James Abdnor, former Senator from South Dakota

Dates	Title	Representing
1981-1986	Senator	South Dakota
1973-1980	Representative	South Dakota's 2^nd District

Sponsorship Analysis

Abdnor was a lonley far-right Republican follower according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship from Abdnor’s time serving in the Senate.

Use this chart to compare Abdnor to other members of the Senate in the 99^th Congress on leadership and ideology.

This chart is based on principal components analysis for ideology and PageRank for leadership. See analysis methodology.

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Some of Abdnor’s most recently sponsored bills include...

View All » (including bills from previous years)

Voting Record

From Jan 1981 to Oct 1986, Abdnor missed 41 of 2,360 roll call votes, which is 1.7%. This is better than the median of 5.7% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Oct 1986. The chart below reports missed votes over time.

Show the numbers...

Time Period	Votes Elligible	Missed Votes	Percent	Percentile
1981 Jan-Mar	57	2	3.5%	61^st
1981 Apr-Jun	124	1	0.8%	25^th
1981 Jul-Sep	122	1	0.8%	21^st
1981 Oct-Dec	192	3	1.6%	11^th
1982 Feb-Mar	77	0	0.0%	0^th
1982 Apr-Jun	127	7	5.5%	59^th
1982 Jul-Sep	176	5	2.8%	46^th
1982 Oct-Dec	86	0	0.0%	0^th
1983 Feb-Mar	54	1	1.9%	37^th
1983 Apr-Jun	121	0	0.0%	0^th
1983 Jul-Sep	92	1	1.1%	18^th
1983 Oct-Nov	101	3	3.0%	27^th
1984 Jan-Mar	45	1	2.2%	25^th
1984 Apr-Jun	144	5	3.5%	28^th
1984 Jul-Sep	68	0	0.0%	0^th
1984 Oct-Oct	35	2	5.7%	47^th
1985 Jan-Mar	22	1	4.5%	55^th
1985 Apr-Jun	116	0	0.0%	0^th
1985 Jul-Sep	60	0	0.0%	0^th
1985 Oct-Dec	183	4	2.2%	27^th
1986 Jan-Mar	51	0	0.0%	0^th
1986 Apr-Jun	102	4	3.9%	64^th
1986 Jul-Sep	149	0	0.0%	0^th
1986 Oct-Oct	56	0	0.0%	0^th

Primary Sources

The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including:

Congressional Biographical Directory for elected positions
United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 by Howard L. Rosenthal and Keith T. Poole.
Martis’s “The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress”, via Keith Poole’s roll call votes data set, for political party affiliation for Members of Congress from 1789 through about year 2000
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress for the photo
THOMAS, for sponsored bills