UPDATED: Democrat Mike McIntyre and his Republican rival are fighting about a political lightning rod: Nancy Pelosi.
David Rouzer claims McIntyre votes with Pelosi 90 percent of the time. McIntyre's supporters say definitively its "not true."
The problem: both sides' claims are only half true. As with many numbers in politics, it depends on how you count.
Rouzer's campaign and the TV ad cite Washington Post's congressional vote database for the figure. The newspaper's database shows McIntyre voted with the Democrats in the House (led by Pelosi) 92 percent of the time in the 110th Congress and 90 percent in the 111th Congress.
Rouzer only considers when Pelosi was speaker -- not the years before or the years after. But in the current 112th Congress, with Pelosi as Democratic leader, McIntyre sided with Democrats only 68 percent of the time. (It also appears at 69 percent on other pages.)
And if you put Pelosi head-to-head with McIntyre -- as a different website OpenCongress allows -- they agreed 67 percent of the time since January.
So in the end, Rouzer is citing the right numbers but picking a too-narrow window. And McIntyre's rebuttal ad ignores the fact that McIntyre does vote with Pelosi and Democrats about seven out of 10 times.
*A major caveat to all this courtesy of Open Congress: "All votes are weighted equally in this ranking, so a non-binding resolution honoring a collegiate sports team, for example, is considered equal to a vote on passing health care reform. Since the vast majority of the hundreds of votes factored in are routine in nature, the result is that even highly-independent senators have a seemingly high score on voting with their party. But it's the context that matters, and this ranking attempts to provide that. Obviously, this gives only a partial picture of the ideological spectrum."
Editor's note: This post was updated to correct a wrong date.
