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Data Mining the US Senate Votes
AJ writes "We used some old and new data mining techniques to see what was happening in the US Senate in 2003. Among other things, we identified the 'social' network of similarities between senators, how influential is each senator and each state, and a 3D VRML view of the Senate. You will be able to check whether Senator Kerry was a centrist or a liberal, and who is acting more cohesively, the Democrats or the Republicans. We provide our data and the source of all our analysis software (Orange and MPCA, both under GPL)."
They have a similarity matrix that pairs Senators and measures how close their votes were to other Senators. It's arranged in order of the clustered blocks in the Senate and if you look at Kerry's data on the vertical you'll notice that he, Edwards, and Lieberman are the Democrats who most agreed with Republicans on matters. This is interesting because two are running for President and Vice President while many thought the third would be Kerry's running mate.
Furthermore, there is a decent sized band of midwestern Republicans who are faintly in agreement with the Democrats. It's the midwest that's usually depicted as a big red blob of Bush voters.
Also worth noting is the middle pack of Democrats and Republicans who nearly never agreed with any Democrats.
It looks as though Kerry got on better with both parties of the house than anyone else, despite all the reports we hear of him being the most liberal voter. Very interesting.
Direct away from face when opening.
Notice that the period surveyed is exactly the period he's been running for President. Before the campaign began, Kerry's attendance record was somewhat better than average, IIRC.
Also be very, very careful when reading the short descriptions of the bills and amendments voted on. The content often has very little to do with the name or the summary. "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," anyone?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My 11-year-old asked me the other day what the word "liberal" means. I explained that many people have tried to give "liberal" a negative connotation, but it really is the basis on which our country was founded -- freedom for all. Remember that "liberal" and "liberty" share the same roots. A liberal leaves room for people to have a different opinion and doesn't label that opinion wrong -- it's just different.
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I told her that "liberal" is not a dirty word and suggested that she look it up in the dictionary, which she did. It explained that liberals don't allow authoritarian, orthodox, traditional beliefs to dictate/restrict the rights of others. A liberal is considered tolerant of alternative views and free from bigotry (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=liberal
Some people have been very effective at convincing everyone that "liberal" is a bad word based on a few extreme liberals, and they have used it for political advantage. Considering the history of our country, people who aren't "liberal" should give us cause for concern. If you care about freedom for all, be proud to call yourself a "liberal." Many of my friends are Republican, but I would call them "liberal" because they are open and tolerant. Being a liberal doesn't mean that you have to be an extreme, left-wing Democrat. It means you have to be broad-minded, and that, frankly, is something all of us should strive to be. I plan to vote for "liberal" candidates, regardless of party affiliation, because they will protect our freedom.
Yeah, it would have been nice if they did previous years as well, since (according to CSPAN) Kerry missed less than 2% of the all votes during the his time in the senate, prior to the begining of his campain, casting over 6000 votes in his senate career.