A group of liberal advocacy organizations for the first time released combined legislative scorecards this week, conglomerating assessments of the 100 Colorado lawmakers’ votes last session on key legislation the organizations said they plan to present to voters next year. A Republican who received among the lowest overall scores, however, dismissed the endeavor as a “political stunt” and told Colorado Politics he doubts the predictable rankings – Democrats good, Republicans bad – give voters any meaningful information.

The scorecards issued by the eight groups – concerned with labor, education, immigration, the environment, abortion rights, LGBT issues, health care and issues involving women and families – are nothing new, but combining them into a master score for each legislator is, said ProgressNow Colorado Executive Director Ian Silverii, whose group facilitated the release.

“The organizations releasing scorecards today work on behalf of an overwhelming majority of Coloradans who want to see their leaders fight for a fairer, more just, and vibrant Colorado,” Silverii said in a conference call with reporters to discuss the results. “Coloradans can use these scorecards to evaluate whether lawmakers voted in support of the issues they care most about or put the far-right fringe and wealthy special interests first.”

The participating groups included the Colorado AFL-CIO, the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition Action Fund, Conservation Colorado, NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, One Colorado, Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado and the Women’s Lobby of Colorado.

State Rep. Justin Everett, a Littleton Republican and a candidate for state treasurer, laughed when told how close he ranked to the bottom on the overall scorecard – he was one of the four House Republicans who had the lowest scores in the entire General Assembly – but shrugged off the potential impact.

“It’s the extreme, far left and their messaging, and they wanted to make sure it fit their narrative,” he said, suggesting that the coalition didn’t invite some nominally progressive groups that hadn’t scored Republicans so harshly or might have given poor ranks to Democrats. (Silverii told Colorado Politics that hadn’t happened, although he noted that ProgressNow Colorado hadn’t coordinated the groups for the combined scorecard.)

“Look, over the past three decades,” Everett said, “they’ve been cultivating these groups with political names that exist to push their extreme political agenda. They’ve had a disproportionate influence in the Legislature.”

And while he consistently finds himself on top when the conservative Principles of Liberty scorecard is released, Everett maintained that he doesn’t take the ubiquitous bill-scoring into account when he considers legislation.

Still, he said, these scorecards tend to yield predictable results – “maybe you have a few outliers with some liberal Republicans who are barely Republicans,” he said – and don’t do much more than confirm who belongs to which party.

“I think they’ll try to use this against candidates in the upcoming election,” he added, “but I think it’ll fall on deaf ears because they’re picking and choosing who they’re going to include in their rankings.

But Silverii argued that the reports were indeed meaningful, helping voters cut through the dizzying thicket of hundreds of votes on all manner of topics.

“There were consistent themes throughout all of the scorecards,” he said. “While there were important compromises on critical issues this session, the Republican-controlled state Senate killed many other important bills that would have greatly helped Colorado’s economy, environment, and public health.”

In all, 43 Democratic lawmakers – all but 12 of the 55 total Democrats in the General Assembly – wound up with scores of 99 or 100 on the aggregated scorecards. Just four Republicans scored in single digits: Tim Leonard had the lowest score of all, with 7, while Everett and his fellow state Reps. Kim Ransom and Stephen Humphrey scored 8. State Sen. Tim Neville, with a score of 10, had the lowest rating in the Senate.

Not a single Republican scored higher than any Democrat, although a few of the outliers – the higher-scoring Republicans and the lower-scoring Democrats – came within shouting distance of one another.

While there were substantial differences which bills were scored between the two chambers  – plenty of bills that started in the Democratic-controlled House didn’t come up for votes in the Republican-controlled Senate, and vice versa, so were only scored in their chamber of origin – averaging so many scores across so many topics appears to have smoothed out many of the particulars, making possible rough comparisons among legislators.

The Republican senators with the highest scores were Don Coram, with 63, followed by Beth Humenik Martinez with 51 and Larry Crowder with 45. In the House, the Republicans with the highest scores were Dan Thurlow, with 60, followed by Marc Catlin with 49 and Polly Lawrence with 46. A few Republicans had perfect scores from some of the groups – Larry Liston got 100-percent ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado and Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado, Humenik and Coram scored 100 percent from the Women’s Lobby of Colorado, and Thurlow had a 100 score from One Colorado.

Among Democrats, state Sen. Dominick Moreno was the clear outlier, with a score of 87. (The next-lowest score for any Democrat was state Sen. Angela Williams with 91.) The reason for that, organizers stressed, was Moreno’s membership on the Joint Budget Committee, which meant he had to vote against all floor amendments to the Long Bill, as the state budget is known, as is the custom for JBC members. (This situation put him athwart fellow Democrats in the Senate on votes to restore funding for this or that progressive program.)

“It’s something we understand and respect,” said NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado Executive Director Karen Middleton, a former state representative.

The other Democrats with slightly lower scores than their partisan colleagues included state Sen. Cheri Jahn, with 92, state Rep. Barbara McLachlan, with 95, and state Sens. Rhonda Fields and Rachel Zenzinger, each with 96.

View the combined scorecard results at coloradovalues.org, including links to each of the participating organization’s individual scorecards.