PDHblog
This is a place for members of Progressive Democrats of Hawai‘i to express their thoughts
and exasperations about political happenings. The opinions and views are not necessarily
those of PDH's steering committee or membership as a whole.

Normally what happens with a lame duck president is that his interests, and those of his party, begin to diverge during his last session of Congress, because he’s not running for office again, and they are. Democratic strategy for the current session of congress counted on this phenomenon, and the leadership has expressed frustration that it has not been happening to the degree that they expected. Well, I will present data to show that it is happening, although whether the shift has been less than normal I am not in a position to assess.

An index on what is happening is conveniently provided by Progressive Punch (PP). I will focus on their ratings of Senators, where the current fable is that in order to get anything done, one needs 60 votes. PP not only provides a progressive ranking of each member for the current congress [PROGRESSIVE ‘07-’08 SCORES(%)], but also their PROGRESSIVE LIFETIME SCORES(%). Consequently, the difference between these two scores provides an index of a “progressive shift.” In Congress as a whole, the shift has been about 4%– perhaps not as much as many might have expected as the result of the Democrats gaining control of the Senate. It may reflect the slimness of the Democratic control.

However, the Progressive Shift of 11 Republicans may be remarkable. These 11 shifted more than 14%. The shift was perhaps most remarkable with three of the 11, Senators Snowe, Specter, and Collins, whose shift has pushed their PP rating over 50%. These may be the Republican senators who constitute the most likely swing votes.

This analysis also revealed an entirely unexpected result: South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson, who spent much of the year recovering from a stroke, turned from a mildly progressive rating of 78% to a Republican-like rating of 28.81! Who’s been registering Sen. Johnson’s votes? Or is this a database error?

Bob in HI