Practical walkthroughs for using voting records to make informed decisions.
PartyLine compares your survey answers to each politician's voting record. Each issue has a position on a −2 to +2 scale — your answer and the politician's voting record are both placed on that scale, and the closer they 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. Positive scores generally reflect a more progressive or interventionist position (expand government programs, stricter regulation). Negative scores reflect a more conservative or limited-government position. The exact meaning depends on the issue — visit any issue page to see how scores are defined for that topic.
PartyLine currently includes current members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, plus candidates from recent major elections. Scores are based on official roll call votes — politicians with no votes on a given issue are not scored on it. Coverage improves with each data update.
Voting data is sourced from GovTrack and Voteview and updated periodically. The most recent votes in the database are shown on each politician's profile. You can always cross-check any vote yourself using the verification guide.
Incumbents (sitting members of Congress) are scored directly from their voting records. Candidates who have not yet served are scored based on stated issue positions and party platform alignment. Candidate scores are labeled separately in your results so you always know which type of data you're looking at.
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.
