In recent years, one’s party affiliation has become the key indicator as to whether a
legislator is conservative or liberal. In the House of Representatives, Republicans scored an
average of 81% while Democrats scored only 2%. The situation was hardly different in the
Senate. Republicans averaged 79% and Democrats averaged only 2%.These results are
peculiar because they point to, with the added context of CPAC’s decades of Congressional
research, major shifts in both parties with the Democrats leaning especially to the Left.
Consider the ratings of Maryland’s representatives from CPAC’s first edition of the
congressional ratings in 1971. If you were to be told that one member of congress from
Maryland posted a 75 rating while another achieved a “0," you would assume the Republican received a higher number. But the opposite was true. Montgomery County Republican Gil
Gude is attached to the “0” rating while Democrat Goodloe Byron, representing conservative
western Maryland for many years, achieved the 75. Similar results could be found around
that time in the Senate. In 1972, two Republican Senate veterans, Jake Javits of New York
and Clifford Case of New Jersey, each earned a “0” while Democrats John Sparkman of
Alabama and John Stennis of Mississippi achieved perfect 100 scores. Nowadays, it’s rare
to find a Democrat that breaks into the teens. Republicans, while less uniform in their
conservatism, typically don’t fall below 30%. Clearly, the parties have polarized into
opposite ends of the political spectrum.
When did this change come about? While the reasons for this shift are manifold, one of the main catalysts for this phenomenon occurred when conservative Democrats started losing their party’s primaries in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Take Congressman Kent Hance of Texas, the man
who had defeated George H.W. Bush to win his House seat, as a prime example of this. In 1984, he lost the primary for a Senate seat to Austin liberal Lloyd Doggett by 509 votes out of 1 million cast, a shock that convinced conservative Democrats in Texas they could no longer win
their party’s primaries. After this upset, many threw in their hat and became a Republican. This trend of purging conservative Democrats has been replicated time and again in the decades since, with the most instance of this occurring in Arizona with the complete rejection by Democrats of Kyrsten Sinema. Whether this phenomenon is best, I will leave for the country to decide.
