National Journal Mis-Identifies Top Liberals, Conservatives in Congress Once Again: The Radical Harry Reid Edition

Things are even worse on the House side. Comparing the 2010 “most liberal” list to actual DW-Nominate rankings for 2009, there is not a single member on National Journal‘s list of 7 who scored in the top 7. Being from Southern California myself, I found it particularly amusing that Linda Sanchez and Judy Chew were on the list–while no one in the know in LA would even rate them as the most liberal representative from California, much less Los Angeles. Maxine Waters (ranked #3 by DW-Nominate) would take that honor easily on both counts. Pete Stark and Bob Filner (#s 6 & 7 respectively) would not be far behind statewide, while Diane Watson (#25) would also be well ahead of Chu in the LA Area. (Two other Californians–Lynn Woolsey and George Miller come in at #16 and #20 respectively.) As far as making direct comparisons are concerned, the average for this list of 7 is 23.7, 5.9 times higher than it should be:

But that’s positively psychic compared to how well National Journal did in 2009, with an average of 39.0 coming it at 8.7 times what it should have been:

Interestingly, the National Journal is far more accurate when it comes to ranking conservatives. But that still leaves them plenty wide of the mark. Their 2010 Senate top rankings gave us two of the top 8 slots in the 8-way tie for first, and their average score was “just” 3.1 times higher than it should be. Notable outliers: Johns McCain (#28) and Thune (#24).

Back in 2009, there was none of this group tie stuff, so just to make comparisons possible, I’ve listed the top five together, and of those, National Journal managed to three senators who actually belonged in the top 5. The average score was less than twice what it should have been:

They must have had Dione Warwick working for them that year!

Switching over to the House side, the gap between liberal and conservative ranking accuracy narrows considerably, even though they managed to get one of the top 5 named in their 5-way tie for first. Still, they ended up with an average 5.9 times higher than it should have been–the same as for liberals:

Once again, National Journal did even worse, comparing it’s 2009 picks to the 2009 DW-Nominate data, but the drop-off was not as bad as on the liberal side, so comparatively they did less poorly: “just” 6.5 times to high, compared to 8.7:

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page