Below we use updated DW-NOMINATE scores to plot the House’s 266-153 vote and the Senate’s 62-36 to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

28 House Democrats and 9 Senate Democrats joined all voting Republicans in supporting the measure. As seen in the plots below, NOMINATE does a good job of modeling voting patterns on the basis of ideology, with moderate Democrats in both chambers predicted to defect from the rest of their party.

These images are from a new Stand-alone DW-NOMINATE that can be run daily as new roll calls are cast. We will have more to say about this software at a later date.

Click images to enlarge

Updated 30 January 2015

Below is the vote to elect John Boehner (R-OH) as Speaker of the House. The actual roll call was 216 for Boehner, 164 for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), 24 Republicans voted for other Republicans, 4 Democrats voted for other Democrats, Babin (R-TX) voted Present, and 25 members did not vote. Grimm (R-NY) resigned before the vote was taken.

The 24 Republicans who did not vote for Boehner were treated as voting for Pelosi and the 4 Democrats who did not vote for Pelosi were treated as voting for Boehner. This was done solely for display purposes. Most of the non-voters were Democrats — 20 of the 25. The opposition to Boehner was from the right-wing of the Republican caucus and the 4 Democrats opposed to Pelosi were relatively moderate.

This image is from a new stand-alone DW-NOMINATE that can be run daily as new roll calls are cast. We will have more to say about this software at a later date.

Click image to enlarge