CQ has long tracked how often members of Congress vote with their parties (aka "party unity"), how often they vote with the president ("presidential support"), and how often they simply show up to vote ("voting participation"). These numbers shed a lot of light both on Congress as a whole and on individual members.
CQ has also launched a new flash-based tool which lets you view all this data interactively. Be sure to scroll all the way down for the chart which plots presidential supports vs. party unity - very cool. Hopefully CQ will go back and add historical data (they've been compiling these numbers since 1953). For now, you can find 2006 & 2007 party unity numbers here, and combined 2005-06 numbers here.
A few highlights:
Nick Lampson had the lowest party unity score (57%) and the highest presidential support score (39%), but it still didn't keep him from getting turfed in his extremely red Texas district
Meanwhile, Nancy Boyda voted with the Dems 92% of the time - exactly average. That probably didn't help her cause.
Good news on the filibuster front: Olympia Snowe voted with the Democrats 61% of the time and Susan Collins did so 54% of the time. Yes, they both voted Dem more often than they went Repub (though Collins's score might have been inflated by the fact that she sought re-election this year).
Check out this chart (PDF), in particular the opposition column for the Senate. Most of the names on that list make sense, but one stands out: DE Sen. Tom Carper, who frequently has a poor party unity record. I'm sure I'm not the only person who expects more from a guy who represents a state which voted 62-37 for Obama.
Tops on the dis-unity list: Evan Bayh, considerably worse than even Ben Nelson. Sheesh. What a phony. After racking up unity scores of 90% in 2005 and 89% in 2006 when he was flirting with a presidential run, he's since cratered to 65%. Seems to me like he's the epitome of a "stands for anything, stands for nothing" politician.
Back on the House side of things, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was second only to the primaried-out Wayne Gilchrest among Republicans voting with Dems, which shows you that a credible challenge at the polls can also do good things on the Hill.
And not that anyone needed reminding, but David Broder and his fellow cult members are still living in fantasy land:
The extent of the shift [toward greater partisanship] may be amplified by tighter floor control exercised by leaders of the majority party, said Jon R. Bond, a political scientist at Texas A&M University. "The majority party just won't bring a vote up unless they know they are going to win," he said. More telling, Bond said, the partisanship of today is a return to traditional American party politics, while the relative comity that existed from the 1950s to the 1980s was the exception.
"Even after all these years of increases in party voting, it's still not nearly as high as it was in the 19th century," he said.
