WORKERS
DESERVE MORE.

How every score is built

This is an independent project. It is not published, endorsed or reviewed by Democratic Socialists of America. It applies DSA's published program as a measuring stick to the public legislative record.

1. The evidence base

A member's score is the share of their scored actions that match the DSA position. Two kinds of action count, and each counts once:

• Cosponsorship of a priority bill in the member's own chamber. Being the sponsor also counts. Cosponsoring is voluntary and public.
• A recorded roll-call vote on a priority bill: Yea on a DSA-supported bill, or Nay on a DSA-opposed bill.

Missing a vote is not treated as opposition. A member who is absent is simply not scored on that vote, so illness, travel and late entry into office do not mechanically lower a score. Every member's page shows exactly how many cosponsorships and votes went into the legislative score, and how the AIPAC penalty was applied.

2. What gets tracked

The catalog contains — bill entries across seven DSA pillars: labor, universal healthcare, housing, climate and public power, peace and anti-imperialism, taxing the rich, and civil rights and justice. — of them have a recorded roll call; — are tracked for cosponsorship. House and Senate versions are scored separately because members can only cosponsor and vote in their own chamber.

Bills are selected for one reason: they force a clear choice between working-class interests and corporate, carceral or imperial interests. Bills that are purely symbolic, or whose DSA position would be genuinely ambiguous, are left out. The full list, with the reason for each position, is on the Legislation page.

Each of the seven pillars counts once in the legislative score, whatever number of bills it holds. A large batch of immigration votes cannot swallow the climate or housing record simply because it is larger. Recorded votes decided by 90% or more are listed but not scored: a 402–1 result tells you nothing about a member that a 226–197 result does not.

3. The AIPAC-linked money penalty

DSA's program is explicitly anti-imperialist, and AIPAC is one of the largest institutional vehicles for pro-Israel political money in U.S. elections. A member can vote well on domestic policy and still be materially entangled with that project, so the scoreboard separates the two:

• Legislative score — cosponsorships and recorded votes, as described above.
• AIPAC-linked support cap — a ceiling on the final grade, applied after the legislative score. Any disclosed AIPAC PAC direct support or United Democracy Project independent expenditure for the member caps the grade at D; heavier money lowers the ceiling into the F range.

The ceiling does not replace the voting record. Inside each band the legislative score still decides the order, so a 95% ally with a small disclosed check keeps a B and outranks a 60% member under the same cap. Below the ceiling nothing changes: a member whose record already sits under the cap keeps their own grade, and the money is still shown on their page.

Recorded votes for Israel's military campaign carry extra weight inside the peace pillar: five times a normal vote for a stand-alone aid package and double for the bundled national-security package that also carried Ukraine aid. They are counted once, not deducted twice, and the weighting uses roll calls rather than spending figures.

Only money spent supporting the member is counted. Money spent against a member is shown on their page as context — being targeted by AIPAC is not treated as a reward, and opposition spending is not added to anyone's score.

The source is the FEC-derived AIPAC tracker published by GovGreed, which aggregates AIPAC PAC (FEC ID C00797670) direct contributions and United Democracy Project (FEC ID C00799031) independent expenditures for and against sitting members. The figures are cumulative for 2022–2026. They are disclosed domestic political spending, not foreign-government money. If the tracker cannot be reached, the last complete snapshot is used and the page notes it; if there is no snapshot, no cap is applied and the member page says so.

4. Editorial disqualifiers

A voting record does not capture everything. A member can compile a respectable score on the bills we track and still take public positions that place them outside DSA's program — most often on Palestine. For those cases the scorecard applies a published editorial override:

• The override sets the grade to F and caps the score at 35%.
• The legislative score is left untouched and is still shown on the member page, next to the reason.
• Every override carries a written reason and at least one primary source, listed below.
• Overrides apply to public statements, never to a guess about how someone votes.

Each override is reviewed whenever the record is refreshed and stays only while the statement stands. Its reason and source are shown on the member's page.

5. Campaign finance and lobbying (context)

Money is shown in two layers. The AIPAC penalty above affects the score. The campaign-finance and lobbying panels are context only and never change a grade.

• Campaign finance — FEC summary for the 2026 cycle: total contributions, individual contributions, all PAC contributions, disbursements, cash on hand and debts.
• Lobbying — AIPAC's own Senate LDA quarterly filings (LD-2), including total reported spending, quarters, issue codes and the committees and agencies lobbied.
• Votes — member-level positions still come from the official House Clerk and Senate LIS roll calls via Voteview. CIV.IQ's House roll-call tool returns vote totals, and its per-member history is capped at the latest 50 votes, so it is not used to score votes.

6. Grades and coverage

Letter grades group the percentage: A+ at 95+, A at 90, A− at 85, then five-point steps down through B+, B, B−, C+, C, C−, D+, D and D−, with F below 40. A grade is only as strong as its evidence, so every dossier carries a coverage label:

• High: at least 5 cosponsorship opportunities and 5 recorded votes.
• Medium: at least 3 cosponsorship opportunities or 2 recorded votes.
• Low: a thin record; treat the number as provisional.

Non-voting delegates from D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands appear in the dataset and have cosponsorship records, but they are not given a letter grade because they cannot vote on the floor. Vacancies are not imputed.

7. Sources and refresh

Every number is rebuilt from the same public sources each day, and nothing is filled in by hand. If a source is unavailable, the last complete snapshot is used and the page says so; if too much of the record is missing, the site is not updated at all rather than published half-checked.

8. Known limits

• Cosponsorship is cheaper than voting. A member can cosponsor a bill they know will never reach the floor. The score reflects that mixed reality rather than pretending only floor votes matter.
• Only the roll calls listed on the Legislation page are used. They are selected because the DSA position is clear, not because they are a random sample of the Congress.
• Committee votes, amendments, discharge petitions that never received a roll call, and state-level action are not scored.
• AIPAC money is a penalty, not a full campaign-finance audit. It covers AIPAC PAC and the United Democracy Project, cumulative 2022–2026. Other PACs, dark money and individual donors are not scored.
• The AIPAC totals are cumulative. A member who took AIPAC support in 2022 and broke with the group later is still penalized for the earlier money. The member page shows the raw dollars and the penalty so the judgment is visible.
• Party is a powerful predictor in a polarized Congress. The interesting signal is the deviation from party, which is why the map and the filters let you compare within a party.

9. Corrections

Every score on this page can be traced back to a roll call, a cosponsorship record or a disclosed filing. If you find a vote, a cosponsor or a bill title that is wrong, send the member, the record and the official source that contradicts it. Corrections are re-pulled from the same public sources that produced the original, so a single number is never patched on its own — the whole record is rebuilt and the page shows the new version.