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First of all, DeWine's career ACU score is an 80, while Specter's is a 45. That's something to think about.

Second, the ACU is not the only entity that rates members of Congress; I don't think a complete analysis would exclude ratings by the liberal ADA, AFS (labor) or LCV (environmentalists) or the conservative NTLC (taxes) or Christian Coalition. Michael Barone lists the ratings from the 5 groups I mentioned, along with the ACU and a couple of other organizations whose ratings I don't find quite as useful. What I do is add up the ratings by the 3 liberal groups and subtracted the score from 300 to get a conservative score, then I add up the ratings for the 3 conservative groups, so each Senator can get a maximum of 600 conservative points. For the 108th Congress (2003-2004), I assumed that the NTLC and Christian Coalition scores were the same for both years, since those organizations rate members of Congress over a 2-year period. For 2003-2004, Mike DeWine got 506.5 conservative points, or 84.42% of the possible conservative points; Arlen Specter, despite voting much more conservative than usual because he knew he would face a strong primary challenge from the right, got 435 conservative points, 72.50% of all possible conservative points. Lincoln Chafee got only 45.92% of conservative points, less than Democrat Ben Nelson (49.58%). Norm Coleman got 87.83% of conservative points, a tad higher than North Carolina's Liddy Dole and far outside of the RINO range. The biggest surprise I found was that McCain's move to the left, especially on environmental issues (he got an average of 60 points from the LCV), left him with 69.33% of conservative points, which was actually lower than Specter.