Pitfalls of index scores

            I was sitting next to my State Representative at the Republican Party meeting. He was stewing over his low OK Conservative Index score.  There in front of him was a printout of the index scoring for every lawmaker in the state.  And Charlie Meadows, head of Oklahoma Conservative PAC  was speaking on the program.

            Give me a bunch of statistics and I’m in hog heaven.  So as Steve was puzzling over two votes he had missed and thus gotten a zero, I was was analyzing statistics.  “I just can’t believe I missed those votes,” he shook his head.  “I remember the bills, and helped line up votes for them [Steve is a House Whip],” Well they both took place on May 23, I noted from the survey, and he checked his calendar. “Oh!  That’s the day the session was extended to end Friday.  I cut out an hour early to attend my kid’s graduation. Everyone was leaving. With 10 votes on the index; 2 votes equal 20 points, even if those were bills sure to pass.”  I reached over his arm and circled the vote.  “Looks like a lot of people missed. The vote was 57-11, so there were only 68 in attendance, not 101.”   And then I was racing to look at the dates of each vote.  It turned out that 3 were on May 23 and another was on the 22^nd—4 of 10.  So if Archie the arch-conservative got sick those two days, his score would drop from 100 to 60 and he’d rate as a RINO. 

            That explains why only 22 Representatives got a passing 70 score this year. There are 72 Republicans.  Are 50 of them RINOs?  The Index was corrupted by high school graduations of kids and grandkids.

            But Steve still wasn’t content.  He got a ‘liberal’ from voting to fix the Capitol Building.  “No way was I going to vote for the original bill to sell $160 million in bonds maturing in 30 years.  So I stood up in the House debate, spoke out against the bloated costs, and took about 25 like-minded folks with me.  The bill unexpectedly failed.  The next morning I was called to an emergency conference to work out a new deal.  I showed them how they could save $75 million [Steve’s a financial planner] and had I gotten my way on pay-as-you-go funding, we could have saved even more. Yet because I ultimately voted for the compromise, I got a liberal tag.”  I just chuckled over the irony.  He was going down the column looking at some lifetime scores of those who have now served their full 12 years and are term-limited.  “Gus Blackwell, 60, Dale DeWitt, 56. But those are great conservatives!” he protested. 

            Yes, but as leaders, they were making deals as conservative as they could get, and then lining up votes for the compromise.  The index doesn’t give a good grade for can-do conservatism, accomplishment conservatism.  It just rewards obstinate conservatism that unwaveringly votes nay.  And I pointed to the index of a legislator who is rather infamous for passing nothing, getting zero done, just criticizing everyone else in the House.  Who does he emulate? The President of the United States?

            To me this illustrates the sad irony of indexes for voting records.  Voters always say they want things solved and bills passed.  But the principled conservative who works to do just this, can get negative scores when they do it.  Then again, choice of issues, under-sampling, and pitfall sampling (like eleventh-hour votes missed when folks excused themselves to go to a daughter’s graduation) can give spurious results. Remember the grain of salt, next time you read a voting index.

            “Just stand up and tell Charlie that he and Baressi need to work on the methodology of their tests,” I joked.  “No we are friends and have to stay that way!” Steve choked.   That reminded me that he is the Politician and I am the Opinion Guy/Advisor.  I predict he will get more leadership roles in the coming year—and will never get a lifetime score of 100.