(Promoted from the diaries by DavidNYC. This is an incredibly important piece of work. I consider it a must-read for understanding the state of the Democratic Party in Congress today.)
This is an amalgamation of recent work I have been doing at MyDD.
In the blogosphere, pretty much whenever a centrist or conservative Democrat does something progressives do not like, they are called DLC. For that matter, whenever a progressive or liberal Democrat does something we do not like, they are called DLC as well. DLCers are accused of being in bed with Republicans, with large corporations, with disloyalty and selling out the Democratic Party, with losing elections, with starting faction fights, and I'm sure with a bunch of other stuff too. Basically, if the blogosphere doesn't like it and a Democrat did it, invariably the DLC is to blame.
Well, I am going to prove that those who blame the DLC for not being loyal enough and / or for not being different enough from Republicans are wrong. Elected DLC officials are pretty darn loyal to the Democratic Party, and I can prove it. There is a faction of the Democratic Party many of you out there should be angry with, but it is not the DLC.
It is really amazing--hundreds and thousands of accusations are being sent toward the DLC by the blogosphere and the netroots, but the blogosphere and the netroots seem oblivious to the fact that they are actually upset with an entirely different faction of the party. In an attempt to correct this and in the hope that we can at least have more accurately directed venom, I am here to introduce you the real conservative wing of the Democratic Party:
the Blue Dogs.
Last Friday, in a bout of frustration with existing voting scorecards for members of Congress, I spent several hours developing my own. My aim was not to measure ideology or individual voting records on individual issues, but instead to develop a transparent, objective method of measuring what I believe a Reform Democrat takes as the most important attribute of a federally elected official: loyalty. Here is what I came up with:
Ever feel baffled by congressional voting record scorecards form issue organizations? I know I do. Not only are there so many of them, thus making it difficult to develop a composite of any Congressional voting record, but very few of these scorecards offer clear explanations of their methodology. Further, many seem to never separate the wheat from the chaff, as though a resolution honoring the Boy Scouts is somehow of equal importance to the Bankruptcy Bill.
To remedy this situation, I spent all day developing and compiling a simplified scorecard for all members of the House of Representatives. The basic goal is to measure party loyalty on important votes. Here are the criteria I used:
- Only the first session of the 109th Congress (the current session) was used.
- The vote must be on the final passage of an actual piece of legislation. Thus, these scores do not include amendments, rules packages for the chamber, sense of the chamber resolutions, or useless things like "honoring the contribution of Catholic schools."
- The majority of Democrats who voted must vote different from the majority of Republicans who voted. Thus, only votes that separated the two parties are included.
The point of these criteria is to determine when Democrats and Republicans have crossed party lines on important votes. It is, in essence, a means to measure the party loyalty of each individual member, and of each caucus as a whole.
Originally, I found eight pieces of legislation that met these criteria, all of which passed the House: the
Real ID Act, the
Class Action Fairness Act, the
Job Training Improvement Act, the
Congressional Budget for Fiscal Year 2006, the
Schiavo legislation, the
Death Tax Repeal Permanency Act, the
Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act, and the
Energy Policy Act of 2005. Since that time, another such vote took place,
the child interstate notification abortion act. Also, because of its almost overriding importance on this session of Congress, even though there has not yet been an actual vote on Social Security, I have added it as a tenth loyalty criteria using the
Fainthearted Faction and
Conscience Caucus as collected by TPM.
These are the ten issues on which the majority of Democrats in the House differentiates themselves from the majority of Republican the House. Loyalty is measured by calculating the number of times a member of Congress broke from the majority of her or his party. Caucus loyalty can be measured in the same manner.
Right now, overall Democratic loyalty stands at 82.5%, while overall Republican loyalty stands at 96.1%. In total, of the 4,350 possible stances on these ten votes / issues, the Democratic majority position received 1764 votes / signs of support (40.6%) and the Republican majority position received 2,586 votes / signs of support (59.4%). Thus, despite Republicans only controlling 53.3% of the seats in the House of Representatives, their greater loyalty actually provides them with support for their positions beyond their numbers.
But where does the Democratic disunity come from? Over at MyDD, several commenters on the first thread in this series suggested that I compare the voting habits of DLC members with the voting habits of the rest of the Democratic caucus. And so, in the second post of the series, I did just that.
My findings were rather surprising (at least they surprised me), and are not that different from my current findings. Right now, the 39 members of the House of Representatives who are also members of the DLC have supported the Democratic majority position 79.0% of the time. The 164 Democratic members of the House of Representatives who are not members of the DLC supported the majority Democratic position 83.3% of the time. In other words, there was very little difference between the voting loyalty of DLC and non-DLC Democrats. In fact, after breaking down the voting patterns of each individual DLC member, I discovered that there did not seem to be any pattern at all when it came time for DLC members to vote:
Quite frankly, the only pattern here is that there is no pattern. I defy any organization with members that vote like this to tell me what it stands for, as something separate or "new" from the Democratic Party as a whole.(...)
What I believe all of this says is that the DLC has somehow managed to turn a loosely connected, ill-formed network with an indiscernible voting pattern into a reputation for ideological centrism and rigidity. Further, considering the chaotic voting patterns of its membership, I think it is pretty safe to conclude that the DLC has very little influence over its members. Further, I also think it is safe to conclude that it receives far too much blame for moving the party to "the center," and receives far too much credit for being an influential mechanism of party leadership.
No wonder the DLC only seems to receive press for bashing other Democrats. They don't seem to do much else.
Of the thirty members who I have come to call the "problem children," those Democrats who break with the party at least half of the time, only five of them are members of the DLC. This is actually a lower percentage (16.7%) than the overall DLC share of the Democratic caucus (19.2%). Further, none of those five are the real extremists, the eight members who broke with the party seven or more times. In short, DLC members are not doing the major dissenting from the party line that many here perceive them to be engaged in.
I temporarily put the project aside until this morning, when a post by Atrios gave me the clue I needed (although I would have noticed it earlier had I paid attention to this comment at the end of the MyDD DLC thread) to finally discover what linked the House Democrats who were breaking ranks the most often (emphasis mine):
In an acknowledgement that fences within her Caucus need mending, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) scheduled private meetings Wednesday evening with leading House Democratic moderates, including Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.).
Pelosi was set to sit down individually with Hoyer, while a similar meeting with Rep. John Tanner (Tenn.), long a leading figure among conservative Blue Dog Democrats, was being rescheduled because of Wednesday evening's ethics vote. She also had asked for a meeting with Rep. Ron Kind (Wis.), a leader of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.
I already knew that the other centrist faction named, the New Democrats, were not the culprits behind party disunity, so I quickly went to find a list of Blue Dog Democrats.
Once I found it, I compared the names to my loyalty scorecard:
I did a quick Google search and found
a list of their thirty-five members in the 109th Congress. I then added up the number of times they defected from the Democratic majority in the 109th Congress when the Democratic majority was different from the Republican majority on an actual piece of legislation. The results were staggering(...):
- All Democrats: 82.5%
- All Republicans: 96.1%
- DLC: 79.0%
- Democrats, non-DLC: 83.3%
- Blue Dog Democrats: 54.3%
- Non-Blue Dog Democrats: 88.3%
Bingo. Caucus disunity has a name-o. Outside of the Blue Dogs, Democratic Party loyalty on the important, party differentiating votes in the House is comparable to Republicans: 88.3% to 96.1%. Further, Blue Dog party loyalty, 54.3%, is massively lower than that found either in the DLC, 79.0%, or among non-Blue Dog Democrats, 88.3%. Overall, the thirty-five members of the Blue Dog coalition account for 44.9% of all Democratic Party defections over these ten votes / issues, even though they only make up 17.2% of the caucus.
And to think that all this time bloggers, commenters, diarists and other netroots activists have been blaming the DLC for caucus disunity, when another Democratic faction entirely was to blame. It is the Blue Dogs, not the DLC, stupid!
For good measure, I added up the scores of the third Democratic ideological faction within the House, the fifty-one member Progressive caucus. This is when things started really coming into focus:
For the Congressional Progressive caucus, Democratic voting loyalty currently stands at an astounding 97.3%, which is actually higher than the overall Republican caucus loyalty of 96.1%.(...)
Comparing the three Democratic groups studied so far, an interesting picture voting loyalty emerges:
- Progressive Caucus: 97.3% loyal
- DLC: 79.0% loyal
- Blue Dogs: 54.3% loyal
Despite the already discussed lack of a pattern in DLC voting habits, these three groups appear to form three fairly distinct branches of the Democratic Party within the House of Representatives. However, I would like to present a different thesis. In the 109th Congress, the 168 members of the House who are not members of the Blue Dogs have been 88.3% loyal on Social Security and the nine major party differentiating votes. This places them almost precisely in the middle of the DLC members (79.0% loyal) and the Progressive Caucus members (97.3%). This also places them nowhere near the Blue Dogs, who are at a paltry 54.3%. Rather than there being three distinct wings of the Democratic party, there instead seem to be two distinct wings, New Democrats and Progressive Democrats, both of which are loyal, albeit to different degrees. By contrast, the Blue Dogs functionally serve as a third party, swing vote entity. After all, a loyalty of 54.3% to the Democratic majority position means that the Blue Dogs have a 45.7% loyalty to the Republican majority Party position. The Blue Dogs thus appear to be almost entirely outside of the control of the Democratic leadership (and, for that matter, the Republican leadership as well), and thus can be accurately considered a third party entity in the House of Representatives.
Blue Dog Democrats serve as an added barrier toward a true Democratic majority in Congress. Right now, the Democratic majority position on Social Security and these nine bills has only 40.6% support in the House, despite Democrats and Bernie Sanders making up 46.7% of the House. Right now, the average Democrat in the House supports 8.25 of the ten Democratic positions, while the average Republican supports 0.39 of the ten Democratic positions, making the difference between them 7.86 out of a possible ten positions. In order for the Democratic majority position to become the majority position of the entire chamber, it would be necessary to replace 53 Republicans with Democrats. Perhaps not surprisingly, with 168 non-Blue Dog Democrats in the House right now, for non-Blue Dog Democrats to become a majority they would need 50 more members. That is almost identical to the earlier number.
Do we justifiably dislike the DLC because of the cottage industry From, Reed and others make out of
using Republican caricatures against fellow Democrats? Yes. Do we justifiably not like the DLC because of
their foundational ties to large corporations? Yes. However, we need to wake up and smell which faction is actively dissenting from the party on key votes, and it is not the DLC. Our problems in Washington are tied far more directly to Blue Dogs than to DLC members. Just take this as an example of how much trouble the Blue Dogs are. Of the thirty "problem children" in the Democratic caucus (that is, those who broke with the party at least half the time), 19 of them are Blue Dogs. This number becomes even more astounding when you realize that there are only 35 Blue Dogs. More than half of their members broke with the party majority at least half of the time.
So please, fellow denizens of the blogosphere, I urge you to keep whipping he party into line, but use your whips correctly. Stop blaming the DLC for everything--it only obscures our real problems in forging a majority. The truth is that the average Democrat falls precisely in between two loyal Democratic factions: New Democrats and Progressive Democrats. No one group represents the party more than the other. Blue Dogs, on the other hand, are basically a third party operating outside of both Democratic and Republican control. This is a real problem for us, because while there are thirty-five Blue Dogs, there is only one Republican "problem child," Ron Paul of Texas. Paul is the only Republican who breaks with his party at least half the time, and he does so because he is a true libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party's Presidential nominee in 1988. This makes the House something like 231 Republicans, 168 Democrats, 35 Blue Dogs, and one Libertarian. We are miles away from forming a real majority, but we are never going to get there if we don't at least recognize the problem.
Update: A lot of people have been asking where the Blue Dogs are from. Here is a breakdown of how each Blue Dog has acted so far in this session of Congress:
Here are how the Blue Dogs breakdown:
- Stayed with the party all ten times: Adam Schiff (CA)
- Stayed with the party nine times: Loretta Sanchez (CA), Mike Thompson (CA)
- Stayed with the party eight times: Jane Harman (CA), Steve Israel (NY), Dennis Moore (KS), Ellen Tauscher (CA)
- Stayed with the party seven times: Joe Baca (CA), Ed Case (HI), Mike Michaud (ME)
- Stayed with the party six times: John Barrow (GA), Lenord Boswell (IA), Dennis Cardoza (CA), Jim Cooper (TN), Stephanie Herseth (SD), John Salazar (CO)
- Stayed with the party five times: Allen Boyd (FL), Jim Costa (CA), Mike McIntyre (NC), Earl Pomeroy (ND), John Tanner (TN), Gene Taylor (MS). It is worth noting that Ron Paul (R-TX) broke with Republicans five times.
- Stayed with the party four times: Marion Berry (AR), Sanford Bishop (GA), Ben Chandler (KY), Harold Ford Jr. (TN), Tim Holden (PA), Mike Ross (AR), David Scott (GA). It is worth noting that three Republicans, Mike Castle (DE), Christopher Shays (CT), and Christopher Smith (NJ) broke with their party four times.
- Stayed with the party three times: Dan Boren (OK), Lincoln Davis (TN), Jim Matheson (UT), Charles Melancon (LA). It is worth noting that three Republicans, Sherwood Boehlert (NY), Walter Jones (NC) and Bob Simmons (CT), borke with their party three times.
- Stayed with the party twice: Collin Peterson (MN). It is worth noting that twenty Republicans broke with their party at least twice.
- Stayed with the party once: Bud Cramer (AL). It is worth noting that fifty-eight Republicans broke with their party at least once.
Overall, of the thirty Democrats who broke with the party at least half of the time (five times), nineteen of them are Blue Dog Democrats. The Blue Dogs thus have nearly two-thirds of what I would tentatively like to call the Democratic "problem children." It is also interesting not note that among the sixteen comparatively loyal Blue Dogs (those with four defections or less), the California delegation dominates with seven. Adam Schiff, who has stayed with the party ten out of ten times, and who is both a DLC member and a Blue Dog, gets the WTF? award of the 109th caucus.
For more information on this topic, check out the House 2006 page at MyDD, or visit Techpolitics. Also, here is the About section on the Blue Dog Democrats website.