Is Your NH State Rep Part of "The 96% Club"?
Answer: If they are a Republican, there is a 7-in-8 chance the answer is "Yes".
Good afternoon! As you’ll see below, I’ve been working on a mini-project over the last several days that I hope many of you will find interesting and (just as importantly!) useful politically.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series I’m writing over the next week, using the McCain Rating System I recently developed to help answer questions activists and advocacy groups have been asking me over the past several months. My work started as thinking of this as a tool to improve advocacy work in the near term, but as you’ll see below, it has evolved into more of an electoral tool for this fall and beyond.
In the meantime, this sort of work takes a lot of time, focus, and energy. For those of you who are already paid subscribers, thank you! For those of you who are enjoying my work (whether this Substack, my audio and video podcasts, live events, or other offerings), but have not yet become paid subscribers, I hope you’ll consider doing so today.
It’s only $8/month, or $80/year (some of you have joined at the Founders Level of $150 or higher, which is immensely helpful), and it really allows me to carve out the time needed to focus on this research and analysis. I then use this work in my events and meetings with local and regional Democratic committees, downballot candidates, and activists and advocacy groups. Paid subscribers really make this all possible. You also get unique benefits - for example, in this post, paid subscribers get access to my full, updated list of all GOP House members McCain scores, including raw data and percentages.
Thank you again for reading, and I hope you enjoy this three-part mini-series!
Earlier this month, I introduced a new analytical tool, The McCain Rating System, designed to try to identify patterns of GOP House members who, on specific types of bills, are willing to buck their own party in sufficient numbers that maybe the right kind of surgical work by center-left advocacy groups could make a difference in the outcome of those bills.
At the time I introduced McCain, just over 100 roll calls had been recorded which met my criteria for inclusion in this work: Bills where there were pretty obvious “Republican” and “Democratic” positions.
Throughout the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions, the GOP majorities have been large enough (about 40 seats), and the number of defectors on any given bill small enough, to seemingly allow the GOP to get through virtually anything they really want.
In my conversations and events, center-left and progressive advocacy groups and activists have obviously noticed this, and have increasingly toggled between frustration, anger, and discouragement. Is there anything different we (the collective Democratic/progressive/center-left “we”) could be doing?
This was the impetus for the McCain Rating System research. The questions I was trying to answer included:
Which GOP House members are the most and least likely to depart from the dominant GOP position?
How many Republicans have a relatively independent voting record? Is this number big enough to even matter at the moment?
Are there certain silos of issues where the number of independent-minded Republican House members is particularly high or low?
The goal of all of this was, I hypothesized, to be able to go to activists and advocacy groups and provide answers to these questions. In all the years I’ve managed, consulted, or worked on campaigns and causes, or been the candidate, I’ve learned this about volunteers and activists: I’ve never lost a volunteer because we overworked them; rather, you lose volunteers from either underworking them or malworking them.
Most activists are mission driven. They could be doing good work on any number of worthy causes (political or otherwise), so they want to know the work (or the money, or the focus) they are giving is connecting to outcomes. Are things going to get better because of the work I am doing, and the efforts of this organization or candidate? If you lose that connection of inputs to outcomes, you eventually degrade the mission driven culture critical to success.
I’ve now updated the data for all GOP House members through all roll call votes in 2026 (under my criteria, that takes it to over 160 such votes). Paid subscribers will be able to access the full data set below the paywall. (Please consider becoming a paid monthly ($8/month) or annual ($80/year) subscriber today. It is the support of paid subscribers which allows me the time to do the research and subsequent writing that strengthens the state’s Democratic infrastructure.)
What have I found in the course of updating this research? Here are three findings, plus some next steps:
Finding #1: There generally aren’t enough “renegades” in the GOP (with a few notable exceptions) to stop the House GOP from doing what it wants in the near term.
You never have full attendance in the House (that’s an effect of a 400-member legislative body!), but the GOP majority is typically 30+ on a given session day in 2026. Of the 160 bills with a roll call in this data set, 149 of them had enough Republican support to overcome even a unanimous Democratic opposing position.
To put it in mathematical terms, it comes down to this: On most votes, the GOP majority is sufficiently big to act as a firewall against GOP defections. Consider this graph:
As you can see above, in 136 of the 160 roll call votes used to calculate the McCain Score, seven or fewer GOP House members vote against the dominant Republican position. That 85% of all relevant roll call votes. In fact, in 24% of these votes, zero Republicans voted against the dominant position.
In a few cases on the far right of the graph, you’ll see large levels of defections (44 and 49, in two cases), but a final result that aligned with the Republican position. In those cases, key votes during the process went the Democrats’ way, but the final vote (for example, to kill a successfully-amended bill) ended up falling the GOP’s way.
Later this week, I’ll publish a piece about the 11 bills that had sufficient defections to end up going the Democrats’ way, but suffice it to say that there is surprising diversity of policy areas within those 11 bills. Probably the highest profile of the 11 was HB675, originally written to impose a per pupil spending cap on school districts. At a key moment in that process, 22 Republicans joined 159 Democrats to pass a key amendment (182-173) that had the effect of killing the bill. If there is a most common theme among the 11 bills, it is probably strong “local control” advocacy.
Finding #2: The number of GOP House members willing to zig when their caucus zags with any regularity can be counted on two hands…literally.
In my introductory piece about the McCain Rating System, I highlighted both the top and bottom of the scoring list. Since then, with dozens of additional roll call votes added to the data set, a few GOP reps have fallen below 10% independence, which means there are currently 10 Republican House members who are voting against the dominant position of their caucus more than 9% of the time:
Reps. Bridle and Boyd are in theoretically the most precarious districts in a 2026 election cycle increasingly looking very bullish for Democrats. Both Hampton and Merrimack are deep in the competitive zone in my latest Partisan Voter Index ratings, with Hampton projected at D+0.35 (the first time it is projected to vote more Democratic than the state overall in more than a generation), and Merrimack at R+1.90 (and moving towards becoming a blue-performing town as fast as any community in the state).
It is somewhat surprising to see some very Republican-performing districts on this list, such as Hampstead and Salem. These incumbents (if they run again in 2026) are likely more at risk to their right (in a primary) than towards the center (in a general).
Finding #3: The number of House GOP members who vote with their party at least 96% of the time - in an election cycle where the GOP brand is taking a hit - is pretty stunning.
With the House and Senate reaching “Crossover Week”, when all bills that are going to pass one of the two bodies must make their way over to the other legislative body, there were a lot of roll call votes in the House over the past few weeks.
This has allowed me to compile a rich database of 160 roll call votes that meet the criteria described above. It also means that the McCain scores are getting pretty “baked in” now - the denominator is sufficiently big that nobody’s score is likely to change a whole lot between now and the end of the legislative session in a few months.
I’ll keep updating it, but one finding that surprised me a bit was just how large a percentage of the caucus sticks with the party line virtually or literally all of the time:
In 160 included roll call votes, over a fifth of the caucus has never voted against the dominant GOP position. In fact, seven out of every eight GOP House members have voted party line at least 96% of the time.
This includes House members in some of 2026’s most competitive districts in the state - places like Bedford, Merrimack, Manchester, Nashua, Wolfeboro, Goffstown, and Hollis.
So what did I take away from this information?
The reality is that on most bills, on most policy areas, with almost all GOP House members, Democrats can’t really rely on meaningful numbers of Republicans to cross the aisle on a given vote. However, as you’ll read in Parts 2 and 3 this week:
We can learn a little bit about where the opportunities might exist by taking a look at the 11 bills (out of 160) where GOP crossover votes did make the difference.
Perhaps more importantly, I concluded from the work thus far that this data provides a potentially powerful communications tool for this fall’s critical downballot elections. I started this analysis thinking of how it could be used between now and late May. Now, though? Its utility is much more obvious for November as an election tool than a legislative tool. Which is probably just as well, because as the calendar flips to April tomorrow, for New Hampshire Democrats, changing the math of this situation comes down to one thing: Winning more downballot elections.
For paid subscribers, below, you’ll find the complete, updated data for all 216 House Republicans through March 31st, including McCain Scores, number of votes, and their districts.