This race, and this party, have become really conservative …
… even if we have trouble defining what conservatism means. By the three ideological measures on this chart, Cruz is the most conservative, on average, and Christie is the least. Perhaps relatedly, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses this week and is polling well elsewhere. Christie is barely on the radar with GOP primary voters. Among the candidates still in the race, Rubio is the second-most conservative.
Kasich and Bush are both between the Republican average for the 96th Congress (1979-1980) and the Republican average in the 113th Congress, whereas Rubio and Cruz are both to the right of the later average. In other words, there’s a time dimension to this as well. Kasich and Bush are more representative of the Reagan and George W. Bush era, while Cruz and Rubio entered national politics with the Tea Party movement. So what we’re seeing there is not just that the stronger candidates are further to the right – we’re also observing the evolution of the party.
