Practical walkthroughs for using voting records to make informed decisions.
PartyLine compares your survey answers to each politician's voting record. On each issue, a politician's votes give a score from 0 to 100, and your answers give a position from −2 to +2 that is placed on the same 0 to 100 scale (position × 25 + 50) — the closer the two are, the higher your match on that issue. Issue rankings you set during the survey act as weights, so topics you care about most affect the final score more. See Methodology for the full formula.
Each issue has two poles, and a politician's score on it runs from 0 to 100. Scores above 50 generally reflect a more progressive or interventionist position (expand government programs, stricter regulation). Scores below 50 reflect a more conservative or limited-government position, and a score near 50 is a mixed record. The exact meaning depends on the issue — visit any issue page to see how scores are defined for that topic.
PartyLine scores members of Congress, past and present, from their roll call votes, and candidates for Congress who have public positions on at least three issues. Your ballot page also lists — by name, without a score — the other people on it where we have a published source: statewide officers, state legislators, mayors, and county, city, school and special-district offices. Methodology explains each label and where every list comes from.
Roll call votes come from VoteView and from the House Clerk and Senate roll call records; what each bill does comes from the Congressional Research Service summary on Congress.gov. New votes are added on a regular schedule, and the most recent ones are shown on each politician's profile. GovTrack is not one of our sources: the verification guide suggests it only as an easier way to check a vote yourself, because it republishes the same official records. The full source list is on the Methodology page.
Incumbents (sitting members of Congress) are scored directly from their voting records. Candidates who have not yet served are estimated from their stated public positions (campaign materials, Ballotpedia, endorsements) and clearly labeled as estimates. A candidate with no substantive public evidence — only a party affiliation — shows “No score yet” rather than a number. A candidate with public positions on at least three issues gets a score from those issues only; their other issues may show their party's typical position marked “(est.)”, and those never count toward your match.
No. PartyLine is independently operated and not affiliated with any political party, campaign, or advocacy group. The scoring is based on roll call votes from official congressional records. We do not editorialize on which positions are correct.
