Tennessee and Indiana tied for the second most-conservative group of state lawmakers in 2021 during a “new level of political polarization,” according to the Center for Legislative Accountability (CLA), a conservative think tank.
The group released findings of a new study last month that reviewed votes from all 7,400 of the country’s state lawmakers from all 50 states. This covered more than 265,000 votes on about 3,500 bills introduced in state legislatures.
In 2021, Tennessee’s GOP-controlled House and Senate was just barely less conservative than top-ranking Alabama. Tennessee’s lawmakers voted “with the conservative position” (as CLA puts it) 73 percent of the time. Alabama topped the state by one percentage point with 74 percent.
The CLA tracked dozens of bills in the Nashville Capitol that year, everything from bills regulating art therapists and homemade food to teaching Critical Race Theory and carrying guns without a permit.
The CLA’s highest (most conservative) score went to Sen. Paul Bailey (R-Sparta) who voted by CLA’s definition of conservative 87 percent of the time. Former Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), awaiting sentencing after a conviction on election fraud charges, scored 85 percent. The lowest-ranking lawmaker (19 percent) in 2021 was Sen. Katrina Robinson (D-Memphis) who lost her seat after wire-fraud convictions in 2021.
Tennessee lawmakers score well on the issues of elections, property rights, education, law, and personal liberty. Their weakest issues are energy and environment and taxes, budget, and spending.
While the state tied for second in 2021, it ranks at the top of the list for all of the years CLA has been collecting this data.
Nationally, the CLA report found the nation’s 3,906 Republican state lawmakers voted conservatively nearly 81 percent of the time, up from 76 percent in 2021. The nation’s 3,223 Democratic state lawmakers voted conservatively about 16 percent in 2021, down from nearly 19 percent in 2020.
“The 64.99 percentage point divide between the two political parties marks the highest level of political polarization since the CLA became the first and only organization to track such data in 2015,” reads the CLA report.
The CLA report said the least conservative state houses can be found in Massachusetts, Hawaii, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland.
The CLA is a project of CPAC Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation.