By David Montgomery

St. Paul Pioneer Press

Speaking to an audience of Republican Party activists Saturday, Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt took a swing at his counterparts on the other side of the aisle.

“People (in 2012) believed that Republicans were extreme and Democrats were reasonable,” Daudt said — something he said was a false impression. “The Democrats I serve with in the Minnesota House are some of the most extreme, radical people you’ve ever met.”

The Republicans at the GOP’s State Central Committee meeting loved it. Democrats, not so much.

But is Daudt right?

As it happens, this is a question that goes beyond he-said, she-said. Political scientists have devised a number of tools to estimate lawmaker ideology, and to compare it across states.

This past summer, the Pioneer Press used one of these tools to estimate how liberal or conservative every single member of the Minnesota House of Representatives is. The findings? Both the DFL and GOP caucuses in the Minnesota House have a wide range of beliefs — and the DFL in particular has a big group of relative moderates:

On the scale where +1 is the most conservative and -1 is the most liberal, there are 13 Democrats with a score more moderate than -0.6, versus only four Republicans below +0.6.

But there are also plenty of House Democrats who are “extreme” for the Minnesota House, in terms of distance from the political center. There are 24 Democrats with a score greater than -0.8, and only 15 Republicans above +0.8. Overall, the median House Democrat (-0.75) is slightly more extreme than the median House Republican (+0.68), despite the faction of moderate DFLers.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the caucuses into arbitrary categories:

(If Daudt has commented about the extreme-ness of the Senate DFL, answers wouldn’t be so easy to find. That’s because the Minnesota Senate doesn’t release its vote data in an open format that enables these ideology estimates.)

Another data set can help us put this in context. Political scientists Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty have estimated ideologies for state legislatures around the country dating back decades. Unfortunately, the most recent version of their data only runs through 2014, so we can’t translate that directly to the 2015-16 Minnesota Legislature. The 2014 elections saw a number of rural Democrats lose, so it’s not implausible that the 2015-16 House DFL was slightly less moderate than the 2013-14 caucus, but we don’t have the numbers to say with confidence.

But Shor and McCarty’s data can let us compare Minnesota’s House to other states, and look at changes in time.

Here’s how the average ideology of the 2014 House DFL compared to the averages for other 2014 House Democratic caucuses, on a scale that runs roughly from -2 (most liberal) to +2 (most conservative):

The Minnesota House DFL was among the more liberal Democratic caucuses, but not nearly as “extreme” as, say, the California State Assembly.

But the 2014 Minnesota House GOP as also among the more extreme Republican caucuses, with even fewer states between them and the most extreme caucus than the House DFL had:

Here is what this looks like over time, plotting every state’s House caucus from 1996 to 2014, with Minnesota’s highlighted: Both Minnesota House caucuses have become more extreme since the mid-1990s, with the House DFL moving to the left by 0.91 points and the House GOP moving even further to the right by 0.248 points.