Who are the most liberal congress critters? McCain 2nd most conservative 109th cong

[seasat]

Usually the liberal to conservative rankings touted by the media are from the National Journal. FiveThirtyEight blog has a an article about a site that uses a statistically rigorous method for their ranking. The site is Vote view run by UC San Diego Professor Kenneth Poole. The most liberal Senators according to this metric are Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehose, and Ted Kennedy. Here's the rankings for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain compiled by Nate at FiveThirtyEight from this site.

Congress    Obama       McCain      Clinton
107th        --             57/102       22/102
108th        --             96.5/100    21.5/100
109th        21/101      100/101      25/101
110th        10.5/101    94/101       20/101

Barack and Hillary are pretty much average Democrats but John McCain quickly shed his supposed maverick status after the 107th congress (he'd just lost to Bush during the 107th) and became one of the most conservative senators overall. Heck, Brownback and McConnell had more liberal records than McCain. You hear the media touting Obama as the most liberal but you don't hear the touting of McCain as one of the most conservative. We should start pointing this out to everyone.

Edited to clean up table

[libodem]

1. Very good study

I'm bookmarking it. I've heard that talking point bandied about, about Obama, "Being the Most Liberal Senator in congress" over and over on talk radio. Thank you, for the counter. I had not heard otherwise and had begun to believe it. This reminds me of the "Gore is a liar" meme that started when Gore was running. He was taken out of context and had words changed in his quotes, to make him look like a bragging liar. (sorry for any spelling mistakes-I couldn't get the spell checker to work this time)

[seasat]

3. This ranking makes more sense to me.

I think Obama is liberal for the most part and that is one of the reasons I support him. However, he supported some things in the Senate that were important to his state but were decidedly not liberal. The National Journal and other ranking groups usually only pick a couple of items that they deem to be liberal or conservative and rank according to their votes on them. Sometimes they count not voting as a vote against the measure either raising or lowering the score. I haven't dug through their methodology but their rankings seem to make more sense to me as to the perception of who I'd rank most liberal and the blogger. Also the blogger at 538 really knows his stats and I value his opinion on their methods.

[ellenfl]

2. bernie sanders! now i'll go read the article. eom