At the Gem State Patriot News (blog) there is an article (post) by Bob ‘Nugie’ Neugebauer on September 9, 2023 titled Idaho ranks in Top 10 states that are least conservative. Bob links to a second article by Luke Rosiak in The Daily Wire on September 7, 2023 titled Dem lawmakers vote for leftism in lockstep, while Republicans routinely abandon conservatism, study shows. And Luke got his information from a third article at CPAC on September 7, 2023 titled Study of 150,000 lawmaker votes exposes Republicans as less committed to conservative policy than Democrats are to liberal policy. Mr. Neugebauer also embedded a YouTube video from Bryan Hyde at Idaho Freedom TV titled Nowhere to Hyde - - An invasive species of RINO. It parrots Luke Rosiak’s article.
But that analysis is flawed. If you wanted to make a comparison, then you should have looked at how Representatives and Senators in the Congress voted on the SAME issues. The CPAC article instead compared how state legislators voted on the DIFFERENT issues which arose. That’s like comparing asparagus (California) with potatoes (Idaho). The CPAC article has a graph showing how the Average Republican Score varies with the Percentage of Republicans in the [State] Legislature, and Mr. Rosiak reproduces it along with a list. Both the graph and list are missing Nebraska.
Mr. Rosiak makes a big point of how liberal Idaho is. Here’s what he said [with the percentages added]:
“Ranking among the 10 states with the most liberal Republican lawmakers were Mississippi [#46 58%], Wyoming [#43 66%], South Dakota [#41 68%], and Idaho [#40 68%]. That’s despite Republicans holding strong majorities in those legislatures, and the state’s population overwhelmingly voting for Republicans in election after election.
As a group, Mississippi Republican lawmakers had an average conservative score of 58% [at #46], making them less conservative than Republicans in New Jersey [#45 59%], Maryland [#44 65%], and Oregon [#42 68%]. The state where Republicans voted most conservative was a swing state: Wisconsin [94%].”
A bar chart (shown above) has the entire list of 49 states from Rosiak’s article, where Idaho is #40. Note that he did not talk about three other states at the bottom: Alaska [#47 57%], Connecticut [#48 54%], Hawaii [#49 26%] – or why Nebraska was ignored.
And a second bar chart has the list from the CPAC article of The 50 State Legislatures Ranked from Most to Least Conservative. Here Idaho is #19 at 59% rather than #40.
The curious graph from that CPAC article showing how the Average Republican Score varies with the Percentage of Republicans in the [State] Legislature, and reproduced by Mr. Rosiak is shown above, along with a dotted green line I added indicating that five-eighths (62.5%) is the peak beyond which the Average Republican Scores decrease. Their smooth dotted gray line goes right through the point for Hawaii, which seems quite unlikely to me.
The vegetables graphic came from Openclipart.
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