The Senate's new math

Politics | The U.S. Senate will become a much more conservative place next year, but Democrats still hold enough seats to cause trouble for the White House | Bob Jones

From 0 to 84 in the blink of an eye. That's what will happen to the conservative ratings of one Senate seat from North Carolina when Richard Burr is sworn in to replace John Edwards in January of 2005. Mr. Edwards, the Democrats' former vice presidential candidate, managed to score a perfect 0 on the 2004 scorecard published by the Christian Coalition. That means he voted against a family-values position on the six issues—from abortion to abstinence to judicial nominations—deemed most important by the Coalition this year.

His successor, on the other hand, voted "right" 84 percent of the time on the most important family-values issues to come up in the House of Representatives. Transferring those conservative instincts to the Senate will result in the kind of left-to-right shift that might happen once a decade—except that this year it's happening again and again.