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Political data analysis nonprofit State Navigate recently rolled out it’s much-anticipated South Carolina legislator ideology tracker.
Chaz Nuttycombe, the founder of State Navigate, told FITSNews he created his website to provide political “data aggregation, curation and creation” nationwide, although the nonprofit anticipates rolling out in select states this year as it continues to build out its technical capabilities.
On launch day, the site already aggregated an impressive array of political data including financial disclosures, roll call votes and voter demographic information. While in our studio promoting the site, Nuttycombe also spoke about a forthcoming controversial feature – legislator ideology tracking.
“I would say it’s a double-edged sword engraved into a Pandora’s box,” Nuttycombe said of the site’s ideological tracker. “The reason why it’s a double-edged sword is (that) people may have a kind of simple reading of… the methodology for calculating it.”
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(Click to view)
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The NOMINATE scaling method (an acronym for nominal three-step estimation) was developed by political scientists in the 1980s to visualize preferential choice data, particularly roll call votes in legislative bodies, and has been used to visualize congressional votes ever since. On NOMINATE graphs, the x-axis represents how often each legislator votes with their party against the other, while the y-axis uses party-splitting votes to measure intra-party divides unique to the chamber.
“I got into this ideology stuff when I was working on my political science degree at Virginia Tech,” Nuttycombe recalled, saying he became interested in the subject while writing his senior thesis studying the Freedom Caucus.
“It wasn’t the Freedom Caucus here, it was Freedom Caucus out west, because I mean, what you have in the divide between the Freedom Caucus and non-Freedom Caucus Republicans here in South Carolina is, of course, not just not unique, but it’s not that big compared to somewhere like Wyoming,” he said.
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“You can say, ‘oh, this, this person is the most liberal’ or ‘most conservative’ person in the legislature,” Nuttycombe added. “But that’s not saying that they are a liberal, right? It’s all in relation to one another within that chamber.”
In Wyoming, “Non-Freedom Caucus Republicans… pretty much look like Democrats,” Nuttycombe said.
“That’s not to say they’re liberal by any means,” he added. “It’s just relative.”
State Navigate data science committeeman and former International Monetary Fund economist Charlie Kramer emphasized the value in summarizing the complex and voluminous voting data produced by legislatures into easily understood graphs.
“You could easily have thousands of bills in a legislative session, and then you have the revised versions of it and the markups and the amendments and all that stuff,” Kramer said. “You could spend a year reading these things just to figure out who voted how on what, and what (W-NOMINATE) gives you is a really nice compact summary of that kind of thing.”
Like Nuttycombe, Kramer articulated the imperfections of the method, but argued it’s still ultimately a useful tool to visualize idealogical differences within legislative bodies.
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“And again, it’s not a perfect art – you really have to look at what comes out of it,” he said. “You really need an expert to look at it and go, ‘okay, does this make sense (or) does this require some tweaking,’ to understand what the assumptions are that go into it and say, ‘are any of these assumptions violated?”’
“That said, for what we’re doing, I think it produces pretty sensible-looking output for the most part,” Kramer added. “But you know, that’s not going to keep people from beating each other up about it.”
While the tool has only been out for a few days, the beatings have already begun.
“You’ve probably heard that South Carolina is a ‘deep red’ state… but when you look at how some of our so-called conservative legislators are voting, the truth gets murky,” a recent post from the York County Republican Party (YCGOP) noted. “Using a tool called W-NOMINATE from State Navigate, we can map how often each legislator votes with their own party – and how often they side with the other.”
The York County post commended state representative Jackie Terribile‘s conservative voting record, but called out other members of York County’s legislative delegation.
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Here are the York County House Republicans' scores:
— YCGOP SC (@YCGOP_SC) June 17, 2025
?? Brandon Guffey – 0.18?? Randy Ligon – 0.18?? Tommy Pope – 0.17?? Health Sessions – 0.14?? David Martin – 0.07
(The lowest GOP score in the state was 0.06.)
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Relative to their peers, the South Carolina state representatives least likely to break party ranks are Democratic representative Courtney Waters on the left and Freedom Caucus representative April Cromer on the right.
“I’m proud of my record, but rankings aren’t something I particularly strive for,” Cromer told FITSNews. “I’m here to represent the principles and beliefs of my district and this is indicative of those values.”
“If we all focused more on properly representing our people, rather than the theatrics and self-preservation, I believe we’d see all our members move in the right direction,” Cromer added.
Cromer’s Freedom Caucus peers can be seen scattered to the right of the main grouping of GOP representatives, whose dots are tightly clustered due to the effective whipping on party-line votes.
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The S.C. Senate is more loosely clustered than the House, with only three GOP senators standing out as being more willing to vote with Democratic senators than their colleagues. Senators Shane Martin of Spartanburg, Luke Rankin of Horry County (a “former” Democrat), and Tom Fernandez of Summerville all clustered well to the left of the main GOP grouping. No Democratic senators voted with Republicans frequently enough to stand out from their caucus.
Florence county senator Mike Reichenbach was most likely to vote with his fellow GOP representatives, while senator Overture Walker of Richland County voted most consistently with the upper chamber’s Democrats.
Fernandez defended his voting record in a statement to FITSNews.
“My job isn’t to mimic a party line,” he said. “It’s to represent the people who elected me. I stood firm against Dr. Edward Simmer’s nomination because I won’t reward pandemic-era overreach. I opposed bloated budgets that feed big government, abstained from judicial appointments driven by politics, and voted for a free market energy solution. If that places me to the left or right on a graph, great! It shows I don’t toe the line. I wasn’t sent to Columbia to blend in. I was sent to guard the Constitution and disrupt a system that too often protects itself instead of the people.”
While it’s up to the voters to assess Fernandez’s legislative record, he certainly cannot be credibly accused of blending in. FITSNews covered Fernandez’s recent high-profile delivery of a single-fingered salute (two single-fingered salutes) to anti-Trump protesters assembled in the S.C. Lowcountry last weekend.
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RELATED | SENATOR FLIPS OFF LIBERAL PROTESTERS
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“Voters deserve to know where their state legislators are ideologically, and our work provides that in a scientific and unbiased fashion,” Nuttycombe told FITSNews before previewing forthcoming features the State Navigate team have in development.
“We’re now turning our focus on the final big part of our state-level sites, again using South Carolina as a pilot: lists and profiles of legislators, committees, and bills.”
It’s clear that politicos across the Palmetto State are already tracking the fledgling site’s work. Count on FITSNews to continue to keep our readers up to date with the newest tools and tactics available to elected officials, political operatives and the citizens who hope to hold them accountable.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
(Via: Travis Bell)
Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.
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4 comments
“Chaz Nuttycombe”
Lives up to the nutty part of his name.
Are you kidding me? This is not science. It is a tool expressly used to reward extremism on both sides. Here’s an idea: get rid of both parties and vote for the person. For example, when the GOP party took control in SC, they begged conservative democrats to switch parties. Note, after being used to gain power the GOP peeps use it against former democrats. Oh well, that’s what they do. Bullshit. Now, they blast Sen. Rankin as a former democrat. Again, BULLSHIT! No one talks about the real enemies of the people, the POSERS. Just go talk to the people in the upstate who now the FREEDUMB Caucus peeps. I have made phone calls to friends there who know.
In the question at a press conference about RJ May, Rep. Pace got frustrated when asked about May’s current standing in the FREEDUMB Caucus after the raid. Cromer whispers to Pace, “UPSTANDING.” Seriously. They protect pedos. Total BULLSHIT. She should resign immediately. No more parties. No more dumbass caucuses. Cromer needs to admit how she has misled the people about who and what she is- an intellectual midget who married the class clown bc OOPS.
Spoken like a true “former” Democrat ;)
Had no idea you were a former democrat. Microlearning.