Voting Score

Our "Voting Score" examines more then 250 votes during the 115th and 116th Congress. To ensure that our score focuses primarily on ideological bills, we only included votes where at least 3 Democrats break from the party.

Our score is NOT predicated on party loyalty. Mainstream Congressional ideological rankings fail to paint an accurate picture by treating all votes that go against the majority of the party as the same regardless if they were taken because the member felt the issue in question was too conservative or too progressive. This creates distortions in their results, such as putting Representatives like AOC (an avowed socialist) in the same ideological category as Blue Dog Democrats.

To remedy this error Progressive Scorecard created a control group of 10 Representatives with unimpeachable leftwing bonafides. From there our score essentially tracks how each an individual

Our Control Group Members:

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

• Rep. Ayanna Pressley

• Rep. Barbara Lee

• Rep. Ilhan Omar

• Rep. Jamie Raskin

• Rep. Jan Schakowsky

• Rep. Jesus "Chuy" Garcia

• Rep. Mark Pocan

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal

• Rep. Rashida Tlaib

• Rep. Raul Grijalva

• Rep. Ro Khanna

Incoming Member:

• Cori Bush

• Jamaal Bowman

• Marie Newman

• Mondaire Jones

• Nikema Williams

Sponsorship Score

There are over 8,000 bills and resolutions introduced each Congress very few of which receive floor votes. Though sponsoring a bill and actually voting on it once it makes its way out of committee are two very different things, seeing what bills a Representative puts their name to is a decent barometer in tracking their ideological predisposition. For our "Sponsorship Score" we examine legislation that has received at least 4 progressive control group members as (co)sponsors, and fewer then 5 Republican (co)sponsors. This narrows the number of bills we examine considerably to around 400.