Matt Ruckman← Blog
Congressional Yield Index
Apr 1, 2026·campaign finance
The Plumbing
A technical companion to 'Every Dollar Counts, Every Vote Counts.' In which the construction of a machine that measures money's influence on Congress turns out to reveal something about the architecture of American transparency that the machine itself cannot measure.
Mar 29, 2026·campaign finance
Every Dollar Counts, Every Vote Counts
What happens when you feed 36 million campaign contributions into a machine learning model and ask it how much money predicts congressional votes. The answer is about 21.3%, which is simultaneously not that much and way too much.