Cage match: Casey Anderson vs Evan Vickers

Rep. Vickers and Sen. Anderson disagree relatively often for members of the same party.

Sen. Casey Anderson (R-Cedar City) was appointed last year to serve out the remainder of Sen. Dennis Stowell’s term after his death from cancer. Rep. Vickers (R-Cedar City) sought the appointment, but lost. With election time upon us, Rep. Vickers is challenging Sen. Anderson for the Republican nomination.

Neither has been in the legislature long. Sen. Anderson has served only a single year. Rep. Vickers has served four years in the Utah House. Although their service overlapped only in 2012, let’s take a quick look at their voting in 2012 to see what differences we find.

One caution: Since we’re comparing a representative to a senator, we can only compare their votes on the final version of bills that pass. I explained the reasons for this limitation the first time I compared a Senator’s record to a Representative’s. Long story short: This means we’re likely to underestimate the true amount of disagreement a little.

Rep. Vickers and Sen. Anderson disagree relatively often for members of the same party. They disagreed 11.1% of the time during the 2012 session.

Most often, it’s Rep. Vickers’s “yes” to Sen. Anderson’s “no.”

Anderson “yes” Anderson “no”
Vickers “yes” 382 29
Vickers “no” 9 2

Here’s the 9 bills where Sen. Anderson voted “yes” to Rep. Vickers’s “no”:

Here’s the 39 bills where Sen. Anderson voted “no” to Rep. Vickers’s “yes”:

Correction (April 3, 2012): A database error caused my query to omit roughly half of the votes held each year. The omitted votes were roughly random, so the general patterns aren’t much different here than originally reported (when viewed as percents). That is, we still find that disagreements are rare. The main change you’ll notice from this correction is that the raw numbers are higher. I now report roughly twice as many disagreements in 2012 as I reported previously, although the rate of disagreements is roughly the same (since I now report twice as many agreements, too).

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About Adam Brown

Adam Brown is an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University and a research fellow with the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. You can learn more about him at his website.
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