For the second installment of my Vermont series, I want to illustrate one of the ways that LDI scores can be useful in non-electoral analysis. One of the the biggest issues citizens face when it comes to state government is that they often know very little about what the people they are voting for support - especially in a state with districts as small as Vermont, where campaigns for state legislature aren't high-spending ultra-partisan affairs. While the recall will be the true barometer, if Wisconsin residents knew what the legislators they were electing really wanted to do with state government, would they have ever had the numbers to take such destructive acts?
In order to combat this lack of information, third party groups often try to inform voters about candidate positions on their individual issues, and this is helpful, to a point. Scorecard scores tend to be intentionally divisive, looking to paint one party as against their issues, and another for it - furthermore, on something like environmental issues, a Democrat with a far from perfect record on the environment might be a considerable improvement over someone who will vote against environmental interests 100% of the time.
By using these third-party scorecards, and plotting them against the District Index scores for the districts these legislators represent, we have better context to evaluate which legislators are pulling their weight on which issues, and to what degree a legislator might be deviating from the rest of his party.
Below I have taken four scorecards that cover the 2009-2010 members of the Vermont Senate, and plotted them against the index score for the Senate district they represent.
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