VAPLAN’s 2025 Virginia General Assembly Scorecard Is Out; There Are Some Surprises and Some Significant Differences with W-Nominate’s Scores

The much-anticipated VAPLAN scorecard for the 2025 Virginia General Assembly session is now available. Great work as always to Cindy, both for putting together this scorecard and – just as importantly – keeping close track of what’s going on with the General Assembly AND informing the public. Thanks!

With that, here are a few things that jumped out at me.

• Sen. Lamont Bagby went from #15 last year to #1 this year; Danica Roem jumped from #14 last year to #3 this year; Sen. Adam Ebbin went from #12 last year to #2 this year. What changed between the last session and this session? Not sure, but in general, I’d expect to see a relatively progressive or relatively conservative State Senator stay fairly consistent from year to year, maybe move up or down a few spots, but no big movements. Not sure what’s up in these cases.
• Two Democratic State Senators (Aaron Rouse and Ghazala Hashmi) are running for Lt. Governor; they’re ranked #9 and #6, respectively, both strong progressive scores.
• Not surprisingly, far-right-extremist Sen. Mark Obenshain ranks as the *least* progressive (e.g., most conservative) member of the State Senate, with some other really right-wingnuts (e.g., Bill DeSteph, Mark Peake, Bryce Reeves, etc.) also towards the bottom of the list.
• Glen Sturtevant, who’s morphed from a relatively mild-mannered “moderate” Republican into a MAGA firebrand, at least rhetorically, surprisingly ranked in VAPLAN as one of the LEAST conservative Republicans in the Virginia State Senate. That honestly makes little if any sense to me…the guy’s a total right wingnut, period. Luther Cifers is also very surprising, as I expected he’d be towards the bottom, based on his hard-right views. (In contrast, W-Nominate ranked both these guys as among the most conservative in the State Senate)
• Sen. Jeremy McPike is in a solid-blue district, yet according to the VAPLAN 2025 scorecard, ranked *last* among Senate Democrats in his progressive score?  That’s surprising and striking – and kind of hard to understand. Similarly, Sen. Louise Lucas is in an overwhelmingly blue district, but ranked #20 on the VAPLAN scorecard? Got me. And Sen. Mamie Locke ranked #18 on the VAPLAN scorecard, while also representing a deep-blue district? Again, I’m kinda baffled. (and again, there are some major differences between VAPLAN and W-Nominate)
• In the House of Delegates, I’m definitely NOT surprised that Del. Nick Freitas ranked dead last on the VAPLAN scorecard, because he’s as far right as you can get, pretty much, without being a member of the Alternative fur Deutschland party, lol. Thank goodness Abigail Spanberger (narrowly) defeated Freitas in 2020 for U.S. House in VA07, or we’d have another John McGuire, Ben Cline, etc. in there – and that would really suck. Also not surprising: VA House GOP Leader and former Speaker Todd Gilbert, who’s super right wing, ranks #98.
• Some of the LEAST-conservative-ranking House Republicans are, unsurprisingly, in “purple”/competitive districts: Carrie Coyner (Kamala Harris won this district by 6 points), Ian Lovejoy (Kamala Harris won this district by 1 point), Kim Taylor (Kamala Harris won this district by 4 points). We’ll see if these delegates’ relatively “moderate” voting records help save them in November…but they really shouldn’t, as these delegates are far worse than a Democrat would be.
• According to this scorecard, the most-progressive delegates are generally in deep-blue districts: Elizabeth Bennett-Parker (D-Alexandria), Rozia Henson (D-Prince William/Fairfax), Katrina Callsen (D-Charlottesville), Adele McClure (D-Arlington), etc. On the other hand, there are Democrats in deep-blue districts who are towards the lower end of the progressive rankings among Democrats, like Del. Luke Torian (D-Prince William), Del. Delores McQuinn (D-Henrico), etc. Not sure if that’s just something about the way VAPLAN does its rankings or if anything more fundamental is going on here.
• Compare VAPLAN’s scores to the W-Nominate scores from Chaz Nuttycombe: Luther Cifers is in the top-5 most-conservative Senate Republicans in W-Nominate, but that’s not the case in VAPLAN’s scorecard; Glen Sturtevant is also in the top-5-most-conservative Senate Republicans in W-Nominate, but again that isn’t the case in VAPLAN’s scorecard; Mamie Locke is the most-liberal State Senator in W-Nominate, again a big contrast with VAPLAN. So yes, there’s decent overlap between the two methodologies, but also some striking differences. It would be interesting to know more about why this is the case…

So what jumps out at you? There’s a lot of information here, so definitely check it out.

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Every year VAPLAN’s legislative tracking culminates in a scorecard, ranking legislators from most “progressive” to least, across policy areas. We score votes on dozens of bills, both in committees and on the floor, to determine the ranking. It’s messy and imperfect as any measure would be, but the methodology has been fairly consistent for the eight years we’ve been delivering it. Without further ado, here it is! (Full spreadsheet here.)

Methodology notes and caveats

• We have used approximately the same methodology for the 8 years we’ve done the scorecard: legislators score a +1 on a bill if their final vote (either in committee if the bill died there, or on the floor just before it passed or died for the last time) matches what we consider a progressive vote. They receive -1 if their vote disagrees, and 0 if they never cast a vote on it.
  • We include both committee and floor votes because lots of the most important bills don’t get to the floor, with the important work happening in committee.
• Legislators also can earn (or lose) a point for being the patron or co-patron of a good (or bad) bill.
• We divide by the number of bills the legislator could have cast a vote on. This reduces–but does not eliminate unfortunately–the bias of who sits on which committee.
• Beginning a couple years ago, we also added or removed a point for a bill that a committee chair did not docket (+1 for not docketing a bad bill, -1 for not docketing a good bill).
  • This year in particular, there was some unexplained weirdness going on between House Democrats and Senate Democrats that resulted in good bills being killed for no obvious reason. I admit we have a low tolerance for that, so we definitely included many of those bills.
• Bills were selected to cover as wide a range of policy issues as possible, as many committees and subcommittees as possible, and with emphasis on bills that separate out legislators within their party.
• Finally, if you’re interested in perusing the voting data, or doing analysis of your own, LIS has recently added features that make it much easier to track a legislator’s votes (follow the links above). Additionally, we at VAPLAN would be lost without the great work of our good friends at recordedvote.org who have a great database for tracking legislation, and for identifying dissenting votes, close votes, votes by committee etc.