GovTrack, an organization that tracks voting records in Congress, scrubbed its 2019 rating that pegged then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as the most liberal member of the upper chamber – after several media outlets including The Post cited the statistic in stories on the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.
The website pulled down its 2019 ranking on Monday evening after it got renewed attention in the wake of President Biden’s seismic decision to drop out of the 2024 race on Sunday, its founder confirmed to The Post.
GovTrack determined in its single-year “report card” for 2019 that she was the most ideological to the left member of the upper chamber based on her legislative behavior.
She was even further to the left of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) – the latter of whom typically owns that title, including in the most recent metric available from GovTrack.
The group’s founder Joshua Tauberer, who created the website when he was a college student in 2004, said the ranking in question was based on a single calendar year and that the organization “discontinued” those types of “report cards” several years back.
“We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators, particularly given the ebbs and flows of the legislative calendar, and therefore did not serve as a useful tool to our users and the American public,” he told The Post.
“We subsequently took down the previously published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason.”
Tauberer previously warned in 2020 that GovTrack’s 2019 ranking of Harris was not reliable, telling the Washington Post at the time that it was at “odds with what other serious analysis of Harris’s career has found.”
“I think the short answer is that both things can be true: She can both be sponsoring/co-sponsoring left-leaning legislation, something with typically little risk, while also being pragmatic when push comes to shove on risky and impactful decisions,” he added at the time.
Back in 2019, Harris was only two years into her Senate term and had been angling for a presidential bid.
In the public eye, she took on a variety of hard-left positions such as support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, starting “from scratch” on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and more.
She later walked back many of those positions – for example, clarifying that she supports private health insurance.
But her 2020 campaign efforts have given ample fodder for Republicans now that she is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies have already seized on GovTrack’s old rating, with the Republican nominee alluding to it at a recent rally in Charlotte, NC.
“Kamala Harris is the most liberal elected politician in American history. Did you know that? She’s an ultra-liberal politician. She’s absolutely terrible. She’s as you know more liberal than Bernie Sanders, can you believe it?” Trump chided.
Sanders, himself, questioned that claim that she was to the left of him.
“Probably not. It’s just possible that for the 83,000th time that Trump is lying. No, I don’t think that is the case,” Sanders told CNN Wednesday when asked about Trump’s remarks.
In a recent attack ad against Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Keystone State Republican Dave McCormick spotlighted a clip of Harris responding to a question about the ranking in which she was seen smiling.
“Bob Casey just endorsed the most liberal nominee in U.S. history,” McCormick, 58, jabbed in an X post featuring the spot.
Trump’s 2020 campaign also spotlighted the ranking after Biden announced Harris as his runningmate.
An Internet Archives capture of the GovTrack rating from July 9 shows the old ranking. Now, the website simply says, “Page Not Found” when directed to the 2019 “report card.”
