One of the problems when investigating where an incumbent
stands on a issue is that incumbents go to great extremes
to hide where they stand. They rarely vote on a single
issue. Their favorite trick is to add amendments to
legislation that have nothing to do with the original
intent of the legislation. This allows them to say they
were against one item in the bill but for some other item
in the bill. This way you have to take their word on where
they stand. Since there was more than one issue in the
legislation, there is no written proof.
The solution the CongressOfHope.com came up with was to
use Project Vote Smart. Project Vote Smart is an organization
that puts together an immense amount of information on its
web site. One of the standard sections on their web site is
the watchdog group (they call it ) ratings section. In this
section they list all the watchdog groups they can find along
with the ratings of these groups on the issue they watch.
As the CongressOfHope.com evolved it was found that the popular
saying, "keep it simple stupid" is good advice. It was
discovered there were four issues that consistently had enough
data to reach a solid conclusion. It is a simple task to look
over the data for this issue and decide if an incumbent is in
the middle, to the right of the middle, or to the left of the
middle. If they were left or right again it was simple enough
to break it down to a little or a lot to the left or the
right. This creates five ratings for each issue.
An example of the final step in this evolutionary process
is shown below.
Can it get simpler than listing the four issues with each
rating? To further explain where these ratings come from
reverse evolution will be used.
Abortion:
Solidly Pro-life
Conservative or Liberal:
Right leaning moderate
Gun Issues:
Strongly pro 2nd Amendment
Illegal Immigration:
Build a fence
The step before "keeping it simple stupid" was to try and
put all the issues into a long table. In the table shown
below the issues that had enough entries to reach a solid
conclusion are highlighted. This was still
confusing to most people.
The very first step in the evolutionary process was simply to send
visitors right to the web page for the incumbent on the Project Vote
Smart web sight. This was even more confusing than the above table
for most. Clicking on the "button" below will bring you to the page
for Congressman Bob Inglis in the Project Vote Smart
web site. He is still listed though he lost in the primary election.
Once you figure out their format, you will see
where the CongressOfHope.com gets the data for the four ratings.
Bob Inglis is used as an example here as he had the only complete
table when it was decided to "keep it simple stupid."
