Interim Report Card For Our Freshman Members

It's still early; there haven't been that many votes in the House. Ranking and rating could change-- in fact, it's a sure bet that they will. But among the freshman class, the split is becoming apparent. As of today, there are 2 dozen freshmen whose voting records Progressive Punch has rated "A" (and who have 100% crucial vote scores) and 23 who voting records Progressive Punch has rated "F." Before we look at who has the "A"s and who has the "F"s, let's get an idea about how ProgressivePunch determines the ratings

. Their algorithm uses the votes of a panel of 33 proven progressives to come up with progressive scores by taking ANY VOTE in which a majority of those 33 progressives voted in opposition to a majority of the Republican caucus and have that vote qualify for the database. That way non-ideological votes such as National Groundhog Day: 429-0 with 6 absences, do not qualify for the database. ANY vote in which a majority of progressives in the progressive cohort votes against a majority of Republicans qualifies for the database and is included in the overall % scores.

These are the 33 progressives currently being used. (After 100 votes are taken super-progressive freshmen like AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilham Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Joe Neguse are likely to be added to the cohort, perhaps replacing less progressive members like Nancy Pelosi, Donald Payne and Linda Sánchez.) Anyway, here's the current list:

• Karen Bass (CA)
• Judy Chu (CA)
• Katherine Clark (MA)
• Yvette Clarke (NY)
• Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)
• Danny Davis (IL)
• Mark DeSaulnier (CA)
• Adriano Espaillat (CA)
• Jimmy Gomez (CA)
• Raúl Grijalva (AZ)
• Jared Huffman (CA)
• Pramila Jayapal (WA)
• Hakeem Jeffries (NY)
• Ro Khanna (CA)
• Barbara Lee (CA)
• John Lewis (GA)
• Alan Lowenthal (CA)
• Jim McGovern (MA)
• Gwen Moore (WI)
• Jerry Nadler (NY)
• Grace Napolitano (CA)
• Donald Payne (NJ)
• Nancy Pelosi (CA)
• Chellie Pingree (ME)
• Mark Pocan (WI)
• Jamie Raskin (MD)
• Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA)
• Linda Sánchez (CA)
• Jan Schakowsky (IL)
• José Serrano (NY)
• Mark Takano (CA)
• Nydia Velázquez (NY)
• Maxine Waters (CA)

Here at DWT we exclusively use crucial votes scores, which Progressive Punch defines as close votes-- "where were you when we needed you" votes. These is how they describe it: "The Crucial Votes % categories include all roll call votes where the margin between yes votes and no votes was narrow and could have been changed by a small group of Democrats voting differently. Narrow margins are defined as votes in which the winning side came out ahead by 20 votes or fewer in the House (so a shift of 10 votes from one side to the other would have changed the result) or by 6 votes or fewer in the Senate (so a shift of 3 votes from one side to the other would have changed the result)."

With the Democrats back in control of the House this session, ProgressivePunch classifies as Crucial any vote in which the progressive side was on the losing side, in addition to all close votes as defined above. "Crucial" votes are votes in which there was strong progressive cohesion and at the same time a significant defection on the part of more conservative Democrats to the Republicans.

The scores do not take into account anything other than votes. It doesn't matter, for example, the Pramila Jayapal wrote and introduced the new Medicare For All Act or that some people co-sponsored it and others didn't. Nor are examples of leadership, courageousness, Twitter abilities or any other non-vote factors part of the scores. That said, so far this cycle, these are the freshmen with perfect 100% scores, all of whom are obviously rated "A."

• Sean Casten (IL)
• T.J. Cox (CA)
• Madeleine Dean (PA)
• Veronica Escobar (TX)
• Lizzie Fletcher (TX)
• Chuy Garcia (IL)
• Sylvia Garcia (TX)
• Debra Haaland (NM)
• Jahana Hayes (CT)
• Andy Levin (MI)
• Mike Levin (CA)
• Tom Malinowski (NJ)
• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL)
• Joe Neguse (CO)
• AOC (NY)
• Ilhan Omar (MN)
• Ayanna Pressley (MA)
• Mary Gay Scanlon (PA)
• Donna Shalala (FL)
• Greg Stanton (AZ)
• Rashida Tlaib (MI)
• Lori Trahan (MA)
• David Trone (MD)
• Lauren Underwood (IL)

Eventually, once the tough votes start, no one will be left with 100% scores. The dozen closest to perfect lifetime scores among non-freshmen-- all of whom have 100% so far this year-- are:

• Jamie Raskin (MD)- 99.34
• Mark Pocan (WI)- 98.85
• Mark DeSaulnier (CA)- 98.36
• Adriano Espaillat (NY)- 98.04
• Ro Khanna (CA)- 97.37
• Katherine Clark (MA)- 97.02
• Judy Chu (CA)- 96.90
• Pramila Jayapal (WA)- 96.73
• Jim McGovern (MA)- 96.70
• Jan Schakowsky (IL)- 96.56
• Raul Grijalva (AZ)- 96.52
• Yvette Clarke (NY)- 95.88

It's worth mentioning that a handful of freshmen have also earned "A"s but don't have perfect scores: Joe Morelle (NY), Susan Wild (PA), Lucy McBath (GA), Chris Pappas (NH) and Haley Stevens (MI). I doubt many of the freshmen with perfect scores today will even have "A" ratings by the end of the year. In my opinion, the likeliest to start sinking the soonest are Casten, Cox, Fletcher, Malinowski, Mucarsel-Powell, Shalala, Stanton, Trahan, Trone and Underwood. These are the freshmen in the middle: 
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)- B
• Jason Crow (New Dem- CO)- B
• Katie Hill (New Dem-CA)- B
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)- B
• Jennifer Wexton (New Dem-VA)- B
• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)- B
• Josh Harder (New Dem-CA)- B
• Angie Craig (New Dem-MN)- D

On the other end of the spectrum, these are the worst voters so far, each whom has earned an "F."

• Chrissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)
• Katie Porter (D-CA)
• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)
• Kim Schrier (New Dem-WA)
• Steven Horsford (New Dem-NV)
• Ed Case (Blue Dog-HI)
• Andy Kim (D-NJ)
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)
• Abby Finkenauer (D-IA)
• Jared Golden (D-ME)
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)
• Antonio Delgado (D-NY)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)

I think some of these members will throw off the "F"s and start voting more progressively as time goes on, particularly Katie Porter, Andy Kim, and Jared Golden and possibly Abby Finkenauer, Antonio Delgado, and Kim Schrier. We'll see how well I'm prognosticating in about a year. Unlikely to get any better are hardcore reactionaries Jeff Van Drew and Joe Cunningham, the worst Democrats in the House. They have identical voting records-- which happen to be worse than 3 Republicans already! The DCCC will spend immense amounts of money this cycle to save their seats, trying to persuade Democrats in South Carolina and New Jersey that these two examples of less of two evils is who they should waste their votes on in 2020.

Joe and Jeff

Can Patsy Keever Win A House Seat On A Platform Extolling Public Education As The Backbone Of American Democracy?

McHenry's district is suddenly a lot bluer-- and he's about to get schooled by Patsy Keever

Remember when Patrick McHenry tried to humiliate Elizabeth Warren at a committee hearing? I believe Patsy Keever is about to turn the tables on North Carolina's tiny little reactionary. If she beats him, Congress will suffer one less corporate shill.

The first we ever heard of North Carolina state Rep. Patsy Keever was a year ago when she was running for the legislature and had been pointed out by Progressive Kick as a future political leader of consequence. At the time we wrote that of their effort to elect progressives to state legislatures:

All their candidates are progressive leaders with real backbones, unlike some Democratic members of Congress who we’ll have to hold our noses to vote for in order to keep a majority. Many of the candidates in this effort will be the progressive congressional candidates of the future. Does this sort of thing work, you ask? Let me share a couple of success stories with you, direct from candidates who have benefited. Patsy Keever is currently the progressive Democratic nominee for North Carolina House District 115. After winning her primary last month she wrote Progressive Kick that “I originally decided to run for the NC Legislature when I read in the local newspaper that my current legislator was ranked at the very bottom of all NC legislators by the nonpartisan organization, Environment NC…. I was up against all the 'powers that be' in the state, and it was a real shot in the arm to get the surprise support from Progressive Kick at a time when we were unable to get support from the groups I had expected to have… we won our primary by a 60 - 40 margin against an entrenched incumbent who outspent me five to one…”

Now Blue America is urging Patsy to run for Congress. And she's very open to the idea. The Republican legislature has gerrymandered her district so that she would now take on ridiculous right-wing clown Patrick McHenry, a dedicated servant of the 1% from his perch on the House Financial Services Committee-- and someone with a very sleazy past that has never been adequately examined. The DCCC is pushing a Blue Dog-type, Asheville mayor Terry Bellamy, who would fit right in with Heath Shuler and Mike McIntyre, the two North Carolina Blue Dogs who stick with Boehner and Cantor on almost everything important that comes before the House.

It has long been a contention of Blue America that Congress has enough lawyers and enough millionaires-- in fact, way more than enough. Patsy has a different background and it's what has motivated her political career. Before winning office, she was a school teacher. I asked if that was important in her political development. She responded with this guest post:

Public Education-- The Path To Social Justice

-by Patsy Keever (D-NC)

As a teacher, I have many causes, but my real passion is social justice, and public education is the path to a just society. Public education is the backbone of our democracy. The majority of my 25 years of teaching was in 8th grade social studies and language arts, although I have taught students in every grade from kindergarten to soldiers in the Army. Teaching was a career which I loved, but the lingering illness and subsequent death of my husband ended that career prematurely. He was a Vietnam veteran who was exposed to Agent Orange in 1970 and developed a very aggressive case of prostate cancer 30 years later. When I realized that he was never going to get better and that I probably didn’t have much time left with him, I left the teaching profession.
 
Although I am no longer teaching, my passion for leveling the playing field remains as strong as ever. I still fight for those children who live in poverty, whose only chance of a better life is a good education. I still care about the students who need to be challenged and those who have far too many challenges at home. As a state and nation, we need to invest in our children from a very early age all the way through college and beyond if we want to develop citizens who can and will contribute to our society.

For 25 years I have watched the Republican party pick away at our public education system. They have tried to treat our schools as a business which turns out a product. It is not a business! It is a service our government provides in order to maintain a just society. The question is how do we develop each individual to reach his or her potential to be a functioning, successful member of the community. Vouchers and charter schools are not the answer. Defunding good programs and instituting unfunded mandates are not the answer. Adding more students to each classroom while decreasing support systems for teachers is not the answer. Teachers, parents, students, businesses, elected officials and entire communities must find ways to work together for the good of all. Our lives depend on it.  

Math Geniuses Might Not Be The Best People To Set Political Strategy

Brad Miller is a measurably better representative for the 99% than David Price

There are several tools I use every single day in my work at DWT and Blue America and Progressive Punch is a major one. So much so that I wrote them a check out of my personal account to thank them for their great work. It would be immeasurably harder to do my own without theirs. The Progressive Punch system helps me figure out which incumbents are doing a good job in terms of working for the interests of the 99% instead of doing what most politicians do in toiling in the fields of the 1%. But Progressive Punch is by no means the end of any story. It's a useful tool to start a story.

Recently a group I'm involved in decided to take a look at the relative merits of the two Democratic incumbents who-- thanks to partisan GOP gerrymandering in the North Carolina legislature-- will be pitted against each other next November, Brad Miller and David Price. The group deduced from Progressive Punch that the two congressmen are about equal and decided to leave it to the North Carolina primary voters and not take a stand. As you may know, Blue America has already taken a strong stand in favor of Brad Miller. But this is what the raw Progressive Punch numbers show:

Brad Miller is the 122nd most progressive member of Congress based on his lifetime of votes on crucial roll calls and David Price is the 126th most progressive, a negligible difference. A more nuanced examination of their respective voting records paints a very different picture, one that shows why Brad Miller is the far better candidate in the most important sense of the issues most important to progressives-- like the very people in the groups I was arguing with. Let's start with an issue that is core to what ails the American economy, trade policy.

Price voted for several of the "free trade" deals, including the worst ever-- NAFTA, and just a few weeks ago, he voted for the horrible deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama. Brad Miller voted against every trade deal that's come up with the exception of one with Australia, a country with a similar enough standard of living to ours that it would not put American workers into competition with very poorly paid workers. There are objections that are specific to each trade deal, such as the history of state-sponsored murders of labor leaders in Columbia. More important, however, whatever the arguments for trade in the abstract, during a period of increasing income inequality and government policies that increase that inequality, trade acts as one more accelerant, increasing corporate profits and driving down wages. David Price has consistently been on the wrong side. Brad Miller has consistently been on the right side.

Sticking with the economy, let's move over to financial reform, Brad's strong point, an area where he has been not just a good voter, but a tenacious advocate for working families and the leader among progressives on the Financial Services Committee. Tragically, Price voted for all the financial deregulation in the nineties, which allowed banks to become too big to fail, erased the separation of commercial and investment banking (Glass-Steagall), and prohibited any regulation of derivatives. Other Members of Congress have told me that Brad has been the leading critic among members of bank practices, and introduced the House version of the Kaufman-Brown bill that limited banks' total assets to two percent of the GDP. That would have allowed banks with more than $300 billion in assets, which are huge banks, but would have required the six biggest banks to split into more than 30 entities (not all would be banks). He has also been a tireless advocate for separating certain bank functions to avoid conflicts of interest and he introduced legislation to prohibit servicers of mortgages owned by others (securitized mortgages) from holding second liens on the same homes. That effectively would have required the largest banks to spin off their servicing affiliates. Most recently he introduced the legislation to make it easier for bank customers to move their accounts to create effective competition in consumer banking.

And speaking of banking, let's look at bankruptcy. Price voted for the God-awful bankruptcy bill that became law in 2005, which made it almost impossible for middle-class families to seek bankruptcy relief from overwhelming debt, and made it impossible ever to reduce student loans in bankruptcy. There are peer-reviewed academic publications by economists that find that the bankruptcy law changes fueled the explosion of subprime mortgages because families had no way out of debt, so they borrowed against their homes. Also, lots of young people are now unemployed and have crushing student loan debt that will almost certainly be with them for most of the rest of their lives. Brad Miller voted against that bankrutpcy bill and he was the first Member of Congress to introduce the legislation to allow modification in bankruptcy of home mortgages ("cramdown"), and was one of the leaders of that fight throughout. That had a lot to do with why Alan Grayson, also then a member of the House Financial Services Committee told Blue America that "Brad Miller is exactly what people hope that their representatives will be: thoughtful, independent, selfless, smart, and completely committed to their well-being. There are very few Members of Congress who are willing to tell a well-connected lobbyist to get lost; Brad is one of them."

Brad voted against extending all of the Bush tax cuts last December, and signed a letter circulated by Barbara Lee to the "supercommittee" to oppose any cuts to Medicare or Social Security to reduce the deficit. Price voted to extend the Bush tax cuts, and signed the opposite letter to the supercommittee urging that "mandatory spending"-- in other words, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security-- be "on the table" to reduce the deficit.

Moving away from purely economic issues for a moment, health care reform is an important place to look for what makes one of these candidates so much better than the other one. Brad voted to allow prescription drugs manufactured in the United States and sold cheaply in Canada to be brought back into the United States, which would lower prescription drug costs. Makes total sense, right? Price voted against it, which achieves exactly one thing-- protects drug company profits at the expense of consumers. And Price has gotten lots of contributions since then from drug companies, the most of any member of the North Carolina House delegation ($275,392). Miller... not so much ($25,750). Two Democrats from North Carolina with similar Progressive Punch scores. But Big Pharma values David Price 10 times more than Brad Miller, who's too busy fighting for a fair shake for middle class families to stick with the corporate agenda that brings in the big campaign contributions.

You don't get a vote on the panel of the DC groups that decide who to endorse. And unless you live in North Carolina, you don't get a chance to make sure Brad Miller is reelected next year. But you do get a chance to help him get his message out that there is a difference-- a very real one. And one way to do that is to contribute to his campaign through our Blue America ActBlue incumbents page. Another would be to send this post to everyone you know who's remotely interested in this kind of information.


GUEST UPDATE BY JOSHUA GROSSMAN: ProgressivePunch Responds

I love Howie, but I was irritated by his post. He essentially sets up a straw man argument and asserts that you can’t use someone’s composite score on Progressive Punch as the sole assessment of how progressive they are. Of course we never said you should do that to begin with. Ironically and somewhat humorously, Howie spent a lot of time digging through his old posts in order to show how Miller is better than Price. We could have saved him a lot of time. In fact Progressive Punch is explicitly designed so that people can determine themselves whether or not they agree with Howie’s praise of Brad Miller and criticism of David Price. On the Progressive Punch homepage you can click on any member of Congress, then drill down by looking at their voting record in any one of 14 master categories (e.g. Environment) then going to 160 subcategories (e.g. Global Warming), then looking at one sentence vote descriptions and then finally reading detailed narrative descriptions of the votes themselves. To read Howie’s post you would think that Progressive Punch is nothing but a compilation of scores. That tends to be how Howie uses Progressive Punch, but there’s a huge wealth of information there and it’s beautifully set up for anyone to come to their own conclusions about who is or is not deserving of our support. In other words you certainly don’t have to take Joshua Grossman’s or Howie Klein’s word for it, you can scope out what issues are of interest to you and come to your own conclusions. You may find yourself agreeing with Howie about Miller & Price-- or not, and another time around you may find yourself switching sides to agree with Howie’s conclusions or disagree, 180 degrees in opposition to your previous position. The point is you get to reach your own conclusions. No other free online database of Congressional voting records-- from any political perspective, not just the progressive one-- has this quantity and easy access to Congressional voting record information.

Smiting Virginia's Philistines-- A Guest Post

by Joshua Grossman, ProgressiveKick

It's a rare thing that one gets to smite five right-wing philistines with a single small donation, but ProgressiveKick has exactly that opportunity to offer today.

In fact, not only will your hard-earned sheckels go to support progressive candidates and smite nasty right-wingers in Virginia's House of Delegates for whom the 2009 elections are the last chance to change the balance of power in advance of 2010 redistricting, but we'll at least double your donation.

We can do this because we've secured at least $25,000 (a number that is still growing!) in pledges from large donors specifically pledged to mount a national matching fund drive to swing the balance in Virginia's House of Delegates in a progressive direction. Any dollar you donate today will be doubled by the time it hits Virginia.

We at Progressive Kick believe that matching large donors with small donors offers an untapped potential to wield progressive power and move political outcomes in Virginia and the nation.

You can check out the page at this link to see the full line-up.

All five of our candidates, Robin Abbott, Peggy Frank, Stevens Miller, Margi Vanderhye and John Bell will do progressives proud in VA's state house. And one look at their opponents tells you everything you need to know about the worthiness of this project.

Robin Abbott's opponent, Phil Hamilton is so corrupt that even the Republican candidate for governor, Bob McDonnell, has called on him to resign for having “violated the public trust.” Hamilton is also staunchly anti-choice, having received a “zero” rating from NARAL since 2006. In contrast, Robin Abbott has been endorsed by NARAL, which calls her “a strong advocate for health care” who will “ensure access to comprehensive reproductive health care.”

Peggy Frank's opponent, Dave Nutter, has received multiple ratings of “zero” from NARAL and Equality Virginia while garnering an “A+” from the NRA. In short, it’s obvious where Dave Nutter’s priorities and values lie. In contrast, Peggy Frank – a prosecutor, former Girl Scout Leader and Kindergarten soccer coach who worked her way through college as a single mother - promises to focus on “job creation, making healthcare more affordable, and improving education and public safety.”

Stevens Miller's opponent, Tom Rust, portrays himself as a “moderate” but in reality is allied with far-right-wing Loudoun County board member Eugene Delgaudio, a “leader in the nation's anti-gay rights movement” who actually staged a “man-donkey wedding” in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Rust has also voted against education, choice, and mandating that health insurers in Virginia provide coverage for autism. In sharp contrast, Stevens Miller supports choice, environmental protection, and equality for all.

TPMMuckraker calls Vanderhye's opponent Barbara Comstock a "GOP knife-fighter" who "ran oppo research for the RNC and chaired Scooter Libby's defense fund.” Former colleague David Brock described her as "almost unhinged," while Sean Hannity considers her a "good friend." In sharp contrast, Margi Vanderhye is a strong progressive who has been endorsed by the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Equality Virginia, and Planned Parenthood.

John Bell's Republican opponent, Bob Marshall, is an extreme homophobe whoalso likens contraception to “chemical Love Canals for…frat house playboys,“ believes that “sometimes incest is voluntary,” and (with regard to abortion in the case of rape) opines that "the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman." In contrast, John Bell believes in equality for all and has been endorsed by the LCV, NARAL, and NOW.

This is exactly the kind of program Progressive Kick intends to run across the United States in 2010. We believe in bringing large and small donors together in support of targeted progressive races where the opportunity to "smite the right" is in the air. The matching pledges to double your dollars are icing on the cake.

Please join us and consider making a donation today.

KNOW YOUR CONGRESSMEMBER-- IF YOU'VE GOT THE STOMACH

Reactionary Georgia Dems, Jim Marshall and his role model, Zell Miller

Last Wednesday Martin Heinrich, the progressive Democrat running for Congress in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area, did a guest post here at DWT, about the importance of lawmakers standing up to tyranny and protecting our basic constitutional rights against encroachment from above. Logically, he called for "more and better Democrats in Congress," a position that would once have been strongly echoed here at DWT. But I took the liberty of adding an update to Martin's post: "Forget More; Concentrate on Better.

Since Martin had brought up the FISA legislation being debated in the House, I took the opportunity to point out that the nearly two dozen Blue Dogs threatening to break with the Democratic House leadership and vote with Bush, Cheney and the radical right extreme of the GOP to push through warrantless wiretapping and retroactive immunity, were all-- every one without exception-- recipients of substantial bribes (in the form of campaign contributions) from the telecom companies for whom Bush and Cheney were demanding the retroactive immunity.

Is this one particular enough of a reason to withdraw support from a congressman-- a Democratic congressman likely to be replaced not by a progressive Democrat but by an even more reactionary, more corrupt right-wing Republican? Not for in my opinion. Instead, what an instance like this is, is an opportunity to check for patterns in voting records and see if this awful instance is the exception or the rule. When I was much younger I would have to spend untold hours of difficult research in a musty library to be able to access the very difficult to find information to help me come to any conclusions about how hundreds of congressmembers tend to behave. Now the information is just a click or two away!

Last April the founder of ProgressivePunch, Joshua Grossman, came and answered questions about his goals and methodology at Firedoglake. Here at DWT we spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out-- and keep track of-- the members of Congress who are true to the progressive values that are at the foundation of the Democratic Party... and of the ones who aren't. One of the tools that has been most helpful is ProgressivePunch which has done its best to keep score. Looking at votes going back to 1991, they've developed an algorithm that can be used to rank every member based on how progressive he or she is-- or how reactionary. They explain the over-all progressive scoring here. Their newest measurement, called "When the Chips Are Down, is "a subset of the overall votes that qualify according to the Progressive Punch algorithm... They show the impact that even a small number of Democrats have when they defect from the progressive position. These are votes where either progressives lost or where the progressive victory was narrow and could have been changed by a small group of Democrats voting differently... Narrow progressive victories are defined as votes in which progressives won by 20 votes or fewer in the House (so a shift of 10 votes from one side to the other would have changed the result) or by 6 votes or fewer in the Senate (so a shift of 3 votes from one side to the other would have changed the result). Due to a programming error, “Chips Are Down” scores for Democrats displayed on Progressive Punch prior to February 13, 2008 were previously inflated. The programming was incorrectly set at a margin of 40 votes instead of 20 for progressive victories to qualify. Because this was a brand new category of votes for us and the initial percentages seemed plausible, we didn’t spot the error right away. The percentage scores ARE NOW CORRECTED."

I'm glad they corrected the programming error and that the algorithm is spitting out more accurate data. In light of that, I decided to take another look at the House and see which Democrats have been the ones who have been most consistent in teaming up with the Bush Regime to cause all the setbacks-- in issues from SCHIP to Iraq to civil liberties.

Here's the whole House ranked by "Chips Are Down" scores. I don't think any of the dozen worst Democrats will surprise you, although the corrected algorithm now shows something never seen before, 2 Republicans (Wayne Gilchrest and Ron Paul) with better scores than at least one Democrat. So who's that worst of all Democrats? You should be able to guess if you're a regular DWT reader: Georgia arch-reactionary Jim Marshall, who Blue America has tried to cure of his evil ways. He sits between Bush rubber stamp Republicans Chris Shays and Wayne Gilchrest. The bottom of the barrel (from bad to worse):

Zach Space (OH)
Gene Taylor (MS)
Chris Carney (PA)
Jim Matheson (UT)
Heath Shuler (NC)
Jason Altmire (PA)
Brad Ellsworth (IN)
Nick Lampson (TX)
Joe Donnelly (IN)
John Barrow (GA)
Dan Boren (OK)
Jim Marshall (GA)

These 12 Democrats have voted again and again and again to thwart a progresisve agenda and push Bush's and Cheney's policies and programs. We talk about "more and better Democrats" a lot here. These 12 are part of the "more" and as far as you can be from the "better." In some ways Barrow is the worst of the lot because his district-- though recently gerrymandered-- isn't all that Republican. Altmire and Donnelly are also in districts that do not necessarily favor Republicans by wide enough margins to justify their horrible and treacherous voting records. Their apologists still excuse their dreadful voting records by claiming that if they didn't vote like radical right Republicans they might lose their seats. So? Are we supposed to support people so they can advance their careers at the expense of our values and even our constitutional rights? Today Ted Rall made the case for tough electoral decisions in a thought-provoking essay called There Should Be Blood: Liberal Democrats Left Out in the Cold. Although I personally came to a different conclusion he-- and thousands of other progressives -- did, it's very much worth reading.

BLUE AMERICA: LOOKING FOR THAT OLD ONE-TWO: A PROGRESSIVE KICK AND A PROGRESSIVE PUNCH?

Earlier this week Joshua Grossman, founder and president of Progressive Punch and Progressive Kick, wrote two posts explaining the importance of local grassroots political action and if you missed either, I urge you to read them (here and here) before sitting down for a q&a with Joshua at FDL this morning at 11am, PST.

If you read our regular Blue America posts, you're already familiar with some of Joshua's work since we use Progressive Punch to track the voting records of all members of Congress. But prying the dome off the Capitol-- providing the best information on Congressional votes anywhere (searchable by member's names as well as by 160 different issue categories)-- is only one part of what the Progressive Punch team does.

Recently I asked Joshua to summarize some of the projects Progressive Punch is working on. I think you'll find his plans as exciting as I did:

• match Congressional votes to campaign contributions from Open Secrets database
• let people know how their members of Congress voted within hours of the vote including brief explanation of the vote + tools to communicate pleasure/displeasure with position taken by member of Congress
• automatically identify bills of interest to individuals in advance of vote + tools to communicate with members of Congress about the legislation
• identify likely co-sponsors of legislation to interested parties BEFORE measures come up for a vote
• provide blogs with super easy to use embedded links to allow them to cover individual members of Congress and/or hot issues of the day

Progressive Kick is a whole other ball of wax. Joshua and his crack team have created a massive database of US Congressional district demographic information broken down even further to the state legislative district level. They also executed a major study on 21st century messaging technologies for issue messaging purposes and they've already deployed campaigns in four congressional districts utilizing these innovative technologies. Joshua has high hopes for what he'd like to achieve with Progressive Kick. Again, I asked him to summarize some of his ambitious plans so we could discuss them with him today:

• identify for the progressive community the members of Congress and state legislators who are "underperforming"-- i.e. voting much more conservatively than their districts
• feed sophisticated/detailed data on voting records to local blogs spotlighting unpleasant aspects of incumbents’ voting records
• create database of progressive state legislators matched to the congressional districts they’re located in
• continue to assess cutting edge technologies for issue messaging campaigns
• create ActBlue pages for progressive state legislators encouraging them to run for higher office
• combine our access to sophisticated databases of congressional voting records with cutting edge issue messaging technologies to inform & empower citizens to hold their elected officials feet to the fire in tremendously effective ways

Progressive Kick has an Act Blue page and because it is a federally recognized 527 organization it can accept unlimited funds. And although Joshua is always grateful for $5.00 and $10.00 donations to help with his work, he, unlike most PACs and political committees, can accept a million dollars or even more... if anyone wants to dig deep. Just yesterday he sent me a brilliant plan to roast a reactionary incumbent... and asked me to help him raise $1,000,000 for the campaign. Meanwhile I am going to match any donations at his Act Blue page made today up to $1,000.

PROGRESSIVE CALIFORNIA, PART II: THE SECRET IS STOCKTON

Yesterday I introduced you to a friend of mine, Joshua Grossman, in the first of a 3-part effort to help focus on grassroots progressive activism. As I explained, Joshua will be joining us for a live blog session at Firedoglake on Saturday at 11am PT. Meanwhile, here's the fascinating second part of the series Joshua wrote for us: THE SECRET IS STOCKTON.

The fact of the matter is that Blue California is mostly quite blue and Red California is quite red. But there is a thin strip of politically semi-arid but not yet desert land, like the Sahel region just to the south of the Sahara in Africa, which we can call Purple California. This land could be fertile terrain for political progressives, as long as it received a modest irrigation flow of money and political expertise. This land is called Stockton.

With a working class population bolstered by some ancestrally Democratic Okies (though not as many as settled in the southern Valley) during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, San Joaquin County was traditionally Democratic – though quite conservative. Over the last 2-3 decades Republicans gained greatly in registration numbers and actual votes. This happened because working class Valley residents felt abandoned as the Democratic party, especially under Bill Clinton, moved away from its FDR/Truman tradition of carrying the banner for working class people. This led to  Valley residents’ innate social conservatism asserting itself and impelling Valley voters, almost by default, to the Republican party. But now affordable housing-starved San Francisco Bay Area residents are moving in droves to the parts of the Valley nearest to the Bay Area, especially San Joaquin County. Enough people have moved to change the politics of San Joaquin County and restore a Democratic party registration advantage among San Joaquin County voters, although it’s a quite narrow one. The people moving from the Bay Area to San Joaquin County, especially the Democrats, are much more progressive on average than long time residents.

The harsh truth is that the overwhelming majority of San Joaquin County elected officials who are Democrats (still a minority of elected officials in the county) have horrible voting records from the perspective of progressives. But there are progressive opportunities. The finely balanced partisan registration margins in San Joaquin County overall mask dramatic differences within different parts of the county. The rural areas and the smaller incorporated cities, especially Lodi, are still quite Republican. Stockton is by far and away the largest population center of San Joaquin County. Stockton itself has a fairly strong Democratic voter registration advantage.

But there’s not anyone doing partisan electoral work from a progressive perspective on the ground in Stockton. California coastal progressives from places like the Bay Area need to think strategically. We shouldn’t be channeling scarce resources to the sparsely populated Gold Country Congressional districts of Herger & Lungren, however much their stench offends our nostrils. Those districts are just too Red.

On the other hand, Stockton just elected a very progressive Latina lesbian to the city council in a harsh race where she was viciously attacked by the old boy power structure. Of the five supervisorial districts in San Joaquin County, one is strongly Democratic and one strongly Republican with the other three closely balanced (two with a narrow Dem advantage/one with a narrow Republican advantage). The predominantly Democratic supervisorial district is the one that includes most of Stockton. This supervisorial district in turn is at the core of the 17th state Assembly district represented by Cathleen Galgiani and the 18th Congressional district represented by Dennis Cardoza, both of whom are fairly wretchedly reactionary Democrats. Fortunately Galgiani will be pushed elsewhere (one hopes to political oblivion) by term limits. By percolating her up through the political ranks, our progressive member of the Stockton City Council COULD wind up being a progressive member of the U.S. Congress. But it won’t happen by accident, and – quite possibly – not without our help.

Bay Area progressives need to scour Stockton and link up with indigenous activist groups who A) have their act together, B) are progressive & C) are angry with the right wing pro-developer, pro-big-agribusiness, pro-corporate mentality that’s resulted in the San Joaquin Valley (including San Joaquin County) having a variety of negative social indices more like those of a third world country than those of the Bay Area. These groups don’t have to currently be engaged in electoral work. They do need to be dedicated to community organizing – year round, not just in election season. With the credibility gained by doing the hard, dirty work of organizing poor people around getting a stoplight at an intersection where a kid has been hit by a car, etc., i.e. Saul Alinsky-style organizing, these indigenous organizations are the only ones who are in a position to command the respect of the socially/economically disadvantaged and understandably cynical communities that they work in. We should be funding them to hire people who have great experience in both community organizing AND nakedly electoral work as well.

It would take a tremendous amount of work, some expenditure of resources as well as time to take over the Stockton City Council. But it could be done and it would provide a tremendous beacon of hope for progressive organizing in San Joaquin County which in turn would provide a tremendous beacon of hope for progressive organizing in the entire San Joaquin Valley.

California’s coastal progressives ignore the Valley at their peril. It’s rapidly growing while the Bay Area’s population is essentially stable. Without combating Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Valley so that it doesn’t become their 21st century equivalent of what Orange County represented for the right wing in the 1980s and ‘90s, California will slowly but inexorably slide from being a blue state to being a purple one overall. That’s because the other rapidly growing parts of California, the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino lean to the Republicans and carry increasing heft in California politics as they mushroom in population and Los Angeles stagnates along with the Bay Area.

Maybe I shouldn’t say the secret is Stockton, but rather that the solution is Stockton!

If you want to help make Stockton the solution, please go to the Progressive Kick ActBlue page. As a 527 organization, Progressive Kick can take contributions of any size from a dollar to $10 million. (If you work in a social change nonprofit you have to be an optimist, at least for the long haul.)

PROGRESSIVE CALIFORNIA-- STATE LEGISLATIVE PRIMARY PROGRESSIVE COMMANDO ATTACK

Joshua Grossman, founder and president of Progressive Punch and Progressive Kick, is going to be our Blue America guest at Firedoglake on Saturday. Since he's absolutely brilliant and I'm eager for him to share his knowledge of electoral politics with everyone, I've aksed him to write a couple of pieces on California politics leading up to Saturday's live blog session (11am PT/2pm EST). All DWT readers are already familiar with Joshua's work because every time I link to a congress member's voting record, it's based on the careful and exhaustive work by Progressive Punch. Joshua's electoral astuteness goes way beyond that work. Here's part 1 of a virtual tryptych of political brilliance:

80 state Assembly members/40 state Senators/53 members U.S. House of Representatives from California. Total of 3 = 173. Assembly & U.S. House members have 2-year terms; state Senators have staggered 4-year terms, with half (20) up for re-election every 2 years. So the total numbers of members of legislative bodies elected from California every 2 years is 153. (80 Assembly + 53 U.S. House + 20 state Senate). During 2004 in the general election NOT A SINGLE ONE of the 153 seats changed hands between the Democrats and Republicans. During 2006, a single legislative seat of the 153 total changed hands between the parties-- Jerry McNerney defeating Richard Pombo for re-election to the U.S. House. So California Democrats didn’t gain a single seat in the state legislature in spite of the fact that Democrats nationally were gaining 325 seats in state legislatures, making gains in 42 of the 45 states holding legislative elections. So trying to affect the partisan composition of the California state legislature is a big fat waste of time, especially outside the 8 or so seats that have even the remotest chance of changing hands between parties.

Meanwhile, the so-called "Business Dems" number almost half the Democrats in the state legislature and constantly force the watering down of progressive legislation if not ensuring its outright defeat. Not one person in 10,000 in California has ever heard of the Business Dems. There are coalition efforts by California Nurses/California League of Conservation Voters plus a few other progressive groups to win Democratic party primaries for more progressive candidates, but it’s very much a smoke-filled room coalition. There is no across the board progressive entity in the state of California trying to mobilize progressives on behalf of progressive candidates in state legislative PRIMARY elections.

The universe of people who vote in the Democratic party primary elections is far smaller and more progressive than the universe of people who vote in general elections. If we, as progressives, can’t win a primary, we don’t deserve to win the general election in that district. The universe of voters in these races is highly identifiable-- so-called pathological voters-- and is of a size that lends itself to grassroots campaigns (as much as any campaigns in districts of these sizes can be characterized as grassroots). In contrast to the extremely non-competitive general elections in California, Democratic party primaries for the state legislature are often highly competitive and are sometimes won by incredibly small margins (sometimes fewer than 1000 votes and in the last election one race was won by 24 votes if memory serves). It makes sense that the primary races are generally so competitive, because after all, in the vast majority of cases the victor of the primary is guaranteed to win the general election.

If progressives can win a sufficient number of seats in Democratic-held districts they can hold out for a 2012 redistricting plan that would cease entrenching all incumbents in their districts in contrast to the previous 2002 redistricting plan which greatly strengthened incumbents of both parties. That would mean that in a good Democratic year the Democrats could win a 2/3 majority (they’re very close now, the problem is that just about all of the currently Republican-held seats are safe) which would allow Democrats to pass a budget without legislative Republicans vetoing it. (California is one of only 4 states where a 2/3 majority is required to pass a state budget.)

So what’s to be done?

This posting is not an action plan or a campaign strategy. We have some excellent organizations working on progressive state legislative electoral politics in California, but much of their work is top down. Some questions that I don’t have the answers to and would love your feedback on are:

1. What can be done to create models that involve California citizens directly as individuals to participate in nominating strongly progressive Democrats in primary elections?
2. What are the best ways and structures to mobilize progressive Californians for this work, whether or not they’re enrolled members of organizations such as the California League of Conservation Voters, labor unions, etc?
3. Is there a bottom up model for how to do this, other than targeting Democratic county central committees and assembly district committees?
4. Can we motivate unaffiliated progressives to cohere into some kind of structured force that is something greater than merely an ad hoc response to a particular progressive running in a given district?
5. And how could this as yet nonexistent structure be constituted so that it would provide a powerful motivational tool to convince wonderful progressives to run for office who otherwise wouldn’t because of insufficient resources?

If you want to help make California progressive, not just Democratic, please go to the Progressive Kick ActBlue Page and consider making a contribution. As a 527 organization, Progressive Kick can take contributions of any size from a dollar to $10 million.

-Joshua Grossman