Utahdatapoints.com Website Review

Rep. LaVar Christensen and Rep. Dan McCay are squaring off to fill a vacant seat in the Utah Senate. These two have served a long time together in the Utah House–long enough to cast a lot of opposing votes. So let’s compare their voting records. Let’s start with some statistics summarizing each legislator’s service, drawn from my statistical tables about the Utah Legislature don’t have a long term average handy, I have included the 2018 value. Christensen and McCay sponsor and pas* a similar number of their own bills, but there is a huge gap on floor sponsorship of Senators’ bills. Senators carefully choose Representatives to carry their bills through the House, so the difference in floor sponsorship rates suggest different reputations among Senators. In fact, this difference in floor sponsorship strikes me as the most telling difference in this table; one of these legislators has a track record over the past several sessions of working closely across chambers, and the other For missed votes, the chamber average each year is generally around 5-7%. Christensen tends to fall right within this average, with McCay slightly above it, but neither is particularly far from the average. McCay is famous for his “nay” voting record, and particularly for voting “nay” on commemorative (i.e. non-policy) resolutions. He casts “nay” votes at more than triple the rate Christensen does. Party support scores measure how often these legislators vote with the majority of their own party. In 2018, Rep. Christensen voted with the majority of House Republicans 97.7% of the time, versus 86.1% for Rep. McCay. The more telling measure, however, is how often these legislators vote with their party when there is a “party-line” vote–that is, a vote wherein a majority of Republicans votes opposite a majority of Democrats. On party-line votes the scores flip, with Christensen voting with his party 84.1% of the time versus Over the past 7 General Sessions, Christensen and McCay have participated together in 4,136 votes, disagreeing 627 times (15%). (I