Watching the government
Six ways to watch Congress
Grading Members of Congress.
What Congress votes on, in plain language, and when a yes bundled unrelated measures together.
The stocks members trade, including in the industries their own committees oversee.
Who funds each member's campaigns, the money behind the vote.
Who pays to work the bills, the firms that file the work, and whose desks that money reaches.
Who pays to fly members and their staff, and where those trips actually land.
One letter per member: their funding, their trading, and how they back their own voters.
One letter for each member of Congress, built entirely from cited public records and recomputed during the scheduled site refresh. Find yours, see where they sit against the rest of Congress, and read exactly how the letter is derived.
How to read this
Each dot is one member of Congress, placed left to right by their Curia grade and up and down by age. Left is a lower score, right is a higher one. A dot’s colour is the member’s party, so you can see how the two parties spread across the whole range rather than only where the extremes sit. Find your own member, then read how the letter is built further down the page.
Age barely tracks with grade, so the vertical axis is mostly a way to spread the 539 dots apart. The horizontal axis is the story.
Weight the grade by
The range, within each party.
The highest and lowest graded members of each party. We show both parties at both ends on purpose: a single best-and-worst list for all of Congress would name only one party at each end, and that is a scoreboard, not a measure of how each member serves the people who elected them.
Democrats
Highest
Lowest
How the grade works.
Every member of Congress gets a letter, A through F. It answers one question: do they represent the people who elected them, and do they conduct themselves cleanly? It is a curve, so a letter means where a member sits relative to the rest of Congress, not against a perfect score no one reaches.
Most of the letter is money conduct that every member is measured on the same way. The rest is whether a member backs the issues their own party's voters want, measured against their own base rather than the other side's, so a Republican and a Democrat are each asked the same question: do you stand with the people who sent you here?
What goes into it
How they are funded
Their small-donor share and how little they lean on PAC money, each measured against their own chamber. Money that comes in small checks from many people points a different direction than money that comes from political action committees.
Whether they trade stocks
Members who do not trade individual stocks score highest. Trading also caps the grade: fifty or more disclosed trades cannot earn above a C, and any late filing under the STOCK Act cannot earn above a B, no matter how clean the rest of the record.
Backing what their own voters want
Of the issues a majority of the member's own party's voters support, how many has the member backed. Democrats are scored on the issues Democratic voters want; Republicans on the issues Republican voters want. The full list is below, and it runs both ways. Backing an issue counts in full; voting against one on the floor counts as nothing. Simply never signing on is treated as neither, worth partial credit, because no position is not opposition.
Attendance used to be part of the grade and no longer is. Almost every member votes nearly all of the time, and the exceptions are mostly life events, a new baby, a run for higher office, an illness, not a measure of how well someone represents their voters. We still show a member's attendance on their page; it just does not move the letter.
The issues the alignment score is built on.
These are the 14 issues we have a per-party voter poll for. Each member is scored on the ones their own party's voters want, and only where the measure reached their chamber: 8 for a Democrat, 9 for a Republican in the House and 6 for a Republican senator. The set runs both ways. Some are wanted by Democratic voters, some by Republican voters, some by both, so neither party is judged against the other's wish list.
- Red-Flag Protection OrdersbothD 95 · R 77
- Universal Background ChecksbothD 93 · R 81
- Extend ACA Subsidies Three YearsbothD 92 · R 59
- Reauthorize the Addiction Grant ProgramsbothD 92 · R 58
- Raise the Purchase Age to 21bothD 91 · R 59
- Assault Weapons BanDem votersD 89 · R 26
- Make Asylum Seekers Wait in MexicoGOP votersD 40 · R 86
- Tax on Unrealized GainsDem votersD 82 · R 45
- Reverse the Marketplace Sign-Up LimitsDem votersD 79 · R 47
- Medicare for AllDem votersD 73 · R 30
- Pair Enforcement With Legal StatusGOP votersD 48 · R 56
- Restore Impoundment PowerGOP votersD 6 · R 53
- End Birthright Citizenship by StatuteGOP votersD 11 · R 51
- Approve LNG Exports AutomaticallyGOP votersD 30 · R 50
The two figures are the share of each party's voters who want the issue. A member is graded on it when their own party's figure is a majority. Voter figures come from the surveys cited on each issue page.
What the grade cannot see.
A cosponsorship is a partial stand-in for representing your voters. A member can agree with a goal and decline to sign a particular bill, or write their own. We count backing the bill, which is the record that exists, not the private view.
The voter benchmark is national polling by party, not the member's own district or state. A member from a competitive seat and one from a safe seat face different electorates, and the grade does not adjust for that.
The money figures are disclosed money only. Spending by outside groups that do not name their donors, the dark money that set a record in 2024, never appears in any of these numbers. A low PAC share is not proof a member runs clean, only that their committee reported little direct PAC money.
Where we have little data on a member, a brand-new member with no voting record, or one with no FEC filing yet, that part of the grade sits at the middle rather than punishing them for a gap in the record.