When empirical measures tell us something you don't want known.

From When media call Kamala Harris ‘centrist,’ it’s no wonder people hate the press by Quin Hillyer.  Kind of a whiney piece but they are not wrong and there is both substance and data in the article.  

The ludicrous establishment-media narrative portraying vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a “pragmatic moderate” or a “centrist” is a perfect example of the media’s abandonment of standards and integrity.

Even if political labels are somewhat subjective, there exist objective ways for "straight news" outlets to determine which labels to use, if they use such labels at all. Under none of those objective standards could Harris be ranked among anything other than the liberal edge of American elective politics.

Fair enough.  The Democrats do have a quandary.  While Harris is too right for many on their left-wing, she is pretty markedly left on a broad range of issues she has acted on or opined about over the years.  Is she perhaps the most radical? I am not sure about that, but certainly she is far to the left of most voters.

Having a far left VP is one issue but it is mightily compounded by Joe Biden's sharp move leftwards over the past year or two.  If he were running on his record of ten years ago, you might be able to call him a centrist.  And I do believe he is behaviorally oriented towards what any good Senator does - making compromises across the aisle in order to pass legislation.

But is the Joe Biden we are dealing with today, the same as the one we have been accustomed to?  His apparent cognitive decline raises at least some alarms; and not just for the sadness of his condition.  Our awareness of who is around him influencing his decisions becomes much more critical.  I suspect, and I suspect most people suspect, we are no longer dealing with the pragmatist, deal-making Biden of yore.  By his words and actions, he seems to be signaling a sharp move left.

Democrats have ended up with a hard left VP under a left-moving Presidential nominee. 

So it is easy to see why they and the press are gaslighting up a storm.  Enough even to accelerate climate change.   

Hillyer's point is that subjectively describing someone as left or right is for the amateurs.  We have objective measured proxies for left and right.  Why are the mainstream media not using these measures and instead relying on less precise descriptions?  Because the empirical measures put their candidates on the hard left cotinuum when they know the electorate is pretty centrist.  

Dozens of organizations use predictable criteria to “rank” elected officials on conservative-to-liberal scales. It is possible for anomalies to skew an official’s ideology over a short time period in ranking systems. But over time, some ranking systems establish themselves as reliable indices of the predilections of those officials. When all these systems — right, left, and scrupulously neutral — agree, reporters who apply labels in contradiction of these rankings are putting their integrity in hock.

The two best-established ranking systems for broad-based ideology — as opposed to single-subject rankings such as those for pro-abortion rights or anti-abortion groups, anti-government-spending groups, or whatever — are from the American Conservative Union on the right and Americans for Democratic Action on the left. The ACU gives Harris a puny lifetime rating of 3 (with 0 being far Left and 100 being far Right). The ADA reports that except when she has missed votes altogether, Harris has a perfect liberal rating.

We can argue about how good the measured proxies are as a predictor of a politician's future behaviors, but these are long established and monitored measures.  There is nothing quixotic or unusual about these measurement systems.  So why hide them?

As for Biden, ACU gives him a score of 15-20 for his years in the Senate.