Election Coverage: Applying Voting Records to Candidates

The idea

Our legislator stance scores work because voting records don't lie. A press release can say anything; a recorded vote can't be taken back. So when we looked at the 2026 election, we asked the same question we ask of sitting members: how will these people actually govern?

For a lot of candidates, the answer is already sitting in a record somewhere. We extended the methodology to cover them.

What's new on the site

• Elections index — every 2026 race, grouped by office, with contested-primary flags and a countdown
• Race pages: candidates separated by primary, side-by-side issue stance comparison, endorsements, and campaign finance
• Governor's record panel on the gubernatorial race — every bill signed or vetoed, with the political direction of each action
• Congressional stances for candidates who currently hold or recently held federal office, scored from their US House or Senate voting record

The hard part: scoring non-incumbents

Stance scores are easy when the candidate is already in the legislature — we have their votes. The interesting cases are the ones where the candidate isn't a sitting state legislator but still has a public record somewhere else.

The current governor, running for re-election, has a record of bills signed and vetoed. A sitting member of Congress running for governor has years of roll-call votes in Washington. We score those candidates from the record they actually have, using the same issue categories we use for state legislators — and we label the source clearly on the page so you can see which record a given score came from.

One thing we don't do: invent a score for a candidate with no prior voting record. A first-time challenger running for a state house seat simply doesn't have the data behind them, and we'd rather show nothing than guess. You'll see the other candidates in the race scored and that candidate left blank — that's intentional.

Money and endorsements

Campaign finance data comes from the FEC for federal races and from state filings for state races, shown as a side-by-side comparison on each race page. Endorsements go a step further: where an endorser has their own voting record, we compute how closely that record aligns with the positions of the candidate they're backing. Sometimes the alignment is obvious. Sometimes it isn't.

Go look at your race

The primary is June 2. Start at the elections page and find your district. If something looks off — a candidate missing, a score that doesn't match a record you know — tell us at contact@pierrereview.com. User feedback is how this gets better.