The Death Of The Moderate Republican

Ken AshfordDemocrats, RepublicansLeave a Comment

Yes, the moderate Republican is extinct.  Like the dodo bird of the days of yore.  But just in case you need a graph showing this, I proffer the following from the Washington Post wonkblog.

The graph employs a widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on voting developed by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal.  Let’s look, for example, at the US House of Representatives over many decades.  Republicans in the the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:

repdrift

Put another way, are there any Republican moderates in the House?  This graph shows the Republican versus Democrat NON-moderates over time….

nomods

So there you go.