Republican losses fell along most of the ideological spectrum, but were a bit more common among moderates than among the more conservative members of the party. The graph above shows the distribution of conservatism in the House of Representatives by party, using the National Journal ratings. (I use National Journal because it is convenient to grab the data, includes more votes than the typical interest group rating and correlates highly with other (more "political science-y") measures such as Nominate scores. Nominate scores are not yet available for the 109th Congress and I don't have time to compute them myself right now. Readers interested in how Nominate scores are computed should see Keith Poole's excellent site here.)
Republican incumbents who were defeated for reelection had an average conservatism score of 66.5, while those who won averaged 74.3, a statistically significant difference. (The average for all Republicans in 2005 was 73.2, and the median was 74.4.)
This does not mean that Republicans were necessarily more vulnerable BECAUSE they were more moderate. What is left out here is the district. Moderate Republicans are more likely to come from less conservative districts, so this result may well simply reflect the more competitive nature of districts that produce more moderate Republican members. I'll take a look at that later, but for now the simple point is that the election defeat did fall more heavily among representatives with somewhat more moderate voting records.
The one Democratic defeat plotted here is Rep. Cynthia McKinney, GA-04 who lost in the primary. The plot above also includes Republican Rep. Joe Schwartz, MI-07, who also lost in a primary.
2 comments:
Do you happen to know how that distribution of moderate vs. more "extreme" incumbents who were defeated would compare with 1994?
(I'm having some problems with the comment form--as seems to be the case frequently since Beta Blogger came on the scene, so my apologies is this winds up appearing more than once.)
I remember that in 1994, some left-liberal publications like*The Nation* argued that "progressive" Democrats had done reasonably well and that it was the Blue Dogs who actually did worst. Of course, this ignores that those Democrats who took very "progressive" views tended to come from safe Democratic districts, whereas the Blue Dogs tended to come from more marginal districts--so *of course* they would be more vulnerable in a Republican year.
It seems to me that those conservatives who make an analogous argument today--"it was the liberal Republicans who lost the worst" are guilty of the same fallacy. Moderate or liberal Republicans tend to come from places like New England which have been trending Democratic for years. So *of course* they are vulnerable in a Democratic year. Does anyone really believe that if Chaffee's conservative challlenger would have beaten him in the primary, he would have won (in overhwelmingly pro-Kerry in 2004 Rhode island) in the general--or even come as close to doing so as Chaffee did?
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