Moving the needle from right to left

Sep. 30 is one of the most important days of the election cycle. The reason why: it's the last FEC-required quarterly campaign finance disclosure day before the election, after which inside-the-Beltway types with the national committees and third-party groups take stock of how various candidates having been faring on the fundraising front. That (along with polling, of course) becomes the basis for who they support, and since they have a lot more money to bring to bear than do individual donors, that's crucial in determining who actually makes it across the finish line in November.

So with that in mind, who should get our netroots dollars? Daily Kos has endorsed a number of candidates, including through our Speaker Pelosi Project, which is an excellent starting point for finding an array of progressive House candidates to give to. In the past few weeks, I've also published several diaries that try to help quantify the contribution decision, including how to find the races in the media markets that offer the most bang-for-the-buck, and looking at races in Obama-majority districts that have flown below the radar this cycle.

But the questions that some of you may be asking, that neither of those diaries answered, may be "Who's most progressive? How do I get as many progressives as possible into office?" Quantifying 'progressiveness' is easier said than done, but there are several vote aggregators who provide that service. (There isn't total unanimity in their findings, but there's enough consensus among them that it's easy to tell progressives from New Dems from Blue Dogs, and establishment Republicans from wack-a-doodles.)

By looking at those ratings, we can make contribution decisions based on actual past voting records, instead of just on campaign platitudes. We can choose to contribute to the most progressive Democrats... or we can turn that on its head, and contribute to the opponent of the most objectionable Democrats. In fact, where possible, we can place the two candidates side by side, and make our decisions based on which races have the widest numeric gulf between the Dem and the GOPer.

Unfortunately, vote aggregators are helpful only to the extent that a candidate has previously served in the Senate or House; if a candidate has only been a governor, state legislator, or hasn't been elected before at all, then there's no data. However, where the data is available, I've included it for every candidate in every Senate race that we at Daily Kos Elections have deemed competitive.

Note that I've arranged the races into their Tossup, Lean, and Likely categories; the competitiveness should factor into your decision too. A "Likely Dem" race is almost certainly going to go in the Dem direction, for instance; a "Tossup" race is too close to call and will be one of the races that will be the tipping point on who has the Senate majority next year. While the Tossup races are probably the most important, the other races can and should be part of a contributor's "portfolio" if you have money to spread around, and if there are races that you find especially compelling because of one or both candidates.

Likely D	Lean D	Tossup	Lean R	Likely R
NJ-Sen: Menendez  -.391 (16/101) PA-Sen: Casey  -.355 (23/101) WA-Sen: Cantwell  -.306 (32/101) WV-Sen: Manchin  -.144 (53/101)	HI-Sen: Hirono  -.555 (32/436) OH-Sen: Brown  -.478 (5/101) MI-Sen: Stabenow  -.347 (25/101) NM-Sen: Heinrich  -.307 (163/436) FL-Sen: Nelson  -.195 (49/101) NM-Sen: Wilson  .430 (House 07-08) MI-Sen: Hoekstra .511 (House 09-10) FL-Sen: Mack  .596 (385/436)	WI-Sen: Baldwin -.603 (19/436) CT-Sen: Murphy -.350 (143/436) NV-Sen: Berkley -.335 (150/436) MT-Sen: Tester: -.278 (38/101) MO-Sen: McCaskill -.177 (52/101) MA-Sen: Brown .140 (57/101) MT-Sen: Rehberg .357 (249/436) ND-Sen: Berg .384 (262/436) VA-Sen: Allen .407 (Senate 07-08) NV-Sen: Heller .475 (316/436) MO-Sen: Akin .623 (397/436)	IN-Sen: Donnelly -.132 (191/436) AZ-Sen: Flake .988 (436/436)

If you're wondering about the mysterious numbers after each candidate, these are DW/Nominate scores. These rate members of Congress on a scale of -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative), considering all votes without cherry-picking, synthesizing how all members act in relation to all other members. Because of the sheer amount of data they consider, they're one of the best-regarded aggregators... but because their ratings are kind of opaque, I'm also including their rank ordering for members within their chambers. As you see above, for instance, Sherrod Brown is the 5th most liberal Senator in the past two years, while Rep. Mazie Hirono, running for the open Senate seat in Hawaii, was the 32nd most liberal Representative. (If you're wondering why they total up to 101 and 436, it's because they have scores in a few cases for different persons who occupied the same seat both before and after a special election.)

One advantage of DW/Nominate scores are that they're designed to be able to generalize from the Senate to the House, and also from one cycle to another. So, as you can see, I can still incorporate people who haven't been in the House (Heather Wilson) or Senate (George Allen) in a number of years. (Rank ordering would be an apples-to-oranges comparison for them, though, so I don't scale them from 1 to 101.) While I often like using Progressive Punch scores for projects like this (since they're more intuitive to understand, their main advantage over DW/N scores), they don't make scores available for previous cycles.

So, you'll notice that there are six Senate races where we have enough data where we can actually do the side-by-side comparison and see which races would move the needle from right to left the most:

Michigan: Hoekstra .511 minus Stabenow -.347 = .858
Nevada: Heller .475 minus Berkley -.335 = .810
Missouri: Akin .623 minus McCaskill -.177 = .800
Florida: Mack .596 minus Nelson -.195 = .741
New Mexico: Wilson .430 minus Heinrich -.307 = .737
Montana: Rehberg .357 minus Tester -.278 = .635

Interestingly, despite how off-the-deep-end Todd Akin has lately revealed himself to be, Missouri doesn't have the biggest disparity. Claire McCaskill's centrism (she's right at the Senate's midpoint) narrows the gap a bit. (The same applies in Florida, where Connie Mack IV is pretty hard-right but Bill Nelson's also in the middle.) Instead, there are bigger gaps in Michigan and Nevada, where Pete Hoekstra and Dean Heller are a little closer to the establishment end of the GOP, but where Debbie Stabenow and Shelley Berkley are also more liberal.

It's also quite possible that some of the other races for which we don't have data could present an even bigger gap. Tammy Baldwin, for instance, is one of the House's most liberal Democrats, at -.603; as long as Tommy Thompson (who was Governor, but never a Rep. or Senator) would pencil out to a score of around .200 or worse, that would be the biggest disparity. (.200 would imply a moderate Republican; while Thompson doesn't have a reputation as a firebreather -- which is why he barely won the GOP primary -- he's not that moderate.) On the other hand, consider Scott Brown, one of the least conservative GOP Senators at .140; while Elizabeth Warren is no doubt very liberal, she'd need to clock in around -.670 (higher than any current Senator, including Bernie Sanders) to top the chart.

Finally, consider Arizona, where DW/Nominate ranks Rep. Jeff Flake as the most conservative member of the House. (That's quite different from many other aggregators, who tend to put him closer to the middle; that's because he's pretty libertarian-flavored, tending to be laissez-faire on social issues but a super-hard-liner on budget issues.) Even if Dem challenger Richard Carmona turns out to be the Senate's biggest Blue Dog, they'd still have the biggest disparity of all, thanks to Flake's off-the-charts score.

Let's turn to the House races over the fold...