119th Congress · Independence Index

A weekly-updated dashboard scoring every member of Congress on their independence from party leadership and bipartisan consensus.

Live site: https://<your-username>.github.io/<repo-name>/

How scores work

Each member receives an Independence Score — the average of:

1. Partisan deviation — how often they voted against their party majority on contested partisan votes
2. Consensus deviation — how often they voted against bipartisan consensus (both parties agreed but they didn't)

Score	Label
< 1%	Mindless Drone
1–5%	Yes Man
5–10%	Reluctant Rebel
10–20%	Frequent Dissenter
20–30%	Rebellious Streak
30%+	Lone Wolf

Data sourced from Voteview.com. Sanders and King are scored against the Democratic caucus they align with, but displayed as Independent.

Setup

1. Create repo and push files

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-username>/<repo-name>.git
git push -u origin main

2. Enable GitHub Pages

• Go to repo Settings → Pages
• Source: Deploy from a branch
• Branch: main · Folder: /docs
• Click Save

3. Run the Action once to generate initial data

• Go to Actions → Update Voting Index
• Click Run workflow

After ~30 seconds, docs/data.json will be committed and the site will be live.

The Action runs automatically every Monday at 8am UTC thereafter.

Local development

pip install pandas requests
python analyze_votes.py        # generates docs/data.json
cd docs && python -m http.server 8000
# open http://localhost:8000

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disclaimer

The author has zero background in data science, python, or anything else. This may all be hallucinatory AI slop. Enter at your own risk. ooooh, scaaaaary...