Below we update an ongoing project that uses Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey Scaling to estimate voters’ ideological perceptions of political figures on the 2016 stage. Because the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study asked 50,000+ respondents to place national political figures (like President Obama) and state-level figures like their governor and senators on a liberal-conservative scale, we can use the Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey scaling procedure to estimate their positions in a common ideological space. We can also estimate credible intervals (the Bayesian analogue of confidence intervals) that reflect uncertainty in the recovered scores.
The survey respondents seemed to do a good job of placing these figures on the liberal-conservative scale. Bernie Sanders is the furthest left, while Ted Cruz is the furthest right. Tim Kaine is the most centrist Democrat, while Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are the most centrist Republicans. Mike Pence has virtually the same score as Marco Rubio: to the right of moderate Republicans, but not as far to the right as Cruz and the Tea Party.
Also noteworthy is that the Supreme Court is nearly dead center in these scores (based on 2014 data). We wait to see if the Court will be placed further leftward by 2016 CCES respondents.
Voteview Blog 
