GovTrack rated Kamala Harris 'most liberal' U.S. senator in 2019 but webpage has disappeared

GovTrack, which tracks voting records of House and Senate lawmakers, removed a 2019 webpage that ranked then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as the “most liberal” U.S. senator in 2019 at some point between the evening of July 8 Eastern time and July 23 of this year.

Social media users have posted that the page was still live on July 22 but GovTrack has not confirmed the exact date the page was removed.

The original link to the page leads to a “Page Not Found” error. The last person to share the link to the original on X without noting its removal was mid-afternoon Wednesday.

The website rated Harris the “most liberal compared to all senators” in 2019. Harris became vice president in January 2021.

"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," GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer told Just the News Thursday when asked about the timing of the removal, while noting that all senators' 2019 report cards remained saved in the Internet Archive.

He pointed to his comments to The Washington Post in 2020 when the report card was getting attention after candidate Joe Biden chose Harris for his ticket.

"Obviously our analysis is at odds with what other serious analysis of Harris’s career has found, and I think the short answer is that both things can be true: She can both be sponsoring/co-sponsoring left-leaning legislation, something with typically little risk, while also being pragmatic when push comes to shove on risky and impactful decisions," Tauberer said then.

"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 so stopped creating new report cards and "subsequently took down the previously-published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason," he told Just the News.

Visitors to its site should instead consult its Vice President Harris page, which presents "the same cosponsorship ideology analysis ... based on her entire tenure in the Senate," Tauberer said, also recommending its "biennial report cards based on complete two-year data for each Congressional session."