The flip side of the courage ratings are the enablers. These are slightly different from the reverse of the courage ratings in that the courage ratings only take into account active no votes. Some of our elected representatives missed votes for various reasons. I chose an enabler rating to accompany the courage rating by making a count of the Aye votes and subtracting the No votes. In the Senate, this gives Gilbert Cedillo a slight boost, as he had 12 no votes and no Aye votes, for an enabler rating of -12. Lou Correa had 13 no votes, for a higher courage rating, but 12 Aye votes, for an enabler rating of -1. Senate enablers are here, the Assembly is below the fold.

mbayrob commented on my earlier entry where I had a grid of the votes on the budget bills suggesting a courage rating for the Assembly and Senators.  I thought about that, and considered some options.  Since most of these ratings are usually simple percentages based on bill votes, it made sense to just look at the percentage of no votes.  So, here are the courage ratings for the Democrats in the Assembly.  The Senate Democrats are below the fold, as are some ideas for more complicated ratings if others want to tackle them.

(ties are all broken solely by sorting on district number — no relative judgment implied)

Before settling on the simple percentage, I seriously considered some metrics involving how many votes were cast for and against a bill, the partisan split on the voting, the partisan split on the district, and the effect of term limits (a term limited assemblymen/senator has less to lose by bucking the party line.)  But, I then realized that I’d need to include some subjective ratings of the weights for each of those factors and then it would be more of a personal measure than an objective and reproducible measure.  

If there’s interest in the more subjective measure, let me know (and give me some suggestions) and I’ll look at grinding away at the numbers over the weekend.