Scatter Plot Shows Liberal Democrats Did Better Than Blue Dogs

Republicans are characterizing the 2010 congressional elections as a rejection of liberal ideology. Was it really?

The scatter plot chart you see below shows the performance of all 231 House Democratic incumbents, sorted according to ideology. The horizontal axis goes from regressive to progressive, as measured on the legislative scorecard for the 111th Congress over at That’s My Congress, calculated from the Democrats’ actual legislative activities in the House of Representatives. The vertical axis shows margin of victory, or, at the bottom of the chart below the zero mark, margin of defeat, as measured in the polls on Tuesday.

This scatter plot shows that there were some outliers – those House Democrats (dots) that are seen hanging around by themselves, relatively far away from anyone else. So, we see that there’s no airtight, completely predictive relationship between political ideology and electoral success. We should expect that, because, in a congressional election, it isn’t just political ideology that’s in question. There are matters such as individual competence, age, personal scandals, and local organizing ability to consider as well, not to mention the differential impact of the huge amount of independent expenditures provided by secret donors.

There is, however, a general trend that can be seen in this scatter plot. The mass flows from bottom right to top left, showing that the more ideologically liberal a Democratic incumbent was, more likely that Democrat was to do well in the polls.

The 20 most liberal members of the House of Representatives were all re-elected, not rejected, as Republicans would have you believe. The Democrats furthest to the Right (left on this chart), on the other hand, didn’t do very well. Some survived, but many of them perished, and none of them were anywhere close to the electoral performance of the strongest liberals. The most electorally successful Democrats were all liberals.

What this chart shows is that the Republicans picked up seats by going after the most Republican-friendly Democrats, like Walt Minnick, who was targeted by the Tea Party after being declared a Tea Party hero. The Republicans could succeed in this strategy because, frankly, rank and file Democrats are sick of being asked to vote for right wing Blue Dog politicians like Mike Arcuri.

This scatter plot chart shows that the elections this year were not a loss for liberal Democrats, and do not represent a victory of right wing ideology. Spin it how they will, the Republicans can’t refute the simple truth that most Americans who have strongly liberal members of Congress enjoy being represented by those politicians.