It’s here: the 2025 VAPLAN scorecard!

Every year VAPLAN’s legislative tracking culminates in a scorecard, ranking legislators from most “progressive” to least, across policy areas. We score votes on dozens of bills, both in committees and on the floor, to determine the ranking. It’s messy and imperfect as any measure would be, but the methodology has been fairly consistent for the eight years we’ve been delivering it. Without further ado, here it is! (Full spreadsheet here.)

Methodology notes and caveats

• We have used approximately the same methodology for the 8 years we’ve done the scorecard: legislators score a +1 on a bill if their final vote (either in committee if the bill died there, or on the floor just before it passed or died for the last time) matches what we consider a progressive vote. They receive -1 if their vote disagrees, and 0 if they never cast a vote on it.
  • We include both committee and floor votes because lots of the most important bills don’t get to the floor, with the important work happening in committee. 
• Legislators also can earn (or lose) a point for being the patron or co-patron of a good (or bad) bill.
• We divide by the number of bills the legislator could have cast a vote on. This reduces–but does not eliminate unfortunately–the bias of who sits on which committee.
• Beginning a couple years ago, we also added or removed a point for a bill that a committee chair did not docket (+1 for not docketing a bad bill, -1 for not docketing a good bill).
  • This year in particular, there was some unexplained weirdness going on between House Democrats and Senate Democrats that resulted in good bills being killed for no obvious reason. I admit we have a low tolerance for that, so we definitely included many of those bills.
• Bills were selected to cover as wide a range of policy issues as possible, as many committees and subcommittees as possible, and with emphasis on bills that separate out legislators within their party. 
• Finally, if you’re interested in perusing the voting data, or doing analysis of your own, LIS has recently added features that make it much easier to track a legislator’s votes (follow the links above). Additionally, we at VAPLAN would be lost without the great work of our good friends at recordedvote.org who have a great database for tracking legislation, and for identifying dissenting votes, close votes, votes by committee etc.