It’s a classic case of man bites Blue Dog. The southern Arizona chapter of the Indivisible Project, a leading organizer of anti-Trump progressives, protested outside Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran’s office Tuesday for supporting a crime bill making it easier for the government to deport gang-affiliated immigrants. Only 11 Democrats, including the moderate freshman O’Halleran, voted in favor the House-passed legislation.
The local Indivisible Project chapter’s leader, however, cited more than just one bill in explaining her group’s activity to the Arizona Republic:
I asked Randall what she meant by “voting for the Trump agenda,” since he’s voted with House minority leader Nancy Pelosi 88 percent ofthe time this year—a decent measure of party loyalty, since it judges O’Halleran against the wishes of the official Democratic line.
Randall cited a different number.
“O’Halleran has a 43 percent ‘votes with Trump’ rating with FiveThirtyEight,” she told me by email.
This FiveThirtyEight score, which compares a member’s voting record with the president’s preferred outcome on legislation, is dubious for quantitative and qualitative reasons. There’s a limited sample size in the first several months of a new administration; many of the votes so far have not pertained to the Trump agenda; FiveThirtyEight selects an arbitrary set of bills for calculating its rating, and the website doesn’t take into consideration that some of the votes it incorporates were quite bipartisan. (Seven of them on which O’Halleran and Trump “agreed” had at least 309 yeas.)
Randall granted that the Arizona 1st, which O’Halleran represents, is a swing district. Its Cook PVI rating is Republican-plus two. Still, “he sort of got an earful from us when he voted FOR some border wall funding, but we didn’t do a protest since we understood it was a tricky vote [with] VA funding attached.”
The legislation to which she was referring, she said, was a stopgap government funding measure passed in May, which included about $341 million to replace existing fence in the Southwest “using previously deployed and operationally effective designs, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs.” Not quite big and beautiful concrete.
O’Halleran, a former Chicago cop, defended his vote on the crime bill to the Republic. “As a former law enforcement officer who has worked to combat criminal gangs, I understand the unique challenges local law enforcement faces—especially in border states like Arizona,” he said.
The grassroots are expected to dominate the 2018 election—it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see more defenses like this from other Democrats on other issues.
