Methods

Abstract

America's Political Pulse uses a large language model to code every post on X by members of Congress, state legislators, congressional challengers, governors and candidates for governor, and every floor speech, press release and e-newsletter issued by members of Congress. Each statement is coded for five rhetorical categories (personal attacks, policy criticism, policy discussion, bipartisanship and credit claiming), for the use of extreme labels, and for the policy areas it addresses. As of July 2026 the archive contained 6.8 million coded posts and 1.9 million coded passages from speeches, press releases and newsletters. The model receives each statement without information about its speaker. In a validation against two trained coders, GPT-4o, the model used for most of 2025 and the first half of 2026, was 97 percent accurate on personal attacks and 81 percent accurate on policy criticism (Jacob, Lelkes and Westwood 2026). Because earlier statements are not recoded when the model or the unit of analysis changes, series that span these changes combine labels produced under different procedures. This paper describes how the labels are produced and why, how to use them, and how to reproduce them.

Abstract

Common-Space Ideal Points (CSIPs) place members of Congress, state legislators, statewide officials and candidates for federal and state office on a single left–right scale. The estimates combine nearly 10 million roll-call votes from Congress and the state legislatures, contributions from 9.7 million individual donors linked across federal and state disclosure records, and the phrases legislators use in their official communications. Roll calls identify the ideological dimension; contributions and phrases, calibrated against the votes within one model, extend the scale to politicians who have not voted and connect the legislatures to one another. The October 2026 estimates cover 43,039 politicians and committees, including every member of the House, 98 of 100 senators and 7,295 of 7,336 sitting state legislators. Within party, the scores correlate with DW-NOMINATE between .67 and .83 for members whose votes enter the model and between .39 and .53 for members whose votes are withheld. This paper describes how the estimates are produced and why, how to use them, and how to reproduce them.

Abstract

The America's Political Pulse survey is a high-frequency study of affective polarization, support for violations of democratic norms and support for partisan violence among American adults. From September 2022 through July 2025 the survey interviewed approximately 1,000 adults from YouGov's online panel each week, and it has since been fielded about once a month; through June 2026 it comprised 157 surveys, 167,000 interviews and 99,000 respondents. The core instrument comprises feeling thermometers toward the two parties, five items on democratic norms and six concrete scenarios of escalating partisan violence, all asked in the same form in every survey. Pooled across surveys, support for arson, assault with a deadly weapon or murder ranges from 1.2 to 2.6 percent of partisans, depending on the act and the party. We also estimate state-level opinion by multilevel regression and poststratification and field the core instrument in five other countries. This paper describes how the survey is designed and why, how to use the public data, and how to reproduce the published estimates.