North Dakota House End-of-Session Legislative Vote Ranking
As you may recall, we at SAB scored the Legislative Assembly based on their voting record at the crossover earlier this session. When Rob and I first set out to track legislative voting trends in the House and Senate at crossover, we were primarily doing so out of our own curiosity on one hand, and because (honestly) there is not a lot else to do at crossover on the other. We did not fully anticipate the magnitude of interest it would generate with the readers, as well as within the Legislative Assembly itself. We’re told that, like kids in the classroom, those legislators who scored well were proud to let their counterparts know, while those who didn’t blamed everyone and everything else but themselves for the bad marks.
Now that the session has ended, and just in time for many NDGOP Reorganization Meetings, we are proud to present the final end-of-session rankings.
As with crossover, we will address each chamber separately. This post will cover the House, and the Senate will be posted a little later on. We may also roll out a few more posts with some analysis and opinion based on a closer review of the voting patterns. But, as a reminder, there is simply no perfect way to assess voting records. We had to pick a few “marker” bills at crossover spread out among a myriad of issues to determine how each legislator generally measured while examined under a conservative microscope lens. Those same bills are reviewed in the end of session assessment.
We also have to remember some of these bills really do represent complicated issues (as opposed to some issues that are only complicated when an elected official is trying to slither out of giving you a straight answer on why they voted a certain way), and legislators often have genuine reasons for why they voted for or against them. The best way to find out why they voted the way they did, and to pass your final judgement, is by communicating with them.
The results were painful to look at yet not surprising at crossover, and the same goes for the end of session results. As we found in the first half, party affiliation doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with whether conservative values are or are not upheld; indeed, as we saw at crossover and you will learn by the time this series is complete, the Republican Super-Majority is as great a myth as Marie Antoinette saying “Let them each cake” (irony intended). This will be much more prevalent when we post the Senate results, but even in the more conservative House, there are more than enough of their members with an “R” next to their name who are anything but aligned with the party platform they affiliated with to get elected.
Below, in order of percentage from most conservative to least, is the ranking of House members at the end of the session based on their votes on the marker bills selected in the first half of the session.
As mentioned, stay tuned for the Senate results soon, when you will have a chance to see which of their NDGOP members scored out at near the absolute rock bottom of the rankings for all members… Republican AND Democrat.
