Methodology

Although this website gathers the endorsements and wisdom of a couple of dozen progressive organizations, it ultimately reflects the opinions of one person, not only in which organizations to include here, but also the values that constitute being progressive, the organizations that best express those values, and which candidates meet those criteria. While most candidates appear here based solely on their running for office, some may be missing — their website may be hard to find, may contain little information, or may have been non-functional when we checked it. Some candidates may also be emphasized or de-emphasized based on personal opinion or other factors.

The data behind this site — endorsements, candidate lists, and reference sources — is refreshed regularly throughout the election cycle. See the Recent Changes page for the latest updates.

Organizations

The organizations we track were chosen based on familiarity, experience, and a feeling that they share progressive values. There are many PACs (political action committees) that promote progressive candidates, but their rosters can be chosen for any number of reasons that aren't transparent. We tend to focus on organizations that are more action-oriented rather than purely electoral.

We do not weigh any one organization over another — all endorsements count equally. The more endorsements a candidate has from these organizations, the higher they will appear in the Top Candidates cards. Candidates with 6 or more endorsements receive a full featured card; those with 4 to 5 endorsements appear in the "Honorable Mentions" section below. Only one candidate per congressional district or Senate seat is shown in each section — the candidate with the most endorsements in that race.

Data Sources

Besides importing endorsement lists from organizations, we use several external data sources to determine which candidates are running in each district and to provide context about incumbents and races. Most sources are imported approximately daily, though timing varies.

FEC filings — candidate registration data for each district. FEC data is loaded less frequently than other sources because it takes a long time to process.
Secretary of State certified candidate lists — where available, per state. Coverage is uneven and shapes what the November list can show: for about ten states we have the full certified ballot, so independents and minor-party candidates appear alongside Democrats; for roughly twenty more we have only the Democratic primary list, where a non-Democrat's absence proves nothing, because they never appear on a primary ballot; and for the rest we have no list at all, so a candidate shows up only if an endorsement or one of our evaluations found them. The full list states the current split. A missing name therefore does not always mean nobody is running.
Members of the United States Congress — current legislators data, including Senate class and biographical information
House incumbents and Senate incumbents — current members of Congress
Retirements — incumbents not seeking re-election in 2026
Special elections — upcoming special election dates and types
DCCC Frontline, Red to Blue, and Districts in Play — DCCC-designated vulnerable incumbents, challengers, and targeted districts
Integrity Index — letter grades rating incumbents on financial integrity and resistance to corruption
Your Rep's Record — member grades
Track AIPAC — which members of Congress accept money from AIPAC and similar Israel lobbies
Congressional birthdates — biographical data used by the shame table
Cook Political Report — House and Senate race competitiveness ratings

Status of Primary Elections

The whole point of this site is to help you find the most progressive candidates for each congressional district — who may or may not be the incumbent. Incumbents have a large structural advantage in primary elections, so they are not emphasized here. Incumbents are not included in the Top Candidates cards.

After a primary election is held, we show progressive candidates who did not win only on the Thank You page, along with a list of the endorsements we had noted for them.

Incumbent Badges

Wherever an incumbent is named on this site, a small cluster of badges may appear beside their name, summarizing what outside sources say about them. Hovering over a badge shows the same information as a tooltip.

Integrity Index letter grade. From the Integrity Index, which rates congressional incumbents on their financial integrity and resistance to corruption. The badge links to that member's rating.
Your Rep's Record letter grade. From Your Rep's Record, which grades a member on their actual voting record.
Wall of Shame brick. Appears when an incumbent has strikes against them on our Wall of Shame. The brick grows more opaque as strikes accumulate — faint at two strikes, fully solid at five or more — and clicking it jumps straight to that member's row on the shame table.
Track AIPAC magnifying glass. A magnifying-glass icon on a colored circle, from Track AIPAC, showing how much money an incumbent takes from AIPAC and similar Israel lobbies. Red is their harshest rating; yellow is a milder warning; green means Track AIPAC considers the member in good standing.

Progressive Scoring and Ranking

While some candidates are ranked based on the number of endorsements they have and pledges they have signed, others are ranked and displayed based on our own "progressive score" — a 0–100 rating based primarily on their stated positions on their campaign websites. We use a combination of AI-assisted and human evaluation to score candidates across ten issue areas, in roughly descending order of importance:

Economic Justice & Labor
Healthcare
Climate & Environment
Campaign Finance & Anti-Corruption
Housing & Cost of Living
Immigration
Criminal Justice
Foreign Policy & Military
Democracy & Voting Rights
Vision vs. Reaction (affirmative policy-led platform vs. primarily reactive framing)

The single most important factor is specificity. Naming a concrete, transformative policy earns full credit; vague aspirations earn almost none — no matter how many of them a candidate lists. “Medicare for All” scores high; “access to affordable healthcare” scores near zero. “Green New Deal” scores high; “all-of-the-above energy” scores near zero. This is why a genuinely progressive candidate can still receive a low score if their website speaks only in generalities — we can only credit what they actually spell out.

The practical test is whether a plank names a mechanism — a named program, action, or piece of legislation that Congress could actually take up. “Expanding affordable housing” and “improving healthcare access” are goals, not mechanisms; “rent stabilization,” “Medicare for All,” “the PRO Act,” and “a $20 minimum wage” are. A goal stated without a mechanism still earns partial credit — we take it as a real signal of intent — but only a fraction of what a named policy earns. A score of zero in an issue area is reserved for sites that never raise the issue at all, or that take a position we score against.

When we mark a candidate weak in an issue area, we distinguish three cases: the topic never appeared on their site at all, it appeared only in general terms with no policy named, or the site took a position we score against. On the Unsung Heroes page these appear as the “?”, “!”, and “!!” markers beside a candidate’s bio.

Sitting incumbents are scored differently. Because an incumbent’s website copy often reads more progressively than their record, we score them primarily on their voting record rather than their rhetoric — and when the two conflict, the record wins. A member who campaigns on a position but repeatedly votes against it is penalized for the contradiction, not given the benefit of the doubt.

Progressive scoring is not an exact science. Scores reflect only what we were able to find on a candidate's campaign website at the time of evaluation — a candidate with a thin or vague website may score lower than their actual views warrant. We only publish scores for candidates with the highest ratings, on the Unsung Heroes page. Lower scores are used internally to rank and filter candidates, but are never shown publicly — we have no interest in shaming a candidate simply for not hitting all the right progressive talking points on their website.

Candidates: if your score looks lower than your convictions, our advice for candidates page explains, concretely, what to put on your website to fix it.

Featured Candidates for Upcoming Elections

At the top of the Top Candidates page, we show mini-cards for non-incumbent candidates whose primary election is coming up soonest. One card is shown per congressional district or Senate seat in those states.

The featured candidate for each district is chosen using a heuristic that weighs endorsements and progressive score together — not a strict formula. As a general rule:

A human choice can override the algorithm. The site moderator can personally choose the featured candidate for a district when an exception is warranted — that pick takes precedence over the rules below, and the moderator can also choose to feature no one in a district.
Endorsements carry more weight. Whichever candidate has the most endorsements from the organizations we track is usually preferred. A candidate with more endorsements wins the slot even if their progressive score is somewhat lower.
Score gaps can override endorsement leads. If a challenger has at most one fewer endorsement than the leader but scores dramatically higher on our progressive rubric, that score advantage can outweigh the endorsement lead. A gap of roughly 20 to 29 points means we show the higher-scoring candidate alongside the leader, on a shared card; a gap of about 30 points or more means the higher-scoring candidate replaces the leader as the featured pick.
Ties. When two candidates are close on both endorsements and score, we sometimes show both on a single card rather than picking one.
Omit districts with weak candidates. A district's card is dropped entirely unless there is some real justification for featuring someone — that is, unless at least one of these holds: the chosen candidate scores 30 or higher, some candidate in the district scores 50 or higher, the chosen candidate is personally endorsed by the site moderator, or the chosen candidate has 4 or more endorsements. If none of those are true, we'd rather show nothing than promote someone we can't stand behind. Similarly, many incumbents are excluded — especially those who appear on our Wall of Shame for votes against progressive values, even if their progressive score from their campaign website is relatively high.

Unsung Heroes

We search FEC filings and the web and Secretary of States' websites to find all candidates running for Congress. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and human evaluation, we score each candidate on the progressive rubric above. Candidates who meet all of the following criteria appear on our Unsung Heroes page:

Score of 80 or higher on our progressive rubric
No more than 3 endorsements from the organizations we track (2 for the lower-scoring tiers below)
Not an incumbent
The highest-scoring candidate (or within 8 points of the highest-scoring candidate)

Three lower tiers follow the same criteria, at progressively lower score thresholds: candidates scoring 70 or higher appear as Honorable Mentions (slightly smaller cards); those scoring 60 or higher appear as "Also Worth Mentioning"; and those scoring 50 or higher appear as "Candidates with Potential."

If a higher-scoring candidate from the same district appears elsewhere on the page, a note reading "(Alternative to higher-scoring NAME)" appears above a candidate's bio, so readers know a stronger option exists.

Before the primaries, we filtered this page more aggressively. A primary field can run to a dozen candidates in a single district, and listing every somewhat-progressive contender buries the ones actually worth a voter's attention. So during primary season two additional rules applied: a candidate was dropped when a clearly better-scoring rival on the same ballot line had already collected four or more endorsements, and a candidate in the two lowest tiers was dropped when anyone shown on the page from their district scored more than 10 points higher.

Now that the primaries are largely settled, both rules are switched off. The November field is already narrow — there is no crowd left to thin, and hiding a nominee because a stronger candidate exists elsewhere would just conceal a real choice on the ballot. We expect to restore this filtering for the next primary cycle.

Additional Candidates on the Full List

The full candidates list may include brief bios for candidates beyond those on the Unsung Heroes page. A candidate will appear with a bio if they meet any of the following criteria:

Unsung Heroes, Honorable Mentions, and "Also Worth Mentioning": Candidates from our Unsung Heroes tiers (scores ≥60) always appear with bios on the full list, regardless of other conditions.
Site moderator's personal endorsements: A small number of candidates are personally endorsed by the site moderator and shown with bios even if they haven't received endorsements from the tracked organizations.
Most progressive candidate with no endorsed competition: A candidate scoring 50 or higher, with no endorsements from tracked organizations, who is the highest-scoring progressive in their district, where at least one other Democrat is also running — so there is a genuine primary choice to highlight.

How the Super-Platform Is Built

The Progressive Super-Platform collects verbatim policy quotes from current and recent congressional candidates and from progressive organizations, sorted by issue. AI does the reading, going through campaign websites page by page and pulling out the passages where someone actually says what they would do. Sorting those into issues, judging which ones earn a spot, and cutting the rest is a mix of human decisions and AI help. Every quote links back to the page it came from, and to an Internet Archive snapshot of that page, so you can check it yourself — which matters, because campaign websites go offline fast, and several in the collection already have.

What earns a spot is something specific: a mechanism, a figure, a named bill, or a real argument. A plain statement of where a candidate stands is welcome too, especially in the thinner sections. What gets left out are quotes that only echo the heading above them without adding anything, and language about what someone has already done rather than what they would do next.

The page is deliberately not terse or compact. Where several people make the same point, we show the strongest version rather than all of them, but each subsection still gathers a sometimes-redundant variety of quotes. Some are perhaps contradictory: progressives do not all agree, and the page does not pretend otherwise. Most subsections also end with a short list headed Opportunities for candidates to address — issues that belong under that heading but that none of the platforms we read takes up.

Strategic Voting and the Spoiler Effect

In the primary. A crowded field splits the progressive vote. If four progressives each take 15% while one corporate-backed Democrat holds 30%, the corporate Democrat is the nominee. A candidate polling in the low single digits is unlikely to win but entirely capable of taking enough votes from a progressive who could.

In November. The realistic choice in most districts is the Democratic nominee or a Republican. An independent may have the better platform, but in a close district a vote for them is subtracted from the only candidate positioned to win. We don't track polling and don't score electability — look at your own district, then decide.

Which non-Democrats we list. Most independent and third-party candidates never appear here. One earns a place only when there is no Democrat in the race — nobody filed, or nobody placed in a top-two primary — or when their score beats the district's Democrat by at least ten points. Ten is deliberate: a rubric scored from campaign websites can't tell a two-point gap from noise, and only a clear gap justifies pointing a voter away from the nominee. Where more than one non-Democrat clears that bar in the same district, we list only the highest-scoring one. Two names side by side read as two recommendations, and when a clearly stronger alternative is on the same ballot, the weaker one isn't the candidate we would point you to.

What the note under each name means. Every candidate in one of these races carries a short line explaining it. Which line depends on who holds the seat, from the Cook Political Report ratings and the current officeholder. Where a Democrat holds the seat, the note names the Democrat being challenged and carries a spoiler risk: HIGH where the seat is a Toss Up or Lean and the campaign has raised real money, MODERATE where it's competitive but the campaign hasn't, and LOW in a safe seat. On the full candidate table that line is shortened to "Challenging incumbent Democrat" without the name, because the row it sits in already carries it. Where a Republican holds the seat, or it's open, there is no Democratic hold to spoil, so the note names the Democratic challenger and stops there. Where no Democrat is running, the strongest non-Democrat is simply the choice on offer. And in a top-two state that sent two Democrats to November, the higher-scoring one is noted as challenging a less progressive Democrat.

Limitations and Caveats

Progressive scores are based on stated positions, not voting records. A candidate's platform may not reflect how they would actually legislate, and a low score often reflects a vague website rather than a moderate candidate.
Campaign websites change. Our evaluations may lag behind updates to a candidate's platform.
Some organizations delay updating their lists after an announcement, so data may be slightly out of date.
Our methodology evolves as we learn more. Scores, rankings, and chosen organizations from earlier in the cycle may not reflect our current criteria.
Our scores measure progressiveness, not electability. Nothing in a score reflects polling, fundraising, or whether a candidate can win. See strategic voting and the spoiler effect above.