Methodology and standards
A ranking you cannot audit is an opinion wearing a costume. Here is how every number on this site is made.
The ruler
US Political Rank scores officeholders and institutions on documented actions only. Speeches do not score. Party labels do not score. Intentions do not score. If an action produced a documented outcome, it counts, whoever produced it.
Historical Percentile Ranking
Where officeholders are compared, we use Historical Percentile Ranking: each officeholder is scored against every predecessor who held the same office in the same jurisdiction. A governor of Utah is measured against every previous governor of Utah, not against the governor of California. This removes cross-state and cross-era bias at the root.
Citations
Every ranking names its sources in the methodology box at the top and lists them in full at the bottom. We cite primary sources first: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Congressional Record, official election canvasses, court records, agency inspectors general. Where we aggregate third-party ratings, every rater is named and attributed. A claim that cannot be sourced is removed.
Quantum verification
The Governor Performance Rankings and the flagship presidential investigation are verified with IBM Quantum hardware: category weights are perturbed with true quantum randomness across more than one hundred thousand samples to prove the rankings are robust no matter how the categories are weighted. A ranking that survives every reasonable weighting is not an editorial choice. It is arithmetic.
Settled versus contested
Every major report separates what the evidence settles from what remains legitimately contested, and states the contested part fairly for both sides. Certainty is earned, not asserted.
Corrections
Errors are corrected in place, flagged with the date, and logged on the corrections page. We never silently rewrite the record, and we never delete it. Weekly snapshots of the governor rankings are permanent.
Independence
This site is reader-funded through The Daily Rank and carries house advertising for our own assessment products, clearly labeled. We accept no political advertising, no campaign money, and no payment for placement in any ranking.
The accuracy report card
After every election cycle we grade our own published expectations against results, in public, on this site. The industry grades everyone but itself. We include ourselves.