← back to the roster

How the Ratings Work

Every candidate is placed on a six-point scale — from firmly pro-Israel (1) to most critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine (6) — using three kinds of evidence: how they vote, who funds and endorses them, and what they say.

A plain-language guide to the method · starting points, not rigid formulas · rules as of August 21, 2026

0How to read this

These are starting points, not formulas. Each rule suggests where a candidate begins; their own record can move them, and every final rating is a judgment written out in that candidate’s entry. The rules exist to keep those judgments consistent and to show our work — not to replace judgment with a scoreboard.

• We weigh three kinds of evidence: how a candidate votes (§2), who funds and endorses them (§3), and what they say in public (§4). A rating is set by the strongest, best-documented evidence, with the rest confirming it, holding it back, or complicating it.
• When the evidence points in different directions, §7 explains which kind we trust most. Every close call is written out so it can be revisited — and revised as we learn more.
• The scale measures support for Israel — specifically, how far a candidate is willing to pull that support back. It does not measure a positive plan for Palestinians, because almost no one in U.S. elections runs on one. So even the most critical candidates are judged mainly by how far they step away from backing Israel.

1The six-point scale

• Split ratings like 3/4: a candidate whose record genuinely sits between two levels. Usually a step toward limiting weapons (the higher number) held back by more supportive positions (the lower number). We write the lower number first.
• NR (“not rated”): no public position found yet. This means we haven’t documented an individual stance — not that the candidate is neutral.

2Evidence 1 — How they vote

The strongest and most verifiable evidence. Votes and bill sponsorships come from the official congressional record. What a candidate does in office counts for more than what they say they’ll do (§7).

Officeholders vs. challengers key distinction

• An officeholder is judged by how they vote; a challenger by what they promise. The same commitment counts differently depending on whether it’s a real vote or a campaign pledge.
• A sitting member who co-sponsors the Block the Bombs Act — a bill to block sales of offensive weapons to Israel — has taken a real conditioning action; a challenger who only says they support it has made a campaign promise, which counts for less.

Willingness to withhold offensive weapons

• Co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act (as a sitting member) is the clearest single sign a candidate will withhold offensive weapons, and it creates a strong presumption of 3/4 — but a presumption the rest of the record can override, not a fixed placement (see the next point). We read it as opposing offensive-weapons sales, not as approving defensive aid — support for defensive aid counts only if the candidate says so directly.
• In the Senate, repeatedly voting to block specific weapons sales (the Sanders resolutions) is the equivalent of co-sponsoring that bill — also a 3/4 (Markey, Luján). Voting only against the least controversial sales (rifles, bulldozers) is weaker and stays at 2/3 (Reed).
• The presumption gives way in both directions. Reaching a clean 4 takes more than one co-sponsorship — a hard vote against an aid package, several weapons-blocking measures, or the like. And a lone or late co-sponsorship surrounded by otherwise pro-Israel or frame-keeping votes — especially with lobby money still coming in — can hold at a flat 3 (Dean, Ansari, Vasquez, Lynch), or even 2/3 (Robert Garcia). What carries a co-sponsor to 3/4 is a second conditioning act or clean money (Scanlon).

Other votes and bills that matter

None of these is a scoring formula. No single vote sets a number; each is a piece of evidence that weighs the overall read toward one end or the other. The tier is the judgment on the whole record, not the sum of these rows.

3Evidence 2 — Who funds and endorses them

Endorsements are signs, not verdicts — adding or dropping one never changes a rating by itself; ratings move on a candidate’s actual record. Money is different: taking it from the major pro-Israel groups keeps a candidate at Tier 2, and publicly swearing it off can help lift them — either way the money itself moves the rating (the money rule, below).

The money rule

• Taking money from the counted pro-Israel committees since 2022 floors a candidate at the 2/3 edge, no matter how else they position themselves. It is a floor, not a flat rating — a candidate with cap money can sit at 2/3, but not past it on the strength of their positioning alone. Only publicly rejecting that money — plus a real record of withholding weapons — lifts them past 2/3, and only to the edge of 3/4, never more critical on the money question alone.
• Money that has stopped does not floor. The test is whether the relationship is live, not whether it ever existed. A candidate with a verified zero from every counted committee in the current cycle reads as a lapsed relationship: the money is recorded, weighed and shown, but it does not hold the tier. Money in the current cycle floors regardless of how small. Twenty records sit past 2/3 on this test — Foushee, Ansari, Salinas, Deluzio, Bonamici, Hoyle, Dean, Casten and others whose lobby money ended in 2022 or 2024. Eleven remain floored because they are still taking it — Mike Quigley is the closest case, at $3,012 in the current cycle against $25,025 in 2022, and his record already says so: money in all three cycles, live rather than lapsed.
  This test has a real cost: it has to be re-checked every cycle, and a candidate can move simply by the calendar turning over. The alternative — a dollar threshold — was tested and rejected, because the amounts run in an unbroken continuum from $1,000 to $568,730 with no empty gap to put a line in, unlike the 5% network test below.
• Taking pro-Israel money is not leadership. It’s going along, not leading — so it never earns a Tier 1 rating on its own (§5).
• Money spent for a candidate isn’t leadership either. Heavy outside spending on a candidate’s behalf — by AIPAC’s super PAC or crypto PACs — is other people backing them, not the candidate leading, so it doesn’t lift them to Tier 1. Adrian Boafo (MD-5) had roughly $12M in AIPAC and crypto money spent to help him win, and he’s still a flat 2 — none of it is his own leadership.
• Money spent against a candidate is the opposite of capture. The rule counts money that backs a candidate. When the pro-Israel lobby spends to beat someone, that is evidence about the lobby’s view of them, and it never holds them at Tier 2. Read literally without this, the rule inverts on its own evidence: AIPAC’s super PAC spent $5,242,260 against Cori Bush in 2024, which on a direction-blind reading would keep a Tier 5 at Tier 2 on money spent to defeat her. Where independent expenditures have been pulled, the entry records which way the money pointed and the roster shows it as Backed by or Opposed by. Cori Bush and Summer Lee are the clearest cases — $5,242,260 and $3,273,952 spent to defeat them, and neither carries a cent of funding drag for it. Abdul El-Sayed ($2,346,358 against), Randy Villegas ($500,000) and Delia Ramirez ($143,348) are the same shape.
• The money rule covers the pro-Israel lobby, not only AIPAC. It counts AIPAC, DMFI and CUFI, and the rest of the lobby’s military-aid committees: NORPAC, Pro-Israel America, the Republican Jewish Coalition, U.S. Israel PAC, Friends of Israel PAC, To Protect Our Heritage, MDACC, Americans United in Support of Democracy, Grand Canyon State Caucus and Americans for Good Government. The test is what the committee exists to fund: US military support for Israel. Community and party-political Jewish PACs stay out — J Street, JAC, BICPAC, SUNPAC, California Jewish Democrats and Mainstream Democrats do not count.
  Checking this against every federal record first: 84 candidates take money from the wider set, 76 of them were already held at Tier 2 by AIPAC or DMFI money, and the 7 it newly reaches — Brian Mast, Max Miller, Julia Letlow, Mike Rogers, Ed Gallrein, Kurt Alme and Ken Paxton — all already sit at Tier 1 or 1/2. Widening the rule moved no one. That holds on the records where money is tier-decisive too: of the 31 candidates at or past the 2/3 edge carrying lobby money, the wide and narrow committee sets capture the same 31. The broader lobby and AIPAC fund the same people, so the narrow rule was not letting anyone through. (An earlier version of this list named eight and included Eugene Vindman; a dated sweep of all thirteen committees across three cycles found no money for him in any of them, and he has been removed.)
  Being listed by a tracker is not the same as taking AIPAC money. Track AIPAC publishes career totals across roughly twenty pro-Israel PACs and their large donors, so its figures include committees this rule counts and several it does not. Michael Whatley appears there at $26,156 from American Principles and the RJC — neither of which is AIPAC. Money is recorded here against the committee that actually sent it.
• Money laundered through another PAC still counts — above 5%. AIPAC, DMFI and CUFI also give to other PACs, which then spend on candidates, so a candidate can be carried by pro-Israel money with no direct link on any filing. A committee counts as part of the network when at least 5% of what it raised came from those three, and its spending is then treated like theirs. The 5% line was not picked for roundness: measuring every committee in the network, the shares fall into two groups with nothing at all between 4.5% and 7.1%, so the line sits in an empty gap rather than splitting a cluster. It captures 314 Action Fund (7.1%) and Bold America (12.1%), and excludes every party and caucus committee — the DCCC is 0.03%. United Democracy Project sent $5,000,000 to Standing Strong PAC in 2024 and never itemised it; Standing Strong’s own filing names the source.

What the endorsements mean

• J Street — a mainstream liberal Zionist group. Its endorsement doesn’t move a candidate toward either pole, and it marks no outer edge either: its 90 endorsees on this roster run from Tier 1 to Tier 5 — Troy Jackson and Frederick Haynes III sit at 5. Since July 2026 its PAC’s first criterion asks only for “US security assistance to Israel that adheres to US law,” and J Street itself backs phasing out financial aid to Israel “including for ballistic missile defense.” It has backed a member who voted against restocking Iron Dome (García, 2021) and the author of the Block the Bombs Act (Ramirez). Of its 2026 PAC money to sitting members, about three-fifths went to those who cosponsored Block the Bombs or voted to block an arms sale in the Senate; nearly half of all its candidate money went to challengers with no votes yet. It does not tell you an endorsee backs the aid package, opposes BDS, or even affirms Israel as a Jewish state — García and Khanna, J Street endorsees at 4/5, cosponsored the 2026 right-of-return resolution. The record decides.
• USCPR Action — endorses candidates who commit, in its words, to “block U.S. weapons transfers and military funding to Israel,” to support “the BDS movement,” and to “refuse to take any money from AIPAC,” so the endorsement points to a strong record. Its endorsees on this roster still run from Tier 4 to 6, and we rate each on their own actions: where a candidate has no BDS position of their own on the record (Ramirez, Pearson), the card doesn’t show the endorsement.
• RJC (Republican Jewish Coalition) — a pro-Israel sign, and a partisan one: it endorses only Republicans, even against a pro-Israel Democrat, so on its own it tells you little beyond party. Not leadership.
• JVP Action (Jewish Voice for Peace) — the anti-Zionist Jewish pole. JVP itself is anti-Zionist and has backed BDS since 2015, but its PAC’s stated test for candidates is broader: those who “unapologetically and consistently support Palestinian rights” and are “working toward an end to U.S. complicity in Israeli apartheid,” running, it says, on an end to military funding and an arms embargo. So the endorsement points toward Tiers 5–6 — 13 of its 15 endorsees on this roster sit there — without certifying a position on Zionism, BDS or the right of return. Like USCPR it points; the candidate’s own words still set the tier.
• If rival groups both claim a candidate — J Street and JVP Action both endorse Frederick Haynes III — no single endorsement decides it; their own record does.

4Evidence 3 — What they say

A candidate’s own public words — weighed below their voting record, but the main evidence for challengers who have no votes yet.

Calling it genocide

• Using the word “genocide” for Gaza in one’s own voice is a real sign, pointing toward Tier 4. But the word alone doesn’t get a candidate past 3/4 without an actual step to withhold weapons.
• Taking it back is penalized: softening “genocide” to “war crimes,” or retracting it, pulls the rating down.

Positions that don’t earn critical credit — and some that keep a candidate from reaching the critical end

Some stances are so common across the mainstream that, on their own, they earn a candidate no credit for being critical of Israel:

• Criticizing Netanyahu or his government specifically
• Framing the issue around Iran

Others go a step further: they show a candidate is still working inside a pro-Israel frame. They won’t by themselves make a candidate more pro-Israel, but they keep a candidate short of the critical end (Tiers 5–6) — they help keep a candidate out of Tiers 5–6, and can make even a Tier 4 a reach:

• Supporting a two-state solution
• Affirming Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself
• Voting for pro-Israel antisemitism-definition bills (e.g. codifying the IHRA definition)

Concern for Palestinian civilians what separates a 2 from a 1/2

• Concern for Palestinian civilians, expressed in their own words — saying aid must reach Gaza, naming civilian suffering — is what separates a flat Tier 2 from a firmer 1/2. What counts is a statement made without simultaneously invoking Israel’s need to defend itself. Note the verb: we record that a candidate expressed concern. We do not claim to know whether it is genuine.
• Boilerplate doesn’t count. A generic line about “humanitarian aid” paired with a pledge to keep Israel armed is positioning, not concern. The Boafo test: “mobilize humanitarian aid for Palestinian civilians” said right alongside “ensure Israel has the security assistance it needs” is thin — a 1/2 is defensible.

Questioning Israel’s legitimacy Tier 5–6

• The positions at the critical end of the scale challenge Israel’s legitimacy as a state: identifying as anti-Zionist, backing BDS by name, rejecting Israel as a Jewish state, or supporting the Palestinian right of return.
• One such position on a thin record sits at 5/6 (Sairitupac, Huntley). A clean 6 needs one of these backed by real leadership or sustained activism, with no hedging (Orkin, Kawas). A candidate with otherwise strong positions who has also affirmed Israel as a Jewish state sits at 5/6 rather than a clean 6 (Omar).

5The far pro-Israel end — the leadership signal

Telling apart a clean 1, a 1/2, and a flat 2 comes down to two questions: does the candidate lead, and do they express any concern for Palestinian civilians?

• Tier 1 is for leaders, not just reliable supporters. Reaching it takes more than voting a certain way and taking PAC money — the candidate has to lead, in one of these ways: writing Israel legislation themselves, running a marquee pro-Israel fundraising operation, building their brand on hardline rhetoric, or personally driving anti-BDS enforcement. We call this a leadership signal.
• No leadership signal + no expressed concern for Palestinian civilians = 1/2.
• No leadership signal + concern for Palestinian civilians expressed without invoking Israel’s need to defend itself = flat 2.
• What is not leadership: taking pro-Israel money, having money spent on your behalf, voting reliably, co-sponsoring (as opposed to writing) a bill, or being endorsed. All of that is going along, not leading.

6The most-critical end (5 vs 6)

• Tier 5 requires a firm, consistent stance — a full weapons embargo including defensive systems, or cutting off all aid. Wavering counts against a candidate; a late conversion counts for less than a long record; funding missile defense during the genocide generally rules out Tier 5.
• State and local officeholders can’t vote on federal arms or aid. Their Tier 5 floor is met either by their own stated federal position — an embargo or an end to all military aid, in their own words — or by the material measures within their reach, such as sponsoring or cosponsoring New York’s Not on Our Dime Act, together with naming the genocide. Sponsoring a bill is a measure, not a legitimacy position: the line that separates 6 is the same for every candidate.
• Campaigning for the ticket that armed the genocide. A candidate who publicly advocated for the Biden–Harris ticket in 2024 — as a surrogate, at the convention, at rallies, or by organizing voters for it — after already calling Israel’s assault a genocide in their own voice carries a marker recording it. It counts as wavering: it can keep a candidate short of a clean tier at the critical end, but it never sets a tier alone. Endorsing without campaigning does not trigger it, and neither does naming the genocide only afterward.
• Tier 6 requires questioning Israel’s legitimacy as a state (§4) — something beyond an embargo and the word “genocide,” which are Tier 4–5 territory on their own.
• Being endorsed by the most critical members of Congress (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez) doesn’t by itself prove a Tier 5 — those figures are around 4/5 themselves.

Tier 6 is harder still — and the most-critical end runs well past electoral politics. Even the most critical figures in American politics are surpassed by the scholars and organizers who have carried this movement from outside electoral life. That fuller position tends to name itself anti-Zionist plainly; to treat BDS as one tactic among many rather than the whole of resistance; to center justice, return, and decolonization rather than offering “coexistence” or a two-state endgame as the primary frame; and to insist on the right of return and an honest reckoning with 1948. Measured against that horizon, even the strongest candidates here — those backing a complete embargo, naming the genocide without hedging, and affirming Palestinian return — represent the leading edge of what is currently sayable in American electoral politics, which remains far behind the movement it trails.

7When the evidence conflicts

When the three kinds of evidence disagree, we trust them roughly in this order:

• 1. What they’ve done in office — votes, sponsorships, bills they wrote. Strongest and hardest to fake.
• 2. What they say in their own words — pledges, debate answers. The main evidence for challengers.
• 3. Endorsements — they color the picture but never set a rating alone.
• 4. Money taken, or spent for them — can hold a rating down (the money rule), but isn’t a rating on its own.

The record beats the label. When a candidate’s own actions go further than the group endorsing them, their actions win. Delia Ramirez is endorsed by J Street but rates a Tier 4 on her own record — she wrote the Block the Bombs Act.

8Split ratings

• A candidate whose record genuinely sits between two levels gets a split (like 3/4) — usually a step toward limiting weapons (the higher number) held back by more supportive positions (the lower number). We write the lower number first, and both count in the totals.
• Adelita Grijalva is 3/4: she co-sponsored Block the Bombs and used the word “genocide” (the reach toward 4), but frames her goal around a two-state solution, humanitarian aid, and hostage release, and had a mainstream record before Congress (the pull back to 3).

9The computed base grade

Alongside the hand-set tier, every member with a voting record also gets a computed Base grade (1–10) — the reproducible layer, shown as a sortable column on the roster. It scores the voting record on the weighted catalog, minus the funding drag, to set a Tier 1–4 anchor; the final tier then adds the judgment layer — toward the critical end for the legitimacy-line stance (BDS, anti-Zionist identity, right of return) and, more mildly, for expressed concern for Palestinian civilians (what moves a 1/2 to a flat 2); toward the pro-Israel end for frame-keeping (Iron Dome support, affirming Israel’s right to exist) and candor problems. Funding doesn’t just subtract — AIPAC/DMFI money holds the tier at 2.

Reading the grade. n is how many vote & funding records stand behind it (roll calls cast, cosponsorships, pro-Israel money, gap-catalog votes); the roster greys the number when n is small and darkens it as it grows, so a grade resting on two records never looks as certain as one built from a decade of votes — the score itself is unchanged, only how confidently it’s shown. The % beside it is the share of the member’s weighted votes that fell on the Palestinian side (consistency): Lateefah Simon reads 7.2 · n4 · 100% — a strong, perfectly consistent record, greyed because only four signals back it, while Rashida Tlaib’s 10 · n17 rests on seventeen.

How each base became the tier

These twenty are the original hand calibration that tuned the weights — the base shown is the hand grade the model is fit to. They illustrate the toward-either-pole adjustment logic that turns a base grade into the final tier.

• Tlaib (10 → 6), Omar (10 → 5/6), Summer Lee (10 → 5) — maxed base (embargo-consistent; Tlaib and Omar voted to strip Iron Dome from the 2021 supplemental, which Summer Lee was not yet in Congress for — her maxed base rests on her later record), then the legitimacy stance pushes them into 5–6. Omar sits a notch under Tlaib for a 2023 “Jewish and democratic state” hedge — a defensive concession co-sponsored while she faced removal from the Foreign Affairs Committee, which did not prevent her ouster and which she said changed none of her positions.
• Khanna (8 → 4/5) — a conditioning record past two cosponsorships (authored a settlements resolution, own-voice genocide) pushes past 4 toward 5, short of the full stance.
• Ramirez (10 → 4), Pressley (9 → 4), Carson (8 → 4), Jayapal (8.5 → 4), Balint (7 → 4) — strong bases that land at 4; no legitimacy stance that pushes past it on these records — all three are original cosponsors of H.Res.409 on the right of return, which is a legitimacy-line marker, but §4 puts one such position at 5/6 only on a thin record, and theirs are not thin. Pressley holds at a flat 4 because her arms stance is offensive-only and she calls for no full embargo.
• Merkley (9 → 3/4), Markey (8 → 3/4), Luján (7 → 3/4) — strong Senate arms-block bases pulled back by frame-keeping: they fund Iron Dome, affirm Israel’s right to exist, emphasize two states.
• Ossoff (5 → 3) — real but discriminating arms-block votes (only the most defensible sales), which is what holds him at a flat 3. On money he is floored at 2/3 like the rest of the band: DMFI spent $102,269 supporting him in the 2026 cycle, which is live money. (This entry previously read “AIPAC actually spent against him, so no funding drag.” No opposition spending against Ossoff appears on Schedule E in any in-window cycle — the direction claim was wrong and has been replaced with the filings.)
• Sylvia Garcia (4 → 2/3) — a Block-the-Bombs cosponsor, but a 2026 signer who took AIPAC money in past cycles and a J Street trip; the money keeps her at 2/3.
• Booker (3 → 2) — the clearest case of money holding a tier: $735,781 in pro-Israel money re-derived from the FEC in Aug 2026, and an AIPAC favorite, so even his first-ever 2026 arms-block votes can’t move him past 2 yet.
• Coons (2 → 2), Meeks (1.5 → 2) — reliable pro-aid records, and neither is a maximalist leader, which is what keeps them off a clean Tier 1. Money is the secondary fact here, not the operative one — Coons’s own entry rests on daylight rather than on his $475,179.
• Norcross (1 → 1/2) — the case where a low Base grade was not the answer. The computed grade sees votes and funding; it cannot see that he is the sole original cosponsor of the U.S.-Israel Defense Partnership Act, alongside its Republican sponsor. That is the leadership marker the Base is blind to by design. It is a real one but a narrow one — a single cosponsorship rather than a sustained leadership record — so with no Gaza-civilian daylight anywhere in his record he sits at 1/2 rather than either a flat 2 or a clean Tier 1. A low Base is evidence about a voting record, never a ceiling on Tier 1.
• Frankel (0.5 → 1), Sherman (0.5 → 1) — not just pro-Israel voters but leaders: Sherman co-chairs the Israel Allies Caucus; Frankel is the sole Democratic author of the Israel Security Assistance Support Act and led the effort behind it. That leadership is the Tier 1 signal money alone can’t buy.

How the base tracks the outside metrics. The base correlates tightly with USCPR (both discriminate on conditioning conduct) and IMEU, and loosely with AJP — AJP’s within-chamber curve inflates mainstream liberals, so a Sylvia Garcia grades B on AJP while sitting at a 4 base. GovTrack (general left–right) barely tracks at all — proof that overall ideology doesn’t predict the Israel position. Base grades are a first calibration, meant to be adjusted, with the weights tuned so the column reproduces the tiers we already trust.

10Who’s included, and how current this is

• Who’s tracked: candidates who have taken a documented position on Palestine and Israel, or who have been targeted by the pro-Israel or Palestinian-rights money and endorsement networks we follow. A candidate’s absence is a choice about scope, not a verdict on them.
• How current: money totals, endorsements, vote counts, and race statuses are accurate as of the date at the top and change as the election proceeds.
• Why the scale leans one way: the pro-Israel side of U.S. politics is more organized and better funded, so there is simply more of it to document. That imbalance reflects the landscape, not the project’s sympathies.

These rules are guides, not verdicts. Every rating is a documented judgment written out in the candidate’s entry, and any rule here can change as the record and the election develop. This page is a companion to the roster.