by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
At last! Voteview has posted DW-NOMINATE scores for the 110th Senate. These rankings are a good approximation of how often Senators agree or disagree. So what happened with the six freshmen takeovers? On the DW-Nominate scale, a rank of 1 is "most liberal"; a rank of 100 is "most conservative". More properly, a rank of 1 means "least likely to agree with the Senator ranked 100", but liberal/conservative is a semi-reasonable approximation. I compared the new members' NOMINATE scores with the scores from the 108th Congress, before the incumbents shifted towards the center in the hopes of winning re-election.
