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It wasn’t long after Vice-President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party nominee and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz became her running mate that the pair became accused of being “the most liberal members of Congress.” To evaluate this argument, I give it the acid test. I looked at data from the American Conservative Union (ACU), now run by CPAC. And in 2020, Harris was just as liberal as a former ex-Democratic representative who now backs Trump.

ACU scores, now CPAC scores, is taken from about 20-30 congressional votes. It’s a fraction of how many votes a candidate takes (perhaps a tenth), but it gives us a rough estimate of how members of the House of Representatives and Senate voted. Scores closer to zero mean the politician is more liberal, while closer to 100 means the candidate is more conservative.

In her last year of office, Harris got a nine, which is two points more conservative than the average Senate Democrat, according to my article for Raw Story. That score also ties her with ex-Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who just endorsed former President Donald Trump. I also found almost 50 Democratic politicians with a more liberal voting record than her record between 2017-2020, and I stopped counting after that. There are likely more.

Before he was Minnesota’s Governor, Tim Walz served in the House of Representatives. His voting average was 8.17, according to the same CPAC data. The average of House Democrats during those years, 2007-2017, was 6.63. So that argument doesn’t really fit either.

Yes, Harris got a score of zero in 2017 and a score of zero in 2019. So did more than 150 Democrats in each of those years. It’s the same deal for Walz in 2007 and 2016.  So you could fudge it to say “most liberal” for two years, but it if you’re tied with 150 others for being called “the most,” it kind of loses its meaning.

Yet Fox News is claiming that a GovTrack.us site that listed Harris as the “most liberal” senator was taken down. It turns out that GovTrack had shifted to looking at the entire 2019-2020 legislative session, which is probably a good idea.

Buried at the bottom of the Fox story about suddenly disappearing websites, we learn “She was ranked the second most liberal in all the Senate behind Independent Sanders. At some point in October 2020, GovTrack changed its ranking language from ‘most liberal’ to ‘most politically left.’ The group’s analysis is based on senators’ ‘legislative behavior’ and their record of sponsoring or cosponsoring bipartisan bills, which it says ‘only takes into account a small aspect of reality.’”

In my Raw Story research, I noted that one of Harris’ last votes was to authorize funds for the Defense Department. So is she “big government” for voting for our military? If she voted against it, I doubt she be praised for “fiscal responsibility.” Instead, they’d call her “Comrade Kamala” for voting against our troops, right? Sounds like they’re doing that anyway, despite the lack of evidence in support of that. Is she more liberal than J. D. Vance? Yes. Is she the most liberal democrat? No. In her last year in the Senate, she voted similarly to a former Democratic Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, who now backs Trump.

Not only is there no conspiracy, but this measure isn’t always a good reflection of Senate voting reality. That hasn’t stopped some in the press from screaming that there’s a conspiracy, but it’s clear from even conservative data sites that Kamala Harris was not the most liberal Senator.