Where Democratic Candidates Disagree in Congress—If They Vote at All

Twelve Democrats who qualified for the debate in Ohio will attempt for the fourth time to convince voters that their policy positions make them stand out from the other presidential candidates.

That’s hard to do, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of U.S. House and Senate votes since 1990. In a typical year, the candidates’ votes matched the positions taken by the majority of Democrats more than 4 times out of 5.

But running for president can cause candidates to recalculate, voting against some bills that pass with significant bipartisan support. Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have voted more often against their fellow Democrats. Excluding missed votes, they’ve each voted against the majority position of the party one quarter of the time—far above average. (Sanders, an Independent, caucuses and typically votes with the Democrats.)

And that’s assuming they’re around to cast a vote at all. Candidates currently in Congress have missed a staggering number of votes this year, some more than half.

When Joe Biden ran for president in 2007, at the time a Senator from Delaware, he missed 39% of his votes. In his 2016 presidential bid, Sanders missed 71% of votes that year. The current candidates have been just as absent.

Prior to this year, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker had missed 48 votes. So far in 2019, he’s missed 163, 52% of all votes and more than any other senator. Sanders has missed half so far this year, and hasn’t voted since July. Harris is also at 50%, while Warren has missed 37%. Other candidates polling behind the frontrunners, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and Tulsi Gabbard, a U.S. representative from Hawaii, have spent far more time in Washington this year, voting three-quarters of the time.

Congressional Service of Democratic Candidates

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• House

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Most Congressional votes pass overwhelmingly without controversy or fall along party lines. But in the Republican-controlled Senate, left-leaning Democrats have voted against some key bipartisan bills and high-ranking Trump nominees.

Warren, Sanders, Harris and Booker were among a handful of Democratic Senators to vote against a trio of federal spending bills in 2018, including an appropriations bill that ended a brief government shutdown and the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which provided funding to avoid yet another shutdown. The next month, they again voted against an omnibus spending bill that funded the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

The senators said at the time that they could not support spending bills that didn’t provide funding for DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Sanders also cited the bill’s increase in military spending.

Klobuchar voted for the bills, along with most Democrats. They ultimately passed with large margins and were signed into law. Across hundreds of votes shared between the five senators still in Congress, Klobuchar stands out. When other candidates have voted against the party line, she’s rarely joined them.

The rest of the candidates have more in common; Warren and Booker have only disagreed on 58 out of 1,604 shared votes.

In the Senate, two-thirds of the times when candidates disagreed in the past three years involved political nominees, including confirmations of Mike Pompeo as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce.

As the pace of campaigning for the Democratic nomination started to increase early this summer, so did the number of votes in disagreement with the majority of Democrats—and the number of missed votes. Explore the positions of the five senators in the race on more than 900 votes since January 2017.