After former President Donald Trump's campaign seized on Vice President Kamala Harris' 2019 "most liberal senator" ranking from GovTrack, the website "retracted" all the legislator rankings for that year and three others.
"We retracted the legislator rankings that we published for 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 including a ranking of then-Sen. Kamala Harris as the most liberal senator in 2019," wrote GovTrack founder and president Joshua Tauberer. "A newer ranking that we published in 2021 says she was the leftmost Democratic senator.
"Catch the difference? Right-wing media didn't like it. It's a difference without distinction," he wrote.
"Our ideology scores rank legislators according to who they partner with to co-sponsor legislation," Tauberer wrote, linking to and including a portion of a 2020 analysis from The Washington Post that ran after Harris dropped her presidential campaign and became Joe Biden's running mate.
The analysis included the following comment from Tauberer:
"Obviously our analysis is at odds with what other serious analysis of Harris’s career has found, and I think the short answer is that both things can be true: She can both be sponsoring/co-sponsoring left-leaning legislation, something with typically little risk, while also being pragmatic when push comes to shove on risky and impactful decisions, as evidenced by her career as a [San Francisco district attorney] and [California attorney general]," he said in an email. "You could also see this in how she responded to the Abolish ICE movement — by not joining it. Another example might be Harris's vote in favor of the FIRST Step Act, the criminal justice reform bill that President Trump counts as one of his achievements, something Harris could have voted against as not progressive enough, but she didn't, she supported it (as did all Democrats, though)."
Tauberer wrote, "Despite my warning in The Washington Post, two months later CBS's "60 Minutes" asked Harris about our stat, and clips from the interview have been a part of Trump's campaigns ever since."
With Biden suspending his campaign for reelection, Harris is the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, and the Trump campaign has been highlighting her "most liberal senator" ranking, including in a new ad.
GovTrack responded quickly and subsequently called out the conservative media that noticed the change.
"A lot of complaints about erasing history (I doubt they complained when Trump deleted tweets)," Tauberer wrote. "Many emails and tweets have asked us to restore the statistic because our methodology was correct and the information important for voters to know while at the same time letting us know that we have lost all of our credibility.
"Well, both can't really be true, can they. Trump himself continues to cite our analysis (both the retracted one and one we still have up). For them, it is all obviously about whether it's convenient, not whether it's correct.
"Right-wing media ran articles with ominous headlines in passive voice like 'suddenly disappears' on Fox News. (They emailed me for comment, I answered all of their questions, and they still pass it off as some invisible hand at work. It was my hand, folks.)
"Other outlets ran stories without asking us for comment. Sean Hannity's team wrote 'Is anyone buying this?' Others in the far-right media have painted this as a Soviet-style partisan censorship conspiracy. Mmmhmm."
Reached for comment by Newsmax, Tauberer defended his organization’s work, saying the analysis “and really no computational analysis” could have “the level of precision as is being made out by the Republicans and the media.”
“Whether our analysis says that Harris was infinitesimally to the left or infinitesimal to the right of Sen. [Bernie] Sanders, that small difference, the difference itself, is not something that should be magnified into more than it is. It is like being within a margin of error. Similarly, the claim that we have changed our rankings again magnifies an infinitesimal difference in a way that just isn't supported by the limited precision of this data analysis,” Tauberer told Newsmax.
Tauberer further defended the move, saying taking down the old statistics “was not based on a comparison to the newer statistics,” but on other factors.
“I’m not aware of any other independent analysis of Harris's legislative record that concludes she is more extreme than Sen. Sanders, nor did it fit well with my own observations of her actions in Congress or other reporting on her career. I also was concerned about a number of ways the analysis may have been influenced by factors that didn't relate to Harris's policies or beliefs, Tauberer said.
Tauberer said the concerns were more pronounced due to the smaller time period used in the most recent analysis, “which means less data and a larger margin of error.”
When asked if he was concerned the move would make it look like GovTrack, which purports to be nonpartisan, was working to protect Democrat candidates of choice, Tauberer said he is “far more concerned” with producing useful information and resources that are understood “than about what people think of us.”
“I think that's why the NRSC called us ‘nonpartisan’ at the start of this week and why politicians and the media on all sides cite, and even this week continue to cite, our resources frequently,” he said.