Capitol Weekly ranks the legislators

[Click here to Download Capitol Weekly’s legislative scorecard]

The political scorecard is more art than science. Interest groups often use “scorecard votes” as a way of trying to pressure members on key bills, and the results often do not accurately reflect an individual’s true ideology.

Scorecards are, by definition, both political and oversimplified.

This is certainly true of the first Capitol Weekly Political Scorecard. We hesitate to use words like “liberal” or “conservative” to describe the polls of our spectrum because some of the issues we have chosen do not fit neatly into those labels.

In fact, though the high scores are given to the more liberal votes, the scale in many ways is based on Republicans. In both houses, the leaders scored a “perfect” score of zero on the Republican side. But on the Democratic side, both Democratic leaders scored an 18 out of possible 20, because of their votes in favor of the tribal gaming compacts. The compacts were approved with the blessings of Don Perata and Fabian N