Matt Ruckman← Blog
Congressional Yield Index
Apr 4, 2026·congress
Who Shows Up
What happens when you measure not how Congress votes, but whether Congress bothers to show up when the vote is close. The answer involves two rooms, one species, and a question about courage that the data raises and cannot answer.
Mar 28, 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 21, 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 6.64%, which sounds small until you learn the model is right 97% of the time.