Paul Tsongas, former Senator from Massachusetts

Dates	Title	Representing
1979-1984	Senator	Massachusetts
1975-1978	Representative	Massachusetts's 5^th District

Sponsorship Analysis

Tsongas was a far-left Democratic leader according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship from Tsongas’s time serving in the Senate.

Use this chart to compare Tsongas to other members of the Senate in the 98^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 Tsongas’s most recently sponsored bills include...

S. 3071 (98th): Agency for Technological Innovation Act of 1984
S. 2917 (98th): A bill to confer citizenship posthumously on Corporal Wladyslaw Staniszewski
S. 2831 (98th): A bill for the relief of Fung-Ming Wong.
S.Con.Res. 128 (98th): A concurrent resolution expressing the sense of the Congress that the Union ...
S. 2811 (98th): United States Skills Corporation Act
S.J.Res. 326 (98th): A joint resolution to readmit Georgia Tavoularis Moser to status and privileges ...
S.J.Res. 316 (98th): A joint resolution designating the week of September 30 through October 6, ...

View All » (including bills from previous years)

Voting Record

From Feb 1979 to Oct 1984, Tsongas missed 275 of 2,670 roll call votes, which is 10.3%. This is worse than the median of 6.5% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Oct 1984. The chart below reports missed votes over time.

Show the numbers...

Time Period	Votes Elligible	Missed Votes	Percent	Percentile
1979 Feb-Mar	32	0	0.0%	0^th
1979 Apr-Jun	121	11	9.1%	66^th
1979 Jul-Sep	170	14	8.2%	59^th
1979 Oct-Dec	184	9	4.9%	32^nd
1980 Jan-Mar	67	1	1.5%	17^th
1980 Apr-Jun	216	13	6.0%	39^th
1980 Jul-Sep	178	21	11.8%	78^th
1980 Oct-Dec	84	23	27.4%	84^th
1981 Jan-Mar	57	9	15.8%	94^th
1981 Apr-Jun	124	4	3.2%	49^th
1981 Jul-Sep	121	30	24.8%	99^th
1981 Oct-Dec	190	27	14.2%	86^th
1982 Feb-Mar	77	1	1.3%	31^st
1982 Apr-Jun	127	15	11.8%	82^nd
1982 Jul-Sep	176	13	7.4%	77^th
1982 Oct-Dec	86	4	4.7%	67^th
1983 Feb-Mar	54	4	7.4%	65^th
1983 Apr-Jun	121	10	8.3%	75^th
1983 Jul-Sep	92	5	5.4%	57^th
1983 Oct-Nov	101	4	4.0%	36^th
1984 Jan-Mar	45	10	22.2%	85^th
1984 Apr-Jun	144	23	16.0%	88^th
1984 Jul-Sep	68	24	35.3%	97^th
1984 Oct-Oct	35	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