We've all heard the argument many times now from people who proclaim affiliation with the Democrats but are wont to attack the progressive constituent base of the Democratic Party:

• Any Democrat is preferable to any Republican
• A Democrat -- even a radical right-wing Democrat -- will support the Democratic Party agenda
• Progressives hurt the party by undercutting the party's agenda and effectiveness.

Well, while all this speechifying and pounding from the orange star pulpit has been going on, Dr. Laniac was quietly crunching some numbers, and the results (.pdf) are quite illuminating:

I ran an analysis of all votes, recording the majority Democratic and Republican positions for each rollcall, as well as other statistics. With those statistics in hand, I ran a query that categorized and tallied up four classifications of votes for each Dem representative:

* Against the party: voting with the Republicans against the Dems
* Anti-bi-partisan: voting against a measure which the bulk of the Democrats and Republicans took the same position
* Bi-Partisan: voting with the majority on a bi-partisan supported measure
* With the party: voting with the Democratic bloc in opposition to Republicans

There were two reasons for this approach.

1. I wanted to deprive the least loyal Dems of their cover for supporting the large number of bi-partisan supported measures and
2. to remove the stigma that progressive's have for taking stances with little support from the bulk of the Democratic party.

The first is only fair as it helps weed out non-consequential votes, much the way Chris Bowers had done by hand picking votes that mattered. The latter ensures that you can tell the difference between the mainstream and the progressives. I didn't do the Senate statistics at this point, but I decided on this approach after I looked at the very first Senate vote of the year. Barbara Boxer introduced an objection to the electoral votes, so the issue could be opened up for debate in the House. Michael Moore had made a point of this in Fahrenheit 9/11, you might remember. Well, Boxer introduced her objection and voted alone in it's behalf. I knew that in other cases single Congresspersons had voted their conscience alone or in small groups while the rest of the body voted for things en masse. I'm thinking of a certain war....

As it turns out, the anti-bi-partisan category also strips the cover from the least loyal Democrats as well. Among the top 10 Most Republican Democrats (8 Blue Dogs), 855 votes have been cast with the Republicans, while 122 against measures with bi-partisan support. Blue Dogs are pretty keen on bi-partisanism. You have to go down to the 40th Most Republican Democrat to find one that has cast more votes for the party on a partisan issue than for bi-partisan measures. Of the top 10 Most Republican, 56% of their votes with the Democrats are bi-partisan supported measures. Are they really voting with the Dems? Or just voting with the crowd? Take the bi-partisan votes votes away and the difference between voting for the party or against it gets pretty small.

At the other end of the scale, the Progressive coalition dominates, with few votes favoring the Republican position against Democrats. Conyers is #50 on the True Blue scale, with 7 Republican leaning votes. Yet many members of this group have voted repeatedly with lonely voices. I would imaging that a good number of those votes are for solidly progressive principles.

Check out the data breakdown (.pdf). Very illuminating.

So next time someone tells you it doesn't matter what a Democratic candidate stands for, as long as he or she is a Democrat, because Democrats back Democrats, remember these numbers.

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