Dennis Kucinich Is The Least Valuable Democrat

In support of my post yesterday about Dennis Kucinich, I’d like to direct your attention to this post from the stats wizards over at FiveThirtyEight.

Basically, Nate Silver looked at Democrats votes on “10 key agenda items” from last year. With those votes, he then gave them a value based heavily on the PVI (partisan voter index) of the district represented.

Here’s how he explained it:

“The idea was to see how each Democrat voted relative to the partisan slant of his district; a Democrat voting for the cap-and-trade bill in a Republican-leaning district would get quite a bit of credit for that, for instance, while one voting for the same measure in a district with a PVI of D+15 would get almost no credit for the vote since almost every Representative from such a district voted for the bill anyway.”

At first, Silver applied a "liberal nos" exemption for when someone voted no because they thought the bill was too weak. But a few days ago Silver got curious and refigured it without this exemption.

Anyone want to take a guess who was the least valuable representative for the agenda of change?

Ohio’s own Dennis Kucinich.

And here’s the kicker, Silver points out that all but 22 Republicans have a higher value to the Democratic agenda than Kucinich.

Remember Dennis, even a kindergartener can tell you that actions speak louder than words.