Here are my scores for the 2012 House and Senate congressional candidates.

Graphs of the distributions can be found in this post, and an explanation of how I came up with these scores is in this post.

The fields in the spreadsheets are as follows:

  • stdist: Congressional district for House candidates
  • st: State abbreviation
  • party: D, R, or X (independent)
  • pid: –1,0,1 (equivalent to party)
  • full.name: Self-explanatory; sorry for screwups with accent marks and the like.
  • incumbent: 1 if incumbent, 0 if challenger
  • crp.id: Center for Responsive Politics identification number
  • npat.id: Project Vote Smart candidate id
  • score: Candidate ideal point or ideological position estimated from survey response as described here
  • sd: Measure of uncertainty around the point estimate in score
  • perc: Percentile ranking within the pool of all 2012 candidates, House and Senate. So a percentile score of 84.5 for  Mia Love (R) in Utah’s 4th District indicates Love ranks as more conservative than 84.5% of all 2012 candidates.
  • perc.r: Percentile ranking within the pool of 2012 Republican candidates, House and Senate. So Love scores 70.3, which indicates she is more conservative than 70.3% of all 2012 Republican candidates: that is, she is certainly quite conservative, even within her own party.
  • perc.d: Percentile ranking within the pool of 2012 Democratic candidates, House and Senate. Love’s opponent, Jim Matheson (D) with a percentile score of 1.6, indicating that he is more conservative than all but 1.6% of 2012 Democratic candidates. In other words, Matheson is extremely conservative for a Democrat, which is not surprising given the conservative character of Utah’s 4th district.
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