politics.of.today

Methodology & sources

How candidates are placed on the issue map, where the scores come from, and — just as important — where they deliberately stay blank.

The seven axes

Candidate positions were first “ballooned” into as many distinct policy clusters as the sources supported, then merged into seven general-purpose axes that recur across very different offices. Each axis runs 1–10.

Axis	1 (low end)	10 (high end)
Public investment style	stability-first, cautious deployment of public finance	activist use of public finance, fair-share taxation, anti-corporate concentration
Growth governance	land release, incentives, business-expansion first	managed growth, subsidy skepticism, community-benefit gating
Housing intervention	indirect/supply-oriented or limited role	active anti-speculation, affordability finance, stronger renter/homeowner protections
Worker power	little labor agenda or employer-first emphasis	unions, wage-theft enforcement, worker-rights expansion
Civil-rights protection	sparse rights agenda	explicit abortion, LGBTQ, voting-rights, anti-discrimination agenda
Safety model	consumer/social safety or weak law-enforcement emphasis	prosecutor/police/anti-crime institutional emphasis
Transparency style	insider/relationship/managerial politics	anti-corruption, disclosure, grassroots accountability, accessible reporting

How a position becomes a number

5 is the center of the observed field, not “moderate” in some national sense. A candidate with mixed-but-explicit evidence sits around 4–7; only clear outliers get pushed to 1–2 or 9–10.
Blanks stay blank. A candidate with no reliable evidence on an axis is left null and is simply ignored in matching — never converted into a fake “5”.
One set of preferences, every race. You set your sliders once. In each race, the app compares you with every candidate only on the axes where both of you have a value, takes the root-mean-square gap, reports it as an agreement percentage, and surfaces the closest candidate as your match for that race. Issues you mark as “doesn’t matter” drop out of the math, and matching never crosses races — your best Governor pick and your best Reno Mayor pick are computed independently.
Confidence is about evidence, not endorsement. “High / Medium / Low / No usable evidence” describes how much public record backs the placement — not whether a candidate is good.

Sourcing standard

The underlying research draws on candidate campaign sites and issue pages, long-form questionnaires, KRNV race overviews and interviews, the Blue Voter Guide and Sierra Nevada Ally endorsement/profile listings, and official filing pages. The safe rule for a non-null score is: either one explicit issue page plus one interview/questionnaire, or two independent issue-bearing sources. Everyone else stays partially or mostly null. A candidate is flagged for caution when the evidence is thin — low/no confidence, fewer than three scored axes, or only a single underlying source.

A few candidates withdrew after the filing deadline but still appear on the printed ballot (Josh Hebert and Samuel White in the NV-02 primary; Susan Broili Kamesch in Washoe County Commission District 2). They are shown as withdrawn and are never scored.

Limits — read these

Uneven coverage. Some candidates have websites, questionnaires, and TV interviews; others have only a filing page or an endorsement listing. The map necessarily knows more about some contenders than others.
Some races aren’t scored yet. Reno City Council Ward 2 and Sparks City Council Wards 2 and 4 were intentionally left out until the evidence is balanced enough across all contenders to avoid misleading precision.
These are analytic estimates. They are model inputs derived from cited material, not immutable truths and not the candidates’ own words verbatim. Treat them as a starting point for your own reading.
This is not an official election resource. Confirm candidates, races, and deadlines against the Washoe County Registrar of Voters and your official sample ballot.