STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.
Did GovTrack delete only Vice President Kamala Harris' 2019 report card, which rated her as the most liberal senator that year? No, that's not true: GovTrack told Lead Stories that it consolidated and deleted everyone's 2019 report card. Her 2020 report card, which covers two years, rated Harris as the second most liberal member of the Senate. Founder Joshua Tauberer said, "We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly Twitter, by X owner Elon Musk on July 25, 2024. The on-screen title was "GovTrack Removes Kamala Harris' Liberal Ranking." The post's caption says:
Literally as far left as it is possible to go!
They're trying so hard to erase the Internet lmao.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu July 25 16:01:40 2024 UTC)
The social media post by Musk provided no evidence to support its claim that GovTrack, which tracks data on members of Congress, deleted only the vice president's 2019 report card. Instead, Musk shared and amplified a trending topic (archived here) on X as compiled by its AI search assistant Grok. Trending topics may or may not be based on fact and come with this disclaimer:
This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.
This is what the trending topic looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu July 25 17:42:38 2024 UTC)
GovTrack
It's well documented that GovTrack's 2019 report card for Harris had her "Ranked most liberal compared to All Senators," archived here. It's also true that the website deleted her report card for that year, but GovTrack also removed everyone else's 2019 report card, too.
In a July 25, 2024, email to Lead Stories, GovTrack Founder Joshua Tauberer explained their rationale. He said:
Several years ago we discontinued creating new single-calendar-year 'report cards': We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators, particularly given the ebbs and flows of the legislative calendar, and therefore did not serve as a useful tool to our users and the American public. We subsequently took down the previously-published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason.
Other analyses that we have published should be used in place of those:
- On our main page for VP Harris, the same cosponsorship ideology analysis is presented based on her entire tenure in the Senate and is the most reliable cosponsorship ideology analysis relevant to your question: https://www.govtrack.us/
congress/members/kamala_ harris/412678 - Our biennial report cards based on complete two-year data for each Congressional session: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members (scroll down under Report Cards)
Tauberer told Lead Stories in a separate email that same day he "removed all the single calendar year report card pages for all legislators" on July 22, 2024. A day earlier, Joe Biden said he was stepping aside as the Democratic Party's nominee for president and then endorsed Harris.
Asked about the timing to delete the old report cards from GovTrack the day after Biden's decision, Tauberer said this in a July 26, 2024, email response to Lead Stories:
I made the change when I saw that attention was being directed to a part of our site that I had warned in 2020 was not reliable.
The GovTrack website's 2020 report cards, covering January 3, 2019, through Jan 3, 2021, still showed Harris as one of the most liberal members of the Senate, second only to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Harris' 2020 report card appears below:
(Source: GovTrack screenshot taken on Thu July 25 17:42:38 2024 UTC)
This is the last report card for Harris as a senator as she began her term as vice president on January 20, 2021. This is her GovTrack page as Biden's No. 2.
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At the time this was written, Check Your Fact and Wisconsin Watch had reviewed a related but not identical claim. The related claim had previously been reviewed by CNN in 2020.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about Kamala Harris can be found here.
Updates:
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2024-07-26T14:26:33Z 2024-07-26T14:26:33Z Adds context from GovTrack Founder Joshua Tauberer from a July 25, 2024, email to Lead Stories.
