Scoreboard Updates PTMD

We've been a bit lax in trying to keep our Mark Udall is not a moderate scoreboard up to date, so today is catch-up day.

Two weeks ago, the Denver Post did a lengthy article on the relative positioning of Mark Udall and Bob Schaffer against well known members of Congress from the last 70 years. The Post noted that Mark Udall was 509th and:

falls squarely within his party's liberal wing — and based on his votes is more liberal than Clinton or Obama.

We will count that in our "reliably left wing" category. We are doing that in part because when we did additional digging into the numbers, we discovered that before Mark Udall decided to run for the Senate, his voting record put him as the 25th most liberal member of Congress. Since he decided to run for the Senate, he has tried to move his record closer to the center. Again, from the Post:

Udall's ranking is 509th from the left, more moderate than Schaffer but still well within the party's left wing. [ Kieth ] Poole's study shows that Udall has shifted to the middle somewhat since 2002, when an earlier version of the scale put him at 379th from the far left.

Meanwhile left leaning magazine "In These Times" has added its assessment of Mark Udall's politics:

Tom and Mark [ Udall ] are progressive U.S. representatives in New Mexico and Colorado, respectively, who have each set their sights on an open, Republican-held Senate seat in their home states.

We count "progressive" as "reliably left wing" because it is most frequently used to describe a liberal's liberal.

Thus, the the "reliably left wing" scoreboard line advances by two, today.

The Mark Udall is not a moderate scoreboard:
extremist 2
reliably left wing 13
liberal 30
moderate 0
conservative (chuckle)

We started this scoreboard when we noticed that liberal blogs and the msm were routinely calling Mark Udall a "liberal," "reliably left wing," and even "extremist." We do not count comments from conservative blogs and we didn't count a comment on a liberal show by a conservative politician. Those who would like to check our methodology can follow the bread crumbs backwards.

Long ago, we started using music titles to make it easier to find earlier posts and to differentiate scoreboard posts from other posts. Recently, Mark Udall admitted that in 1971 he had his automobile seized in a drug related arrest. Most states don't seize vehicles unless the amount of drugs involved suggests drug dealing. Mark Udall has been quite coy about what happened. An enquiring public wants to know. In that spirit, our future scoreboard entries will be titled Puff the Magic Dragon or PTMD.