The short version
The datasets are licensed CC BY 4.0. You may copy them, republish them, chart them, feed them to a model, or build a product on them. You do not need to ask. The one condition is credit.
How to credit it
Political Grades, politicalgrades.com, methodology v2.4, data generated 2026-07-26. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
A link to politicalgrades.com satisfies the attribution requirement. Naming the methodology version matters more than it looks: the rules change, every change is dated in the changelog, and a number quoted without its version cannot be checked later.
What the license covers — and what nobody can license
Covered: the compiled datasets, the selection and arrangement of categories, the computed scores, ranks and standardized figures, and the written methodology.
Not covered, because it is not ours to license: the underlying government data. Unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mortality data from the CDC, budget totals from OMB — none of that belongs to this site. In the United States facts are not copyrightable at all, and works of the federal government are public domain by statute. You already have the right to use every source number here, from the source, with or without this page.
That distinction is not a technicality. A site that claimed ownership of public facts while asking to be trusted about public facts would be arguing against itself.
The files
- governors.json — every governor score, with the inputs behind it
- congress.json — all sitting members of Congress
- cities.json and city_scores.json — the 50 largest cities
One thing this license is not
CC BY covers the data. It does not grant permission to use the Political Grades name or wordmark to suggest that this site endorses, produced or checked your work. Republish the numbers freely; just do not imply we vouched for what you did with them.
Found a mistake in something you reused? That is worth more to us than the citation — see disputes & corrections.