How the spectrum works

Donor score (CFscore) covers candidates with enough donors, at any level. It reflects who gives them money: candidates who share donors land close together. Source: Stanford DIME public version 4.0, recipients file 1979 to 2024.

A voting-based score (DW-NOMINATE) is not shown. Its publisher, Voteview, states no license, and we have asked for permission to show its scores. Senate vote records on profiles do come from Voteview, with its citation. Shor-McCarty scores for state legislators are not included yet.

• Each measure is a number on its own scale, with 0 at the center. CFscore is published on a scale that runs about −2 to 2. We cut it off at those ends and divide by 2, so the bar runs from −1 at the Liberal end to 1 at the Conservative end.
• The marker sits where the measure puts the person. The middle of the bar is centrist on that measure’s own scale. It is not the middle of Congress or of a party.
• With more than one measure, the combined marker is the plain average of their positions. With one, the marker is that measure.
• Each measure keeps its published score in small type under its name. There is no score out of 100 and no ranking against other people.
• If a person has no score, there is no bar. We never fill one in.

• A donor score reflects the donor network, not votes or views. It is weaker when few people gave. When a record has fewer than 50 donors, the profile says so.
• Donor scores come from past cycles. A donor score is a career figure, not a 2026 reading.
• Some people have more than one database record in the same seat, with different scores. We use the newest.
• Matching people to database rows uses FEC ids where we have them. Otherwise it needs the same name, state, office and district, and exactly one match. Name matches can be wrong, and the profile says when a record was matched by name. Ambiguous cases are left out.
• These are research estimates from the publisher named on each profile, not Election Wrld ratings.

The donor database is licensed ODC-BY 1.0, which requires the credit below.

Bonica, Adam. 2024. Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections: Public version 4.0 [Computer file]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries. https://data.stanford.edu/dime