Measuring Gordon Smith's "Maverick" Record

Jeff Alworth

Gordon Smith has carefully tended his reputation as a "maverick" senator, casting himself in the lineage of his predecessor, Mark Hatfield.  He consistently gets press for "bucking" the GOP, casting votes against his caucus at strategic moments, and making "bold" public statements (that don't always cohere with later votes).  The image is well-established: do a Google search on his name and the word "maverick," and you get 21,000 hits.  Wyden gets a paltry 804. Oregonians--and 42% of Democratic voters--seem to believe that he is independent and not a foot soldier for the White House.  But is he?

I decided to look into this a bit, using the Washington Post's handy Votes Database, which contains the votes of every member of Congress going back to 1991.  I am not paid nearly enough money to peruse the entire database for a comprehensive look at Smith's votes.  But the summaries do allow you to do some quick sorting and comparing, and what it shows is revealing.  Gordon Smith a maverick?  Far from it.

Voting with Republicans
One of the handiest features allows you to see how often your Senator voted with his party.  With Gordon Smith, an interesting pattern emerges.  In the 105th and 106th Congresses--when Smith was not up for re-election--he was a reliable Republican vote.  In fact, he voted with the GOP majority about 3% more often than his colleagues did on average.  But during the 107th Congress, when he was running for re-election, he mavericked up, voting with the Republicans less frequently than his colleagues.  So now that he's prepping up for the fight of his life, would you guess that he's mavericking up again?  Behold:

After being one of the most reliable GOP votes throughout his career, Gordon Smith is now demonstrating some independence--just at the moment he's trying to justify the "maverick" label.

Close Votes
Another way to assess Smith's maverick bona fides is to examine what he did when the vote was on the line.  It's one thing to vote against drilling ANWR, as he did in 2005, when the outcome was not in doubt.  But what about when it is in doubt?  For each session, the Post lists the dozen or so closest votes, including names of defectors.  You would imagine that a maverick like Gordon Smith would take brave stands against his caucus even when it meant scuttling their position, right?  You would imagine wrong. 

I looked at the first session (a calendar year) of the 106th and 107th Congresses (it's a little labor-intensive, so I sampled just one session each).  The Post had 12 close votes listed for 1999 (106th), and 15 for 2001 (107th).  The GOP had pretty loose party unity in '99--just 88.4%.  In '01, it was a more unified 95.2%.  The number of times Gordon Smith deviated from the majority in these close votes: zero.  Nada.  None for 27.  By contrast, Arlen Specter (R-PA) was a real maverick.  In these close votes, he dissented from his party 58% and 40% of the time.  Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and George Voinovich (R-OH) were all far more maverick than our man Gordon. 

In the current Congress, Smith has finally stepped up his maverick game--a tiny bit.  Of 24 votes cast in '07 and '08, he has gone against his party twice (an 8.3% maverick rating).  This is a marked improvement over past sessions, but hardly represents real independence.  Again, Specter, Collins, Snowe, and Voinovich have bucked their party more often.

These are just two data points.  I expect that a staffer with a couple days and a calculator could do a more comprehensive look.  But as data points go, these are pretty revealing.  Once every six years, Gordon Smith drags his costume out of the closet and poses for the press as a maverick.  But the rest of the time, he has been a foot-soldier for the likes of Bush and DeLay. 

For Oregonians, that means we have had a Senator cancelling out every effort Ron Wyden has made to end the war, address health care and wages, and make progress on the environment.  For the next seven months, we're gong to hear a lot of hype about Smith's "independence" in the Senate.  Don't believe it--he is and has voted like a good, orthodox Republican, making sure the agenda of George W. Bush has had smooth sailing.  The numbers tell us so.

By Jeff Alworth April 21, 2008