How Conservative is Rick Stream?

With the contest for St. Louis County Executive gaining more attention, one talking point involves the ideological position of Rick Stream (the Republican candidate). The campaign of Steve Stenger (the Democratic candidate) claims that Stream is an extreme conservative, while the Stream campaign claims that he often worked across the aisle during his eight years in the Missouri General Assembly. We actually have some data to visualize where Stream stands on the political spectrum. Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty have been compiling all of the roll call voting data for every state legislature in the United States and reporting their findings at the Measuring American Legislatures blog. Their most recent data for the Missouri House is from the 2008 session, Stream’s first term in the legislature. Shor and McCarty use all of the roll call votes to create a Common Space Score for each legislator, which indicates where the lawmaker falls along a left-right ideological continuum.

The figure below is a kernel density plot showing the distribution of legislators in the Missouri General Assembly in 2008. Positive values indicate conservative legislators and negative values indicate liberals. In 2008, all Republicans had scores above zero and all but one of the Democrats had scores below zero. The two peaks in the graph roughly coincide with the median Democrat (-.6) and the median Republican (1.2), indicating a considerable ideological gulf between the two parties. Each individual legislator is also denoted by one of the notches in the rug plot along the horizontal axis. Rick Stream’s ideological score (1.0) is indicated by the vertical line. Stream’s roll call record places him to the left of the average Republican as well as some prominent GOP lawmakers such as Brian Nieves (1.5), Tim Jones (1.4), and Steve Tilley (1.3). However, Stream’s record is more conservative than some other Republicans, such as Ryan Silvey (0.7), Jason Smith (0.8), and Jim Lembke (0.9).