GovTrack, an organization that tracks congressional election records, confirmed to Fox News Digital that it has taken down a 2019 webpage that ranked Kamala Harris as the year’s “most liberal” US senator two weeks ago.
A self-described “government transparency website” scored Harris as the “most liberal of all senators” in 2019, ahead of then-Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
But a web page with the rankings, which is widely discussed in news reports during the 2020 election, was recently activated. The link now displays a “Page Not Found” message. The Internet Archive shows the page was removed between July 10 and July 23, and some on X claim the page was still up on July 22.
President Biden announced his decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee on July 21. Harris announced early on July 23 that he had won enough delegates to lock in the nomination at the DNC next month.
MONTAGE: THE LIBERAL MEDIA TRYING TO AVOID KAMALA HARRIS’ BORDER RESPONSIBILITY
Vice President Kamala Harris was once the ‘most liberal’ US senator. (REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt/Pool)
When reached by Fox News Digital, GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer said the page was removed because the company implemented a policy “several years ago” to end one-year ratings of lawmakers in favor of only rating them based on Congressional sessions, which are two years.
“We determined that the limited data available for one year is not enough to create a reliable picture of legislative activity, especially due to changes in the legislative calendar, and therefore it is not a useful tool for users and the American public,” said Tauberer. “Furthermore we excluded the previously published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason.”
Tauberer confirmed to Fox News Digital that the page was removed within the past two weeks, but did not provide a specific date or address as to why the page was not removed when the one-year report card was left last year.
Tauberer said the organization still publishes a report card based on the two-year congressional session and pointed Fox News Digital to Harris’ existing 2020 webpage, which lists his ideology as “the most politically left-wing compared to Senate Democrats” for the 116th Congress. second liberal in the entire Senate after Independent Sanders.
At some point in October 2020, GovTrack changed the ranking language from “most liberal” to “most politically left.”
The group’s analysis was based on the senators’ “legislative behavior” and records of sponsoring or supporting bipartisan bills, which it said “captures only a small aspect of reality.”
An analysis in 2019 showed that Harris joined bipartisan legislation “most often compared to Senate Democrats.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris attends an infrastructure event targeting high-speed internet in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington, US, June 3, 2021. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
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The Trump campaign cited the rating after Biden announced Harris as his 2020 running mate, again rejecting a New York Times feature that described Harris as a “pragmatic moderate”.
“Warning: GovTrack ranks Senator Kamala Harris as the most liberal member of the US Senate in 2019, further to the left than Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and even Bernie Sanders,” the campaign sent in an August 2020 email. “Kamala Harris is a radical left-wing liberal , despite what the New York Times says.”
Harris’ 2019 ratings are back under scrutiny this week after Biden endorsed Harris as his successor on Sunday, releasing a bombshell letter telling the American public that he was responding to repeated calls to suspend his re-election campaign.
Harris confirmed that he would seek the Democratic nomination, writing in a statement, “I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my goal is to earn and win this nomination.”
President Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement for the November election. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
As Harris heads toward the Democratic nomination, his allies in the media now suggest it’s unfair to pin the illegal immigration issue on him.
Axios was particularly grilled on Wednesday over a piece insisting Harris was not a “border czar” that seemed to contradict earlier reports. The outlet was even forced to update the story by admitting that it was “wrong” to call him a “frontier tsar” in the past.
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Harris has received endorsements from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and former Speaker Nancy PelosiD- Calif.
Brooke Singman and Brian Flood of Fox News contributed to this report.
