| Name ↕ | Party ↕ | State ↕ | Chamber ↕ | Independence Score ↓ | Missed % ↕ | Label ↕ | Consensus Dev. ↕ grouped by chamber | Partisan Votes ↕ |
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Consensus deviation carries its denominator because the two chambers do not supply comparable ones. Most of the House's bipartisan votes are suspension-of-the-rules bills — the classic noncontroversial passage vote — and it holds roughly three times as many of them as the Senate, whose bucket is mostly cloture motions and motions to proceed that happened to align. A single Senate defection therefore moves the rate about three times as far. Sorting by this column groups the chambers rather than ranking them against each other.
Caucus drift appears once the archive covers a term from its start — three or more weekly snapshots, the first within 90 days of the Congress convening, and no gap longer than 45 days. A term the archive only caught the tail of would plot a flat line by construction, so it gets no chart.
Welcome
This site tracks how often members of Congress vote as part of the two-headed Borg. Deviation is applauded in this framing, serving as an indicator of those voting their conscience rather than buckling to the whip. Other scorecards use ostensibly positive labels such as "Party Loyalty" or "Ideological Alignment"; we lean hard the other way and give a shout out to those who buck the trend. Read the scale upside down and it works as a straight loyalty tracker.
Most scorecards measure how often a member votes with their party when the two parties disagree. That's useful, but it misses half the picture. When both party leaderships agree, those votes are typically invisible to standard analyses. The consensus deviation score captures how often a member breaks from bipartisan agreement — the moments when the Borg collectively wants a Yea, and someone votes No anyway. It sits beside the Independence score rather than inside it; the two measure different things and the scale would flatter one at the other's expense.
Breaking ranks is also not worth the same on every vote. Defecting when your party votes as a bloc is real independence; landing on the losing side of a 50/50 party split is not, so partisan deviation is weighted by how united the party was on each vote. That weighted number is the Independence score, and it is unkind: most of Congress sits under 1%, which is to say most of Congress almost never breaks ranks at all. “Where everyone lands”, above, is the shape of that.
Methodology
Every definition, in full
- What's counted Recorded Yea and Nay votes cast during the Congress shown. Scores are cumulative across the whole term, not a rolling window — which is why they barely move week to week.
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Partisan deviation
On votes where the two parties split, how often the member voted against their own party's majority — each vote weighted by the party's cohesion on it, from 1.0 for a unanimous party down to 0.0 for an even split. The unweighted rate is still published in the data as
party_unity_pct. - Consensus deviation On votes where both party majorities agreed, how often the member broke from that bipartisan consensus. Not weighted.
- Independence score Weighted partisan deviation, expressed as a percentage. Higher = more independent from leadership. Consensus deviation is not folded in: it runs about six times larger, so averaging the two produced a number that tracked consensus deviation almost perfectly and said little about party discipline. The two are reported side by side instead.
- Attendance Tracked separately and deliberately kept out of the score — showing up is not the same thing as being independent. Over every rollcall their chamber held between their first and last recorded vote, missed % counts the ones with no Yea or Nay from them: Present, Not Voting, and rollcalls with no row for them at all.
- Party leaders The Speaker plus each party's leader and whip in each chamber are badged, not excluded. They schedule the votes they then vote on, so their loyalty is partly loyalty to an agenda they set themselves. Use the filter to hide or isolate them.
- Who's left out Members with fewer than 30 recorded votes — too few to produce a meaningful score. Also the President, whose announced positions Voteview records as cast votes, and the six non-voting delegates, who are barred from final-passage votes and so can't be ranked against members who aren't.
- Independents Members displayed as Independent are scored against the caucus they align with. Any independent with no caucus to deviate from is left out.