Carney's Votes by the Numbers

One of Tom Marino's very first press releases claimed that Chris Carney "voted with Nancy Pelosi 91% of the time," and I've seen the same claim repeated in NRCC ads on TV. (Of course, this implies that everything Nancy Pelosi votes for is "liberal," but we'll set that aside for a moment.) I said to myself, "That can't be right." Carney has stood up and done the right thing many times (voting for healthcare reform, the DISCLOSE Act, etc.) but I think many liberals and progressives would be a lot happier with him if he really did vote "91% liberally." So I did a little digging.

The first thing I found was this Factcheck.org article which addresses 6 ads being run by the NRCC with basically the same accusation ("voting with Pelosi") against 6 different Democrats. Factcheck points out two reasons the "91%" is wrong and misleading. First of all, it doesn't actually use Pelosi's votes. "Traditionally" (and this was news to me), the Speaker doesn't participate in most of the votes in the House, so for instance out of the 991 votes taken in 2009, Pelosi only cast a vote on 46 of them. So, the NRCC opted instead to assume that any time Carney voted with "the majority of Democrats," he was voting with Pelosi.

The trouble with that (reason #2 why the "91%" is misleading) is that Congress takes many, many votes where a majority of both parties agree. These include quorum calls, votes to name post offices, votes to "honor the 50th anniversary of Miami Dade College" (House Vote #520 in 2010), stuff like that. So if we're really trying to get at a measure of "how consistently does Carney side with the Democrats" (as opposed to siding with everyone), we've got to take that into account.

Factcheck makes the assumption that anything Pelosi actually bothered to vote on must have been a contentious issue, and therefore reports in their article how often (in 2010 only) Carney and Pelosi actually did vote the same (including only the measures that they both actually voted for). They report this number as 84%, which is still pretty high, but the NRCC obviously preferred their (not-quite-accurate) "91%" soundbite.

While Factcheck's assumption is probably true most of the time, it's not necessarily true all the time. In other words, Pelosi may have voted on "non-controversial" things, too. Since we have access to raw Roll Call Vote data from Thomas.loc.gov (or in a more easily usable format at Govtrack.us), I wanted to go a step further than this and see how often Carney really agreed with the Democratic vs. Republican leadership on "controversial" (i.e., non-unanimous) votes over his whole career, not just in 2010. I used two measures to determine which were the "contentious votes":
(1) Any votes that weren't unanimous (the winning side had less than 90% of the vote); or
(2) Any votes where the highest-ranking voting member of each party voted differently.

For (2), since Pelosi doesn't usually vote but her deputy Steny Hoyer (of MD) does, I compared Hoyer's votes with those of John Boehner (the Republican minority leader). Their votes "should" reflect the way that Democrats and Republicans were "supposed to vote" on each measure (I realize this isn't a perfect assumption, but I think it's more objective than Factcheck's).

With all that in mind, I compiled the following table showing how Carney has agreed or disagreed with both parties since he started in Congress in 2007. (Click to enlarge -- I apologize for inserting it as an image, but I was having trouble converting from Excel to HTML.)

Basically, this suggests a few conclusions:
(1) Carney has been pretty consistent under both Bush and Obama;
(2) Carney consistently sides with the Republicans (and breaks with Democrats) between 16-21% of the time. While that's not a huge number, it translates to somewhere between 300 and 400 "controversial" votes with the Republicans (depending on how you define "controversial") or roughly 1 out of every 5 votes. So he's definitely voting with the Democrats more often than not, but he's no mindless drone.

(Final disclaimer: Obviously, none of this addresses which of these votes were "important" bills, or how Carney breaks with the Democrats on certain issues, but it is meant to give an overall picture of his voting tendency.)

I have drafted a letter to the editor that I plan to send to the Daily Item, but if others would like to use this information and send letters on a similar theme, I hope that we could get this information out to combat the "91% voting with Pelosi" myth.