My first piece on Saturday exploring the key votes identified by our Chris earlier in the year suggested that the numbers might be worth mining.

Further work has indeed brought up one or two things of interest.

The purpose, be it said, of these inquiries is not mere academic interest: if, as we all expect, the Dems take control of the 110th House, a key factor in their success - and their chances of extending their franchise - will be how much solidarity the Dem leadership can command on key votes.

There's more...

Given the imminence of the expected Dem win in the House, I thought I'd take another look at the way in which the various groups of Dem reps cast their votes in the key votes which Chris identified back in April in his 'Building a Real House Majority' piece - which formed the basis of my first look at the way minorities in the Dem House party regularly sided with the GOP on key votes, sometimes to the extent of being the difference between bills passing or not.

In the light of recent controversy over the way a Dem-controlled 110th, I thought I'd see what clues the performance of the Dems in the 109th might provide.

So I've been doing a fair bit of spreadsheeting - which, unfortunately, I have no place to put online right now!

Spreadsheets need to be shuffled and cut a fair bit to yield their goodness; but first indications are interesting.

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Two questions commonly asked about the Congress are How liberal is a particular MC? and How effective is a particular party?

These questions are asked, explicitly or implicitly, hundreds of times a day (if not more) in the lefty sphere!

The information most relevant to quantitative answers to the questions is the roll call votes cast by MCs. Each MC will have the chance to cast around 300 such votes a year, a sampling of opinion at a frequency and level of detail not available from voters.

There's more...