California State Legislative Scorecards

The Capitol Weekly did their first annual legislative scorecard of members of the State Assembly and Senate. They go into detail about their methodology and recognize that devising these types of scores is more art than science. In addition the voting sample size is fairly small. But I still believe there's some value to them.

The full list (PDF) is here. Some interesting tidbits:

You can pretty obviously see that we have an ideologically rigid legislature. 8 Republican Assemblymen have a "perfect" 0 score on legislation (fully conservative), and 13 Democrats have a 100 (fully liberal). In the Senate, there are 2 Republicans with a 0 score and 5 Democrats with a score of 100.

The Republicans, however, are FAR more unified. There are no Assembly Republicans with a score above 20, and no Senate Republicans above 30. Put it this way, the 2nd-most "moderate" Republican in the legislature is right-wing loon Tom McClintock, I guess because he is occasionally libertarian.

By contrast, a handful of Democrats dip into the other side of the ocean. Here are the Democrats with scores under 50.

Assembly:
Cathleen Galgiani 20
Nicole Parra 20
Juan Arambula 50

Senate:
Lou Correa 40
Mike Machado 45

All 3 Assembly Democrats live in the Central Valley (Galgiani's from Stockton, Parra's from Bakersfield and Arambula's from Fresno). Mike Machado is also from this area (Stockton, Tracy). Correa is the only exception to this rule.

Galgiani's election site features the line "I'll never raise your taxes." Machado endorsed Steve Filson in last year's Congressional primary against Jerry McNerney.

I'm not making value judgments, this is all just somewhat interesting stuff and I'm trying to make sense of it, particularly in the context of yesterday's discussion about the Central Valley. The spotlight is not usually shined on this area; is that how we end up with Democrats like this?