"Quiet Caucuses" / Congressperson Typology by 538/ABC News

In an era of razor-thin majorities in Congress, divides within each party are often the key to understanding congressional dynamics. But members' formal statements and the ideological caucuses they are part of (e.g., Problem Solvers Caucus, Freedom Caucus) don't tell the full story of how they vote and on what issues they're apt to break from the rest of their party from. With this in mind, “The 8 Types Of Democrats And Republicans In The House” used a custom algorithm to classify each House member into one of eight voting clusters based on an in-depth data analysis of House floor votes taken in 2023, and which members voted most similarly to which other members.

This analysis represents a new and unprecedented way to understand congressional voting behavior — for example, separating out lawmakers' behavior on partisan versus bipartisan votes. We found that moderates in both parties broke most often with their peers on partisan “messaging” amendments with no chance of becoming law, and that the overwhelming majority of House GOP leaders voted more closely with far-right obstructionists than with the more moderate majority of their party.

Beyond this, the analysis distills a very broad dataset (719 votes taken by 435 U.S. representatives) into an interactive data visualization. With the aim of engaging both close observers of Congress and readers who don't know Steve Scalise from Dean Phillips, this interactive allows readers to visualize and explore how members voted based on factors such as formal caucus membership, term length, ideological alignment (i.e., liberal/conservative and establishment/anti-establishment) and district partisanship (i.e., whether they represent a swing district or a safely Republican or Democratic district).

The data visualization helps illustrate, for example, how some members' voting records broke sharply with others in their formal caucuses, and how the longest-serving Republicans tend to be more moderate than their peers.

This work has the potential to deepen our collective understanding of party and partisan identities at a time where both are in flux, providing not just a detailed snapshot of the House ahead of the 2024 election, but a multifaceted dataset illustrating new correlations and contradictions between members' formal caucus memberships, public statements and voting records in a visually engaging and interactive way.