Who represents you in Congress?
Enter your ZIP code to see how your representative and senators vote, who pays for their campaigns, and what they've passed.
Or search by name.
Stories: start here
At the kitchen table: then vs. now
Prices & jobs over time
Pick something you care about, like gas prices or jobs, and see how it changed over the years. Each dot is a law Congress passed; tap one to see who voted for it. Gray bands mark recessions, and dotted lines mark major events.
Indicator
Did new laws help?
When Congress passes laws on a topic, does the economy change afterward? This compares what happened in the months after those laws with what happens in an ordinary stretch of months. It shows what happened next, not proof that a law caused it.
The bottom line
Show the math
What happened, month by month
Every topic at a glance
The laws behind the numbers
Which party did better?
How did things go when Democrats or Republicans were in charge? Policies take time to work, so by default each month is credited to whoever was in power a year earlier. You can change that with the slider.
President by president
Follow the money
Campaigns run on donations. Much of it comes from PACs, groups that pool money from a company's employees, a union's members or people who share a cause. See who gives, who receives, and whether the money lines up with how members vote.
Where PAC money goes: groups → parties → members
Tap a group or a member to learn more.
Wider bands mean more money. "Other" groups together everyone else who got money from these groups. Politicians' own PACs (leadership PACs) and party committees are left out unless you choose them as the type of group.
Does the money line up with how they vote?
Each dot is a member of Congress. Left to right: where their campaign money came from. Bottom to top: how they vote.
About the data
Everything here comes from official public records: how every member of Congress voted, what became law, campaign finance reports, and government economic statistics. Nothing is estimated by us except where we say so.
What's included
Keep in mind
Where the data comes from
- Voteview (UCLA): every recorded vote in the House and Senate, and a score for how liberal or conservative each member votes.
- Congress.gov (Library of Congress): every law, who wrote it, its topic, vetoes and official cost estimates.
- Federal Election Commission: campaign finance reports: who gave money to whom.
- FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis): official statistics on prices, jobs, wages and more, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Commerce Department, the Treasury and the Census Bureau.
- congress-legislators (open-source project): biographies and terms of office.
- Census Bureau: which ZIP codes are in which congressional districts.
Glossary
Everything we track
For developers: refresh the data with python -m pipeline.