Is it possible to be a “moderate” Republican?

[MarkD]

Sure, it's possible. I have two lists of current Republican members of Congress whom I consider to be moderates.

Before I list them, I'll explain how I deemed them to be moderates. I judge the ideology of all members of Congress based on their approval scores from the American Conservative Union and the Americans for Democratic Action. I deem a Republican to be either conservative or moderate depending on their average approval score from ACU, and I deem a Democrat to be either liberal or moderate depending on the average approval score from ADA. I never use just a single year's score to decide what label I will give a member; I need to know their scores after they have served in Congress for at least two whole years. Neither ACU or ADA has yet published their scores for the members of Congress for the year 2020, so, for the lists below, I have excluded any current member who has started serving since March 2018 or later. For Senators who used to be members of the House, I include the average of all the scores they have ever gotten, including their scores from when they served in the House.

The ACU considers a member of Congress to be conservative if they get at least 80%. I myself use the number 76 instead as the cutoff point between a conservative and a moderate. So to me, any Republican who gets an average lower than 76.00% from ACU is moderate, and the rest of them are conservative.

Members of the House (in order of seniority): Don Young, Chris Smith, Fred Upton, Mike Simpson, Mario Diaz-Balart, Jeff Fortenberry, Vern Buchanan, Glenn Thompson, Tom Reed, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Bill Johnson, Mike Kelly, Adam Kinzinger, David McKinley, Steve Stivers, Steve Womack, Mark Amodei, Rodney Davis, David Joyce, Mike Bost, John Katko, John Moolenaar, Dan Newhouse, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, David Valadao, Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, Brian Mast, John Rutherford, Claudia Tenney.
(Some of the names surprise me, because they come from states that don't usually elect moderate Republicans. Mike Simpson is from Idaho, Jeff Fortenberry and Don Bacon are from Nebraska, and Steve Womack is from Arkansas, and you don't usually associate any of those states with moderate Republicanism. Fortenberry's career has been especially unusual, regarding his ACU scores, because he has clearly veered towards the center after starting out as a conservative. Fortenberry's scores from the ACU were always in the 80s and 90s for the first six years that he served in the House, but from 2011 on to the present, he has been consistently getting scores in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, for a career average of 73%. Simpson's scores have also been much lower in the last decade than they were earlier in his career.)

Members of the Senate (in order of seniority): Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Hoeven, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Rounds, Kevin Cramer.
(Special mention for Lindsey Graham, because he has been veering more towards the center in recent years than the way he started out. During the eight years he was in the House, and for the first 10 years he was in the Senate, he had an average ACU score of 89.6%. But for the years 2013 to 2019, inclusive, his scores have dropped way down, to an average of only 65.3%. This has brought his overall average for his entire career down to 82.8%. If he continues on the trajectory that he is currently on, his average may dip below 76% by the time he leaves the Senate.)

[MarkD]

(Special mention for Lindsey Graham, because he has been veering more towards the center in recent years than the way he started out. During the eight years he was in the House, and for the first 10 years he was in the Senate, he had an average ACU score of 89.6%. But for the years 2013 to 2019, inclusive, his scores have dropped way down, to an average of only 65.3%. This has brought his overall average for his entire career down to 82.8%. If he continues on the trajectory that he is currently on, his average may dip below 76% by the time he leaves the Senate.)

I've never seen a post so thoroughly disprove its own metric like this. Congrats!

Huh??

[MarkD]

Sure, it's possible. I have two lists of current Republican members of Congress whom I consider to be moderates.

Before I list them, I'll explain how I deemed them to be moderates. I judge the ideology of all members of Congress based on their approval scores from the American Conservative Union and the Americans for Democratic Action. I deem a Republican to be either conservative or moderate depending on their average approval score from ACU, and I deem a Democrat to be either liberal or moderate depending on the average approval score from ADA. I never use just a single year's score to decide what label I will give a member; I need to know their scores after they have served in Congress for at least two whole years. Neither ACU or ADA has yet published their scores for the members of Congress for the year 2020, so, for the lists below, I have excluded any current member who has started serving since March 2018 or later. For Senators who used to be members of the House, I include the average of all the scores they have ever gotten, including their scores from when they served in the House.

The ACU considers a member of Congress to be conservative if they get at least 80%. I myself use the number 76 instead as the cutoff point between a conservative and a moderate. So to me, any Republican who gets an average lower than 76.00% from ACU is moderate, and the rest of them are conservative.

Members of the House (in order of seniority): Don Young, Chris Smith, Fred Upton, Mike Simpson, Mario Diaz-Balart, Jeff Fortenberry, Vern Buchanan, Glenn Thompson, Tom Reed, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Bill Johnson, Mike Kelly, Adam Kinzinger, David McKinley, Steve Stivers, Steve Womack, Mark Amodei, Rodney Davis, David Joyce, Mike Bost, John Katko, John Moolenaar, Dan Newhouse, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, David Valadao, Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, Brian Mast, John Rutherford, Claudia Tenney.
- snip -

Members of the Senate (in order of seniority): Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Hoeven, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Rounds, Kevin Cramer.
- snip -

Now that ACU has published approval scores for the members of Congress for the year 2020, I can update this list. Sen. Mike Rounds just got an all-time high score of 86 for last year, which brings his average to a fraction over 76, which means I don't consider him a moderate any more (I think he'll continue to get scores over 76 in the next six years, so he probably will not return to being a moderate in my system). But now that we have a second year's score for Senators who were in their first full year as of 2019, I can add two other names to the list of moderate Republicans: Cindy Hyde-Smith got only 68 in 2019 and 78 in 2020, which averages out to be only 73, so she - technically - belongs on my list too. And Mitt Romney got 77 in 2019 and 59 in 2020, which averages out to only 68, making him a clear moderate too. A name I should have included above is Roger Marshall, who is a new Senator, but served four terms in the House before last year's Senate election, and who's average for the first three years was exactly 75.00. Now he has just gotten 76 last year, which means he is still a fraction below my cutoff of 76.00. The rest of the Senators I mentioned above - Collins, Murkowski, Hoeven, Capito, and Cramer - got scores no greater than 78 in 2020, and those numbers do not change where they stand in my system of determining the moderates.

There aren't any names in my list of House members who I will delete at this time, but I'll add these names: Troy Balderson, Anthony Gonzalez, Guy Reschenthaler, Pete Stauber, and Michael Waltz. I should probably add Jeff Van Drew as well, even though he's a party-switcher, because he got only a 24 score his first year, when he was a Democrat, and after he switched parties, he got only a 46 as a Republican.

So the Florida House delegation has 5 moderate Republicans, the Illinois delegation has 3, the Michigan delegation has 2, the Nebraska delegation has 2, the New York delegation has 5 (the other 3 Republican New Yorkers are new members of the House and don't have ACU scores yet),  the Ohio delegation has 6, the Pennsylvania delegation has 4, and the Washington delegation has 2. Also, the only Republicans from the states of Alaska, Nevada, and New Jersey are moderates.