Members in the House of Representatives don't always vote as expected. The folks over at fivethirtyeight.com have studied all the votes of House members, and believe those votes divide them into eight groups - three Democratic groups and five Republican groups. Those groups are:Far-Right Obstructionists
In a Congress largely defined by Republicans’ struggle to govern in harmony with their far-right flank, it’s no surprise that a cluster of hardline, obstructionist conservatives emerged as a cohesive voting cluster. The Far-Right Obstructionists cluster is made up of 39 members who are part of, or tend to be closely aligned with, the Freedom Caucus, including notable rabble-rousing Trump acolytes like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who led the charge on ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s threatening the same fate for Speaker Mike Johnson.
Far-Right Establishment
The Far-Right Establishment cluster is the largest of the GOP clusters and is stacked with party leaders. That’s notable given that it’s the second-most conservative group in the House.
The 55 members in this cluster are deep-red conservatives who, along with the Far-Right Obstructionists cluster, often broke with the rest of their party in their opposition to government spending bills. Of those who voted, less than 30 percent of members in this cluster supported each of two short-term funding extensions last fall, and only 15 percent supported the final funding package last month.
Old Guard Republicans
The Old Guard Republicans cluster is the second-largest GOP cluster and lies in the ideological center of the five. This group of 50 members, along with the 55 in the slightly more conservative Far-Right Establishment cluster, makes up the core base of the House GOP. While most of the party’s leadership is in the latter cluster, a number of key leaders landed in this slightly more moderate group, including House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and seven committee chairs.
Both groups are on solid footing when it comes to their conservative base, with members representing districts that Trump won in 2020 by an average of around 24 percentage points, but this group was less likely to support some more hardline proposals, including several that proposed significant spending cuts or limits on foreign aid to Ukraine and other countries.
Compromise Conservatives
The Compromise Conservatives cluster is the smallest of the GOP groups (32 members) and the second-most moderate on average, though there were some notable exceptions. Like the Moderate Republicans, they broke with more conservative clusters pretty frequently on hard-right messaging votes, supporting only 63 percent of partisan amendments from their own party.
However, this group exhibited slightly more conservative leanings on spending legislation and other traditionally libertarian priorities. Breaking with what we’d expect from a relatively moderate group, members in this cluster were actually less likely to vote for bipartisan spending bills like the annual defense policy bill and September Ukraine aid package than the Old Guard Republicans, who more often fell in line with conservative messaging votes but strongly supported funding bills.
Moderate Republicans
The Moderate Republicans cluster is a group of 39 members who break more often than others from the majority of their party on both substantive policy and partisan messaging, with the goal of finding consensus across the aisle. For example, 89 percentof the cluster voted in favor of a September 2023 bill to provide security assistance to Ukraine, compared to 38 percent of all other Republicans.
Unsurprisingly, Problem Solvers Caucus Co-chair Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania is in this group, along with 17 others from the caucus — two-thirds of the group’s GOP members. More than half (22 members) of the similarly pragmatic-minded caucus called the Republican Governance Group also aligns with this cluster, including the caucus’s chair, David Joyce of Ohio, who described the group in 2022 as “hellbent on breaking through Washington’s dysfunction” to “carve out a viable path forward for effective lawmaking.”
Moderate Democrats
The Moderate Democrats cluster is the smallest Democratic cluster. Seventy-five percent of its members won their seats during either the 2018 or 2022 cycles, making it also the newest Democratic cluster by average term length. The biggest exception to this is Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, who is the longest-serving woman in congressional history, having been elected to 21 terms.
This cluster is by far the most centrist of the Democratic wing. Last year, the Moderate Democrats voted yes on bipartisan amendments 92 percent of the time, 20 percent more frequently than their progressive colleagues, and they voted for Democratic amendments 11 percent less frequently than the rest of their party. They also voted yes more often on all types of passage, a signal that they were more willing than other Democrats to side with the Republican majority.
Core Democrats
The Core Democrats cluster includes almost half of all Democrats in the House and all but one member of House Democratic leadership, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Minority Whip Katherine Clark is in the Progressive Democrats cluster). This cluster is the largest with 100 members and — as you might suspect from the name — is characterized primarily by being squarely in the middle of all the different factions of the Democratic Party, both ideologically and during fights between the party’s insurgent and establishment wings. It contains members from every Democratic caucus that we tracked, including a majority of the New Democrat Coalition.
It’s also the longest-serving cluster in Congress, having been elected to an average of 6.7 terms. That’s partly because much of the aging Democratic establishment can be found here: Seven of the 10 longest-serving Democrats currently in the House are part of this cluster. This older guard contains lots of workhorses, who often stay out of the high-profile clashes between the progressive and moderate wings of their party.
Progressive Democrats
The Progressive Democrats cluster includes, naturally, 68 of the most progressive members in Congress, including every member of The Squad. Fittingly, almost every member of this cluster is part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but there were still some surprises to be found. One was that Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, was in this cluster. This was unexpected considering the Progressive Democrats were about 20 percent less likely to vote yes on bipartisan amendments than the other two Democratic clusters, and were also the most anti-establishment of the Democratic clusters, with an average score of -0.31 on the second dimension of DW-NOMINATE.6 And it’s true that Dingell broke with her cluster on a coupleof votes where it otherwise had strong consensus. But she still ended up agreeing with the Progressive Democrats more than the average member of the cluster, voting with them over 98 percent of the time,7 including on high-priority issues like criminal justice reform and environmental protection.
Another surprise: while many members of this cluster have made headlines for unseating long-serving representatives in primaries over the last several years, this cluster is actually one of the longest-tenured in the House, having been elected to an average of 6.3 terms. That’s due to the presence of progressive stalwarts like Rep. Maxine Waters of California, the longest-serving member of this cluster, who has been elected to 17 terms.
