Webpage that rated Kamala Harris the 'most liberal' senator in 2019 suddenly disappears
GovTrack removed a web page ranking Vice President Kamala Harris as "most liberal compared to all senators" in 2019 when she was still in Congress.
GovTrack, an organization that tracks congressional voting records, confirmed to Fox News Digital it had removed a 2019 web page that ranked Kamala Harris as that year's "most liberal" U.S. senator sometime within the last two weeks.
The self-described "government transparency website" scored Harris as the "most liberal compared to all senators" in 2019, outranking Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at the time.
But the web page with the ranking, which was widely covered in news reports during the 2020 election, was recently deactivated. The link now displays a "Page Not Found" message. The Internet Archive shows the page was deleted sometime between July 10 and July 23, with some on X claiming the page was still up on July 22.
President Biden announced his decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee on July 21. Harris announced in the early hours of July 23 that she had secured enough delegates to lock up the nomination at the DNC next month.
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When reached by Fox News Digital, GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer said the page was removed because the company adopted a policy "several years ago" to end its single-year ratings of lawmakers to only do ratings based on Congressional sessions, which are two years.
"We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators, particularly given the ebbs and flows of the legislative calendar, and therefore did not serve as a useful tool to our users and the American public," Tauberer said. "We subsequently took down the previously-published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason."
Tauberer confirmed to Fox News Digital that the page was removed sometime in the last two weeks, but did not give a specific date. Asked why the pages weren't removed when single-year report cards were abandoned years ago, he said, "I was focused on more impactful aspects of our work."
Tauberer said the organization was still publishing report cards based on two-year congressional sessions and pointed Fox News Digital to Harris' existing 2020 web page, which ranked her ideology as the "most politically left compared to Senate Democrats" for the 116th Congress. She was ranked the second most liberal in all the Senate behind Independent Sanders.
At some point in October 2020, GovTrack changed its ranking language from "most liberal" to "most politically left."
The group's analysis is based on senators’ "legislative behavior" and their record of sponsoring or cosponsoring bipartisan bills, which it says "only takes into account a small aspect of reality."
The analysis in 2019 showed that Harris joined bipartisan legislation "the least often compared to Senate Democrats."
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The Trump campaign cited the rating after Biden announced Harris as his running mate in 2020, pushing back on a New York Times feature that described Harris as a "pragmatic moderate."
"Reminder: GovTrack ranked Senator Kamala Harris the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate in 2019, farther left than Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and even Bernie Sanders," the campaign sent in an August 2020 email. "Kamala Harris is a radical left-wing liberal, despite what the New York Times may say."
Harris' 2019 rating came back under scrutiny this week after Biden endorsed Harris as his successor on Sunday, releasing a bombshell letter informing the American public that he was answering the mounting calls to suspend his re-election campaign.
Harris confirmed that she would run for the Democratic nomination, writing in a statement, "I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination."
As Harris heads toward the Democratic nomination, her allies in the media are now suggesting it's unfair to pin the thorny issue of illegal immigration on her.
Axios was particularly roasted Wednesday over a piece insisting Harris wasn’t the "border czar" that seemed to contradict its own previous reporting. The outlet was even forced to update the story by admitting it had "incorrectly" called her a "border czar" in the past.
Harris has received endorsements from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.