Another Excellent SSP Analysis

Swing State Project is out with another excellent analysis, this time matching up the partisanship of Congressional districts with the voting records of their representatives, in an effort to look at what members of Congress are more liberal or conservative than you might expect given the leanings of their districts.

This issue is important to me because of the knee jerk reactions that are sometimes aimed particularly toward Mike McIntyre and Heath Shuler. Sure, those guys are not always as progressive as I'd like them to be. They also come from conservative districts where if they were as progressive as I'd like them to be the chances are better than not they'd lose reelection to a Republican who would be a heck of a lot worse. Sometimes you have to look at the big picture.

Anyway, no North Carolina Democrats were among the top 20 who were too conservative for their districts. Nor were any among the top 20 too liberal for their districts either. I pretty much think the Democrats in the North Carolina Congressional delegation vote how they should for the political leanings of their district and this analysis backs up my intuition that none of them are out of line in one direction or the other.

If you look at the raw data for the SSP analysis you actually find that every Democratic member of the delegation is more liberal in their voting record than would be expected for their district, with the exception of G.K. Butterfield.

On the Republican side most members fall in line with the exception of Walter Jones who leads all House Republicans in terms of being more liberal in his voting record than you might expect given the conservative leanings of his district. If Walter Jones Jr.'s name was George Smith, he might have gotten the boot in the primary last year but his family's long history of service in the district probably lets him get away with being more of a maverick, at least for now.