The (really good) website FiveThirtyEight is tracking how often members of Congress vote with the positions favored by President Trump. A “Trump Score” of 100 percent indicates that a senator or representative has matched the White House’s stance on every bill to have been weighed up or down. The model interprets the president’s opinion on a given issue from either official administration statements or press accounts.
So far—and it’s worth italicizing so far—this record-keeping provides little insight into how much congressional Republicans back Trump. After Sen. Jeff Flake challenged conservatives to check Trump and Sen. Tim Scott declared Tuesday that “we don’t work for the president,” the pundit class is judging GOP lawmakers for how sufficiently they are resisting the White House. It’d be easy to use the FiveThirtyEight vote-tracker as evidence. The website’s editor in chief, Nate Silver, tweeted Wednesday that the lowest score of a Republican senator, Susan Collins, is 79.2 percent—high, if the expectation is that even the median GOP legislator ought to be a tougher opponent than that. Three immediate replies to the tweet were:
“So … the narrative of the GOP breaking with Trump is false until the numbers say something else.”
“[To Sen. Flake] If you disagree with [Trump] so much why do you vote with his position so often?”
“John ‘Maverick’ McCain[:] 84.8 percent.”
Without the use of the FiveThirtyEight numbers, several commentators made similar points after the publication of Flake’s book.
A little tired of this two step of “honest conservatives” lamenting the GOP and then voting in lockstep with Trump & McConnell.
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 1, 2017
This criticism is so off-base that it’s practically AWOL. There are at least three reasons why it’s misleading to use Flake’s, Collins’s, or any GOP senator’s vote scorecard this year to evaluate their “support” of the president—a concept that has much to do with non-policy matters and the public perception of associating with Trump. (For the sake of simplifying the argument, we’ll stick to Senate votes; Republicans there are receiving more attention on this issue than their House counterparts.)
The quantitative argument: limited sample size
FiveThirtyEight has used 48 Senate roll call votes to calculate its score. This tally is at least somewhat arbitrary; the upper chamber has taken 183 such votes so far this year. Presumably, the 48 that were selected represent the most controversial or major legislative matters to-date. But in the four two-year sessions of Congress that kicked off a new administration prior to this one, the Senate took 291 (in 2013), 397 (in 2009), 366, and 380 roll call votes. We’re just getting started. Which leads to …
The qualitative argument: Congress has voted on a standard GOP agenda
About half of these 48 votes, 25, have been on Trump nominees, most of them to his Cabinet. Since the administration of Jimmy Carter, the average secretary-level appointment has received about 95 yeas in the Senate. In the six presidencies spanning Carter to President Obama, a nominee received fewer than 75 votes just four times. It’s parsecs outside the scope of this article to consider the merits of each of Trump’s picks. But suffice it to say that voting frequently against this president’s Cabinet, as a handful of Democrats has done, is an unreasonable and goofy standard for judging how much Republicans boost Trump. As of Wednesday, votes of this kind account for more than 50 percent of a senator’s FiveThirtyEight score—a significant weight.
The content of the other 23 votes is incidental to the politics of the current administration. Most of it relates to repealing the Affordable Care Act and certain agency rules issued during the Obama years. Of the some 42,000 Republicans who ran for president in 2016, those who supported such ideas included Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker … So what are GOP lawmakers expected to resist? A customary GOP agenda just because it happens to have Donald Trump’s name attached to it? Which leads to …
The future argument: The unique items of Trump’s agenda requiring legislation* haven’t been considered yet
A couple of things. One, there are certain aspects of Trump’s presidency a FiveThirtyEight vote counter can’t or in some cases should not incorporate—like whether a lawmaker has called him a weirdo for not just accepting the conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Second, Trump threatened during the presidential campaign to renegotiate NAFTA and indefinitely bar individuals from Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. He’s taken some sort of action on these fronts—but using the powers of his, and not the legislature’s, office.
He had other goals particular to his and not the broad Republican agenda that require congressional approval: funding for the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall and a massive infrastructure package, for instance. The House approved the first item last week. At this rate, Congress might not get around to the second one until next century. The wall is some sort of right-wing or populist notion (as is a legal immigration overhaul the White House touted with Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue on Wednesday). But while federal infrastructure spending is also populist, it’s been more of a Democratic priority in recent years. What if the president rolls out a package friendly to the left? Are Republicans supposed to vote it down because it’s the “Trumpulus”? See—it’s not so easy. This goes without mentioning future instances of policy caprice the president could show that aren’t consistent with the GOP platform. Who knows what they’ll look like?
No matter what, surely they’ll count toward a Republican senator’s affinity score—at a time when it might be a more meaningful statistic.
