March 9, 2004

Party, Not Kerry, Moved to Left

By Jeffery A. Jenkins

Jeffery A. Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208.

John Kerry’s political ascension has not gone unnoticed by Republican Party operatives.

As his successes have mounted, concerns have been raised about Kerry’s ideological makeup. For example, Terry Holt, the spokesman for President Bush’s reelection campaign, has characterized Kerry as culturally out of sync with most Americans, while Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee Chairman, claims Kerry is firmly entrenched among “the extreme elements of his party.”

In short, Kerry is being painted as the prototypical “Massachusetts liberal,” alongside such past and present Republican bogeymen as the “soft-on-crime” Michael Dukakis and the “welfare-loving” Edward (Ted) Kennedy.

Is he?

A careful analysis indicates he is not. In fact, he is solidly ensconced in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, slightly left of center.

Currently at issue is John Kerry’s voting record. As has become custom in recent elections, party strategists (on both sides of the aisle) have used individual votes to paint broad strokes about a candidate’s ideological predilections.

In this case, Republican party strategists have highlighted several of Kerry’s recent and past Senate roll-call votes to make the claim that he is outside of the mainstream; some of these votes include his opposition to banning partial-birth abortion, his opposition to prohibiting same-sex marriage, his opposition to increased defense spending, and his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts.

Herein lies a problem: the use of a very limited (and often unrepresentative) set of votes to characterize a candidate’s career typically leads to a distorted view of the true picture. This, of course, is the intent of political strategists, who attempt to frame candidates of the opposing party in the most negative light possible.

But this “negative framing” runs counter to the interests of most Americans, who would prefer to have an objective assessment of candidates’ records from which they could better determine their vote choices. But is such an objective assessment in fact possible? Specifically, in this case, can we obtain a true sense of where John Kerry stands ideologically?

“Yes” and “yes”.

The current “state of the art” technique developed by Professors Keith Poole (University of Houston) and Howard Rosenthal (Princeton University) is a simple algorithm that incorporates all roll-call votes cast in a given Congress and generates an ideological ordering of all members along a basic left-right continuum.

Stated simply, the Poole-Rosenthal technique takes votes as inputs and yields ideological “scores,” which can be arranged from left to right along a line with more liberal members on the left and more conservative members on the right. I tracked Kerry’s Poole-Rosenthal scores across time and evaluated them relative to those of his fellow Senate Democrats.

Where does John Kerry lie within his own party?

I find that in the first four Congresses in which John Kerry served, the 99th through 102nd Congresses, his Poole-Rosenthal scores suggest that he was in fact among the most liberal members of the Democratic Senate .

However, beginning in the 103rd Congress and extending through the current 108th Congress, Kerry is positioned closer to the center of his Democratic Senate delegation.

One inference to draw from the previous findings is that Kerry moderated his positions over time. In fact, this inference would be incorrect.

Kerry’s Poole-Rosenthal scores appear more centrist in recent Congresses because while Kerry’s views and accompanying vote choices have remained essentially constant over his career, the rest of his party has moved to the left.

Thus, Kerry has remained quite true to his ideological predilections across his two decades in Congress; those predilections placed him in the extreme liberal end of the Democratic Party twenty years ago, while those same predilections place him more toward the center of the Democratic Party today.

A simple comparison drives home this latter point.

In being painted as a Massachusetts liberal by Republican strategists, Kerry has found himself compared to Senator Edward Kennedy, a longstanding lightning rod among conservative Republicans. The Poole-Rosenthal scores can be used to investigate this assertion.

First, Kerry and Kennedy do in fact appear ideologically similar early in Kerry’s career; however, while both are positioned in the extreme liberal end of the party, Kennedy is always further to the left than Kerry. Over time, Kerry and Kennedy have separated. Kerry has maintained his basic ideological position, while Kennedy (mirroring the trend in the party) has become more liberal. As a result, while Kerry now appears to be in the left-center quartile of the party, Kennedy has never strayed from the left quartile.

In summary, despite the claims of Republican strategists, John Kerry is no extremist.

Whether Kerry is “out of step with where the American people are,” as was suggested recently by Ralph Reed, a Bush-Cheney campaign advisor, is another question.

This has more to do with the current “mood” in the nation, whether the public believes that more liberal or conservative policies should be pursued in the future. While opinion polls are often used to tap into the public’s mood, should Kerry’s primary and caucus successes continue, then a more definitive answer can be achieved.

That is, the citizenry will be able to determine directly just who is out of step this November.