No. The Pew method employs DW-NOMINATE, which is a joke for cross-time comparisons. Since the issues Congress votes on changes over time, the method assumes that legislators don’t change their voting tendencies much. To compare different Congresses, DW-NOMINATE assumes some legislators’ ideology is stable over time and uses them as benchmarks. But this assumptions is just blatantly untenable and almost certainly false (see Joe Biden et al.). Worse yet, all votes are treated as equivalent even if the stakes are wildly different. According to this method, voting to abolish the income tax versus reducing the income tax by 1% is equally radical if the partisan split is the same. If we take its results at face value, Congress was more liberal in 1970 than now. Does anyone seriously believe this?
See: thebulwark.com/p/the-mismeasu…
See: thebulwark.com/p/the-mismeasu…
Also, WRT to the party as a whole, FT picks two issues where Republican ideology has been remarkably stable, but zoom out a bit and you’ll see that they’ve moved leftward as well. In fact, most of the “political polarization” in the country is just due to Democrats liberalizing much faster than Republicans:
https://x.com/aldenwhitfeld/status/1894465251413758245?s=46
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