California Legislature Continues Plunge in 50 State Conservative Rankings

The voting of California’s state lawmakers is trending much more progressive, dropping the state 3 spots in a new 50 state analysis conducted by the Center for Legislative Accountability (CLA), a project of CPAC Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation.

In the CLA’s analysis of all 7,400 state lawmakers across America, the California legislature earned a conservative rating of a mere 24% (dropping the state from the #44 to the #47 spot in the rankings). California trails only Rhode Island (20%), Hawaii (19%) and Massachusetts (15%) as most liberal in America. This past election is likely to only worsen the plunge due to the projected flip of Republican seats to Democrat in the state Assembly.

The conservative rating is calculated on lawmaker voting across 186 policy areas ranging from cultural and life issues to tax, fiscal, and regulatory policies. Each year the CLA tallies over 320,000 votes to generate the scores and 50 state rankings. Only 17 California Republican lawmakers earned awards from CPAC for earning conservative ratings of 80% and above. However, an astounding 72 lawmakers earned CPAC’s “Coalition of the Radical Left” award for conservative ratings of 10% or below.

The ratings have also been incorporated into CPAC’s new Lawmaker Comparison Tool which runs head-to-head comparisons on lawmaker’s strongest and weakest policy areas.

The CLA is the first and only organization to annually publish individual ratings for all 8,000 federal and state lawmakers in America. The CLA is also home to the nation’s most comprehensive conservative policy database containing over 19,000 detailed bill analyses which span 50 years of Congress and all 50 state legislatures.