GovTrack Removes Harris’s ‘Most Liberal’ Rating, Claiming It Was Unreliable
GovTrack DELETES Harris’s ‘MOST LIBERAL’ Rating
GovTrack “retracted” its 2019 “most liberal senator” score for Vice President Kamala Harris after Trump highlighted it.
GovTrack founder and president Joshua Tauberer said, “We retracted the legislator rankings we published for 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019, including ranking then-Sen. Kamala Harris as the most liberal senator in 2019.” “Our 2021 ranking claims she was the leftmost Democratic senator. Notice the difference? Right-wing media criticized it.”
“Our ideology scores rank legislators according to who they partner with to co-sponsor legislation,” Tauberer wrote, citing a 2020 Washington Post analysis after Harris withdrew her presidential campaign to run with Biden.
Tauberer said in the paper: “Obviously, our analysis is at odds with what other serious analysis of Harris’s career has found, and I think the short answer is that both things can be true: She can both be sponsoring/co-sponsoring left-leaning legislation, something with typically little risk, while also being pragmatic when push comes to shove on risky and impactful decisions, as evidenced by her career,” he said. Her refusal to join Abolish ICE shows this. Harris endorsed the FIRST Step Act despite doubts about Trump’s criminal justice overhaul.
Writes Tauberer, “Despite my warning in The Washington Post, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Harris two months later about our stats, and Trump’s campaigns have used footage from the interview.”
Harris is the presumed Democratic presidential candidate after Biden’s reelection suspension, and the Trump team calls her the “most liberal senator” in a new video.
GovTrack soon scolded conservative media for noticing the change.
“A lot of complaints about erasing history (I doubt they complained when Trump deleted tweets), many emails and tweets have asked us to restore the statistic because our methodology was correct and the information important for voters to know while at the same time letting us know that we have lost all of our credibility… I replied to their emails, yet they suspect an unseen hand.”
“Harris’s position relative to Sen. Bernie Sanders should not be exaggerated as in error. Readjusting our ratings again exaggerates a tiny difference beyond the data analysis’s precision,” Tauberer told Newsmax.
Tauberer stated the previous figures were removed for different reasons, not a comparison to the newer statistics.
No independent study has found Harris more extremist than Sen. Sanders, and it doesn’t fit my impressions of her in Congress or past professional reporting. Tauberer worried about non-Harris influences affecting the results.
Tauberer worried about the analysis’s limited period, “which means less data and a larger margin of error.”
When questioned if GovTrack, which claims to be neutral, will protect Democrat candidates, Tauberer replied he is “far more concerned” with creating good information and services that are understood “than about what people think of us.” Tauberer continued, “I think that’s why the NRSC called us ‘nonpartisan’ at the start of this week and why politicians and the media on all sides cite and still do our resources.”
