Methodology

Polling

Politically.com does not conduct polls.

Polling records come from the documented VoteHub API and are cached in the Politically.com tenant database. Each displayed record retains its VoteHub ID, poll type, subject, pollster, sponsors, field dates, supplied sample and population, answer choices, internal and partisan fields, validated source link, source timestamp, cache timestamp, and raw provider JSON for private diagnostics. Missing sample or population values remain visibly not supplied.

Polls can differ because of question wording, dates, population, sampling, weighting, sponsor, mode, and methodology. Results should be read as individual records, not as interchangeable measurements.

A, RV, and LV samples should not be treated as directly interchangeable. Version one applies no editorial weighting, polling average, trend score, or election forecast.

Federal campaign finance

Official report totals, not transaction arithmetic.

Candidate and committee registrations, totals, reports, and filings come from OpenFEC. The OpenFEC key stays on the server. Ordinary cached page rendering does not call the provider, while an explicit search or stale detail request may refresh a bounded 24-hour server-side cache.

Finance figures reflect official federal filings and their stated coverage dates. Amended filings, processing delays, and reporting schedules can change totals. Politically.com uses totals supplied by official FEC report summaries and does not naively sum transaction rows.

Politically.com does not import, search, display, or republish individual contributor lists, donor names, donor addresses, or donor-level records.

Certified federal election results

One official table, one displayed denominator.

The result finder uses the FEC's Federal Elections 2022 workbook, a biennial compilation of official results certified by state election offices. A deterministic converter accepts only the reviewed workbook SHA-256 and exact Senate and House worksheet grammar; the committed extract has its own pinned checksum.

Candidate, scattered-vote, party-total, race-total, and state-total rows remain distinct. “Unopposed,” *, and # remain source text rather than becoming zero. A winner is shown only when the source marker begins with W. A source percentage is displayed only when a race-total denominator for the same race and stage is present.

Candidate and dossier links require the exact FEC candidate ID on both records. Names, parties, states, districts, vote totals, polls, and finance values are never used to infer identity or causation.

Federal lobbying disclosures

Literal source text, exact identifiers, no spending rollups.

Federal lobbying filings come from the official authenticated Lobbying Disclosure REST API at lda.gov. Politically.com caches 2025-forward filings, registrants, clients, reporting periods, source-reported income and expense fields, and lobbying-activity issue descriptions. Missing amounts remain missing, and filing amendments are not combined into locally calculated registrant, client, issue, or spending totals.

Bill citations are extracted only from literal issue-description text using an enumerated grammar for House and Senate bills and resolutions. The Congress is derived by fixed arithmetic from the filing year. A citation links to a bill only when that exact Congress, measure type, and number exists in the local Congress.gov cache; unmatched citations remain visible plain text. Names, client descriptions, policy topics, and dollar amounts are never used to infer a relationship or advocacy position.

Congress

Official actions are procedural records.

Bills, resolutions, titles, actions, sponsors, cosponsors, subjects, committees, amendments, related measures, text versions, laws, meetings, published hearings, members, and House roll calls come from the official Congress.gov API v3. They are cached locally and retain source links, source timestamps, and provider JSON for private diagnostics.

Politically.com does not assign importance, ideology, momentum, probability, or a simplified status. A bill passing one chamber is not the same as becoming law. Measures with similar titles can be separate legislation, and committee-meeting schedules or status can change.

A Congressional Research Service summary is displayed only when Congress.gov supplies one and is identified as a CRS summary. CRS summaries can lag a bill's introduction or later amendments. When no summary exists, the site shows the official title, sponsor, subjects, committees, actions, and source links without writing a substitute.

Standalone Congressional Research Service product pages cache report identifiers, versions, titles, dates, status, authors, topics, official formats, and structured related materials from the documented Congress.gov CRS endpoint. Politically.com does not mirror report text. A report-to-bill relationship requires the source-supplied Congress, measure type, and number, and becomes a local link only when that exact bill is cached; titles and report text are never mined to infer one.

House roll calls come from Congress.gov. Senate roll calls come from official U.S. Senate XML. Both show the official question, result, totals, and member votes when supplied, while remaining separate chamber records. Politically.com calculates no partisan score, loyalty rating, member ranking, or ideological conclusion.

Federal identity links

Shared public identifiers, never name matching.

Politically.com uses the CC0 unitedstates/congress-legislators current and historical identity files together with its current committee and membership files. One Bioguide identity may carry multiple official FEC candidate IDs and one Senate LIS identifier, together with dated terms and exact committee assignments.

Each refresh resolves one published repository commit and downloads all four JSON files at that exact commit. Malformed rows, duplicate or ambiguous identifiers, invalid dates, and broken internal relationships fail the complete transaction and preserve the last successful snapshot.

Committee membership joins require both a validated committee key and a source-supplied Bioguide ID. Thomas-style keys map deterministically to Congress.gov system codes, with two reviewed current House select-committee mappings where the official source systems use different prefixes. Any other unmapped drift is skipped and counted, never guessed.

A valid identifier is not discarded merely because its corresponding Congress.gov or OpenFEC record has not been cached. The identifier remains dormant, and Politically.com displays a cross-link only when both local source records exist. Names, party labels, states, and offices are never used to infer identity. The crosswalk does not identify arbitrary candidates named in VoteHub polls.

Executive branch

Structured Federal Register fields, without inferred authority.

Executive orders, final rules, proposed rules, agencies, dates, citations, CFR references, docket identifiers, and comment deadlines come from the public FederalRegister.gov API v1. Politically.com caches the complete API executive-order series and a bounded rule series beginning January 1, 2025.

Topic matches use only literal title and abstract text. Agency filters require a structured agency ID relationship. The API does not expose a structured statutory-authority field, so the product does not text-mine citations, infer an authorizing law, or create a law-to-rule relationship.

FederalRegister.gov pages are informational and not the official legal edition. Detail pages retain the source's GovInfo PDF link. Comment periods are shown as open only when a structured close date is today or later; visitors should confirm deadlines and submission instructions at the official source.

Election administration

Reported survey fields, not election results.

The election-administration page uses a reviewed extract of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey Version 2.0 jurisdiction CSV. Displayed totals come from exact EAVS fields for registration, reported voters, voting methods, precincts, and polling places.

Negative codebook values are missing-data sentinels and become null, never zero. Voting-method categories are not added into a turnout figure because reporting conventions and missing fields vary. Politically.com publishes no election forecast or inferred performance score.

State legislatures

Bulk foundation, budgeted freshness layer.

State jurisdiction metadata, bills, recorded votes, current legislators, committees, and events come from Open States / Plural. Politically.com covers the 50 states, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico while excluding municipal and federal jurisdictions from this pillar.

Official per-session JSON archives provide the nationwide bill-and-vote foundation. Current-legislator CSV files provide the roster foundation. API v3 supplies jurisdiction/session metadata and a carefully budgeted update layer for recently changed bills, selected committees, selected events, missing details, and corrections. Normal page views and searches query only Politically.com's owned database.

The current REST contract allows 250 requests per fixed UTC day and 10 requests per fixed UTC minute. The importer starts no more than one request per second and stops at local ceilings of nine per minute and 225 per day, leaving room for retries and operator verification. Updates that do not fit within the budget wait for a later run; they do not trigger visitor-time requests.

Bill classifications, subjects, titles, actions, sponsors, documents, related measures, vote results, and member votes are displayed only when supplied. No local status, momentum, importance, ideology, or likelihood is inferred. The current legislator file describes the current role and is not presented as a complete service history.

Committee and event endpoints are experimental in Open States v3 and coverage varies by jurisdiction. Those pages are labeled limited coverage. A missing record is not evidence that no committee, event, document, action, or vote exists.

Freshness and failure

The last successful snapshot survives a provider failure.

VoteHub refreshes are designed to run hourly. High-level OpenFEC and Lobbying Disclosure caches refresh daily; LDA refreshes revisit a three-day posted-date overlap, and visitor-requested OpenFEC searches remain cached for 24 hours. Congress bills, nominations, CRS report metadata, House votes, and Senate votes refresh hourly; committee meetings and hearings refresh every two hours; members and committees refresh daily; and a rotating full reconciliation runs nightly. Federal Register records refresh every two hours with a seven-day publication overlap. Open States current-legislator CSV files are checked nightly; current-session bill archives are checked weekly; API updates rotate through every supported jurisdiction, with bills and committees selecting one jurisdiction hourly and events selecting one every four hours. EAVS is a biennial survey, so its official archive is checked monthly. Certified FEC results use a reviewed, hash-pinned release import and change only when a new or corrected official publication is reviewed. Every sync or import is lock-protected, timeout-limited where applicable, parsed before writes, recorded in a sync ledger, and applied transactionally per provider unit.

A failed or malformed refresh is recorded but never erases a good cached snapshot. A bounded number of individually malformed VoteHub records may be rejected while the validated majority is committed; the private sync ledger records that count and the whole refresh fails if more than five percent are invalid. Every data section identifies the source, last successful refresh, and stale condition. “Recently refreshed” means the cache is inside the documented threshold. “Latest available” means the last successful cache is older than that threshold.

Source correction

Follow the original record.

Displayed records link to the original poll source, official FEC or LDA filing record, official Congress.gov or Senate record, Open States source, or EAC dataset where available. Source providers may delay, amend, or correct their data. When a displayed value and the linked source disagree, the source record is authoritative and the cache should be refreshed or investigated.

Read the complete source and license details.