The Scoreboard Does Not Care

Only actions matter

I judge politicians one way. What did they sign, what did it do, and can I document it. Not what they said. Not what their party says they meant. Not what my own gut wants to be true. Speeches are free. Signatures cost something. So I score signatures.

This sounds easy. It is not. It means writing down results before you know whether you will like them. It means publishing the ranking the method produces, not the ranking your friends expect. I have done this once before, at Black Intervention, where I ranked presidents strictly by their measurable impact on Black Americans (blackintervention.com). The framework pays no attention to which party a president belonged to. It counts documented actions and their documented effects. Nothing else gets a vote.

The results nobody ordered

The method produced results that fit nobody's script. Donald Trump ranked first on measurable impact for Black Americans. Abraham Lincoln ranked fifth. Barack Obama ranked ninth. I did not choose those outcomes. The framework did, and every input is checkable.

The receipts for the top spot are federal documents, not campaign ads. The First Step Act of 2018 made the Fair Sentencing Act's crack cocaine reforms retroactive, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission's own retroactivity reports show thousands of sentence reductions with roughly nine in ten going to Black Americans (U.S. Sentencing Commission, First Step Act of 2018 Resentencing Provisions Retroactivity Data Report). The Black unemployment rate fell to a then-record low of 5.4 percent in 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, series LNS14000006). The FUTURE Act of 2019 made permanent 255 million dollars in annual STEM funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions (Public Law 116-91, Congress.gov). Signatures. Numbers. Sources.

Lincoln at fifth offends the other direction. The Emancipation Proclamation and the push for the Thirteenth Amendment are the two largest single actions on the entire board (National Archives). But the framework scores a full record, including what was left undone at the moment of maximum power, and it scores every president on the same scale. Obama at ninth has receipts too. The Affordable Care Act cut the uninsured rate among Black Americans by roughly a third after its coverage expansions took effect (KFF, Health Coverage by Race and Ethnicity). Ninth on a list of 46 is not an insult. It is a measurement.

Discomfort is not evidence

People read those three rankings and assume an agenda. Which agenda depends entirely on which name upset them. That reaction proves the point. If the list flattered one party from top to bottom, you should suspect the list. This one flatters no party. It flatters documentation.

If that produces discomfort, the discomfort belongs to the reader, not the data. I did not write that sentence to be cute. It is the operating principle of everything I publish. Your feelings about a president are yours. The Sentencing Commission's tables are not. When the two collide, exactly one of them is evidence.

USPoliticalRank runs on the same rule, applied wider. Governors, senators, states, elections. Same ruler for both parties, methodology first, citation on every claim, and corrections appended rather than hidden. Some weeks the scoreboard will please you. Some weeks it will not. It was never built to please you. It was built to be checked.