This rubric evaluates candidates by the source-supported likelihood that they will reduce concentrated power, strengthen democratic accountability, protect civil rights, materially improve conditions for working people, and expand the public good.
It is not an electability score, favorability score, endorsement machine, biography contest, or moral worth score. It is a structured civic-risk and civic-capacity assessment.
The rubric is criterion-referenced: candidates are compared to defined standards, not merely ranked against one another. The intended use is race-specific analysis, public accountability writing, candidate-questionnaire design, and repeatable re-scoring when new evidence appears.
No inspected standard provides an off-the-shelf academic method for scoring political candidates in exactly this way. This page therefore adapts adjacent standards:
| Standard family | How it applies here |
|---|---|
| Program evaluation standards | Require useful, feasible, fair, transparent, accurate, accountable evaluative judgment. |
| Evaluation ethics | Require systematic inquiry, competence, integrity, respect for affected people, common good, equity, and explicit limitations. |
| Educational / psychological testing standards | Require validity evidence for intended score interpretations, reliability / precision attention, fairness, score-interpretation safeguards, and documentation of scoring procedures. |
| Composite-indicator methodology | Requires a theoretical framework, indicator selection, normalization, weighting, aggregation, and uncertainty / sensitivity analysis. |
| Evidence-certainty frameworks such as GRADE | Support separating a numeric score from confidence in the evidence base and treating critical domains as possible caps on overall certainty. |
| Reproducibility / replicability norms | Require source preservation, method transparency, reviewable assumptions, and repeatable scoring logic. |
The standards discipline the method. They do not endorse the substantive political values in the rubric. Those values are stated openly in the construct definition below.
The construct measured is structural civic value.
A high-scoring candidate is source-supported as likely to:
A low-scoring candidate is source-supported as likely to reinforce concentrated power, weaken democratic accountability, restrict civil rights, reduce public capacity, treat corruption as peripheral, or use competence mainly to serve anti-public or donor-aligned ends.
Appropriate uses:
Prohibited or unsafe uses:
Use the canonical evidence language below when assigning category scores.
| Evidence class | Definition | Typical scoring force |
|---|---|---|
direct evidence |
Inspected source directly documents the action, statement, filing, vote, role, committee structure, or policy position. | Strongest evidence, especially for incumbents or official records. |
candidate commitment |
Campaign-controlled platform, questionnaire, interview, public forum, or candidate statement. | Score-supporting but weaker than governing behavior. |
reported relationship |
A reliable source reports a relationship or action, but the repo has not inspected stronger underlying records. | Useful but confidence-limited. |
donor/employer signal |
Campaign-finance employer, occupation, donor, vendor, JFC, loan, or outside-spending data that reveals network shape. | Relevant to risk and independence, never proof of control, influence, coordination, or intent. |
bounded negative source result |
A documented search did not locate a specific position or record within a stated source set. | Can limit confidence or implementation credit, but is not proof of absence everywhere. |
unresolved |
Evidence is missing, contradictory, nonpublic, future-filing-dependent, or requires candidate / agency response. | Do not convert into a claim; use as a confidence cap or QA gap. |
Scores use a 0-10 scale. Half-points are allowed; tenths should be reserved for aggregate scores.
| Range | Meaning |
|---|---|
0-1.9 |
Directly hostile to the construct, or evidence shows severe anti-democratic / anti-public / capture-aligned behavior. |
2.0-3.9 |
Materially reinforces concentrated power, civil-rights restriction, public-sector shrinkage, or donor-class alignment. |
4.0-5.4 |
Mixed, weak, ambiguous, shallow, or mostly symbolic evidence; may include competence without structural public-good commitment. |
5.5-6.4 |
Moderately positive but incomplete; supports some public-good or democratic commitments but has major gaps, capture risk, or weak implementation detail. |
6.5-7.4 |
Strong positive evidence across several domains, usually still limited by lack of governing record, unresolved relationships, or implementation gaps. |
7.5-8.4 |
Very strong evidence, including tested behavior, detailed implementation, and comparatively low capture risk. |
8.5-10 |
Rare. Requires sustained, source-supported, pressure-tested public-good and anti-corruption behavior with strong evidence quality across critical domains. |
The score is a gated weighted composite, not a pure average. The weighting reflects the theory that democracy, anti-corruption, donor independence, material conditions, civil rights, truth, and public capacity are not interchangeable branding features.
| Category | Weight | What It Measures |
|---|---|---|
| Democracy and anti-corruption reform | 15% |
Support for democracy protection, voting rights, campaign-finance reform, dark-money disclosure, lobbying limits, revolving-door restrictions, stock-trading restrictions, ethics enforcement, and institutional accountability. |
| Independence from donor class and corporate power | 15% |
Resistance to capture by large donors, corporate sectors, PACs, outside spenders, JFC structures, regulated industries, or professional networks likely to constrain public-interest action. |
| Material impact on working people | 10% |
Likely effect on wages, labor rights, health care, housing, childcare, taxes, worker safety, public benefits, and economic precarity. |
| Democratic institutions and civil rights | 10% |
Position and conduct on constitutional order, due process, voting access, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, executive overreach, and equal protection. |
| Truthfulness and epistemic integrity | 10% |
Relationship to factual claims, election legitimacy, conspiracy frames, policy honesty, correction behavior, and evidence-based reasoning. |
| Structural understanding versus symptom management | 10% |
Whether the candidate diagnoses underlying systems and power mechanisms rather than only visible symptoms or slogans. |
| Courage under pressure | 7.5% |
Willingness to take public, costly, or institutionally difficult stands against party, donor, ideological, or professional pressure. |
| Coalition building without surrendering principle | 7.5% |
Ability to build governing coalitions while preserving core public-good, civil-rights, and anti-corruption commitments. |
| Competence and governing capacity | 7.5% |
Administrative, legislative, policy, constituent-service, campaign, organizational, and implementation capacity. |
| Willingness to expand the public good | 7.5% |
Support for public institutions, public lands, public services, public workers, public health, public education, and durable public capacity. |
Use these anchors when assigning domain scores.
| Category | High score indicators | Low score indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Democracy and anti-corruption reform | Explicit public financing, small-donor matching, Citizens United reversal or neutralization, dark-money disclosure, lobbying / revolving-door limits, ethics enforcement, voting-rights protection. | No serious reform support, restrictive voting frames, acceptance of dark money, donor-protective posture, attacks on independent democratic institutions. |
| Donor / corporate independence | Small-dollar or local funding base, low outside-spending dependence, transparent relationships, willingness to name donor pressures, no major unresolved capture signals. | Heavy donor-class dependence, high outside-spending support, regulated-industry clusters, opaque JFC flows, conflict-risk networks, capture-aligned record. |
| Working people | Labor rights, collective bargaining, health-care access, childcare, housing, public benefits, wage policy, anti-precarity policy. | Anti-labor votes, benefit cuts, regressive tax policy, deregulation that increases worker risk, austerity. |
| Democratic institutions and civil rights | Voting access, due process, equal protection, reproductive and LGBTQ rights, checks on executive abuse, rights-protective court / agency posture. | Restrictive voting policy, anti-DEI or anti-rights legislation, punitive enforcement politics, rights rollback, executive impunity. |
| Truthfulness | Evidence-based claims, acceptance of election outcomes, correction of errors, careful uncertainty language, no disinformation pattern. | Conspiracy claims, inflationary threat rhetoric, election denial, repeated misleading claims, refusal to correct. |
| Structural understanding | Identifies mechanisms: money, institutional rules, markets, monopoly, labor power, public capacity, legal authority, administrative design. | Treats problems as isolated bad actors, culture-war slogans, charity-only fixes, or vague competence without structural account. |
| Courage under pressure | Demonstrated costly dissent, donor or party defiance, pressure-tested public answers, willingness to name powerful interests. | Avoidance, opportunistic triangulation, silence under pressure, party conformity despite contrary evidence. |
| Coalition building | Broad but accountable coalition, labor / civil-rights / local / institutional reach, principled compromise. | Exclusionary coalition, donor-only coalition, transactional endorsements, principle-free moderation, factional purity without governing path. |
| Competence | Record of implementation, staff management, legislative skill, policy fluency, constituent service, administrative realism. | Disorganization, unserious policy claims, weak implementation detail, no evident governing capacity. |
| Public good | Public-sector capacity, public lands, education, health, benefits, infrastructure, public workers, common-resource stewardship. | Public-sector shrinkage, privatization without accountability, selective public spending only for favored coercive functions. |
If a candidate does not support serious campaign-finance reform, including overturning or functionally neutralizing Citizens United, the final score cannot exceed 6.0.
This is a construct rule, not a purity test. Under this rubric, a candidate who will not confront the political-money system cannot receive a strong structural civic score because every other public-good promise remains exposed to the system that can defeat, dilute, or capture it.
Implementation:
Every overall score and every important category score should receive a confidence label.
| Confidence | Meaning |
|---|---|
high |
Mostly direct official or governing evidence, stable filings, roll calls, court records, audited records, direct transcripts, or multiple independent source classes. |
medium |
Strong candidate commitments, public-forum evidence, direct campaign-finance data, and some independent reporting, but limited governing record or unresolved relationships. |
low to medium |
Some direct evidence, but important categories depend on campaign statements, machine transcripts, negative search results, or unresolved financial / relationship questions. |
low |
Sparse evidence, mostly reported claims, biographical inference, weak public-source coverage, or major unresolved gaps. |
Do not let a numeric score imply more certainty than the evidence supports. A high-confidence low score can be more durable than a medium-confidence high score.
0 to 10 using the category anchors.0.3 points from the weighted composite unless a written override explains why the formula misrepresents the construct.Overrides are allowed because this is a structured professional judgment rubric, not a psychometric test. Overrides must be explicit, source-grounded, and reviewable.
Re-score when any of the following materially changes:
For any public-facing scorecard, include at least one robustness check:
+/- 5 percentage points;0.3 or more;If the ranking changes under reasonable weights or evidence exclusions, report that instability rather than hiding it.
Every scored candidate should have:
Raw source material should be preserved before synthesis whenever a live source is materially used.
The CO-05 scorecard is the first documented application of this rubric:
| Candidate | Current score | Confidence | Main driver | Main limiter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joseph F. Reagan | 7.0 |
medium | anti-corruption, labor, health-care, public-good, targeted-transcript, and Political Integrity Pledge evidence | mostly campaign commitments; Welcome relationship details, donor geography caveats, and one unsupported ICE statistic |
| Jessica Killin | 5.8 |
low to medium | competence, campaign execution, public-good commitments, and direct Citizens United / dark-money opposition | missing implementation detail and donor / finance / fintech network concerns |
| Jeff Crank | 2.8 |
high | direct congressional, FEC, roll-call, and outside-spending evidence | donor-friendly, anti-labor, restrictive-voting, anti-DEI, anti-reproductive-rights, and public-sector-shrinkage record |
The current CO-05 pages remain the source-specific evidence layer. This page is the reusable methodology layer.
15/15/10/10/10/10/7.5/7.5/7.5/7.5 weight scheme should remain fixed across offices or be recalibrated for state legislative, school board, county, or executive races.