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