Bridge Grades is a non-partisan report card for Congress.
We rank members of Congress on how collaboratively (or divisively) they govern. Our thesis is that a more collaborative and bipartisan Congress benefits Americans through a healthier Legislative Branch, stronger checks-and-balances, and more win-win legislation in our common interests.
Our methodology compiles objective 3rd-party non-partisan data into a 100 point index that sorts legislative “bridgers” from “dividers” based on what a person says (public statements, speeches, social media), and what a person does (authoring and sponsoring cross-partisan bills).
Why Bridge Grades?
We believe toxic polarization and hyper-partisanship is holding our nation back. We are inspired to introduce incentives for legislators to seek collaborative win-win solutions for our common interests.
Our multi-year quest is to build Bridge Grades into a transparent, open source, crowdsourced, and independently governed system protected from special interests. Durable and self-sustaining, we aim to build Bridge Grades into a public utility that educates citizens by offering an easy way to sort Congressional bridgers from dividers, while nudging incentives for House Representatives and Senators to engage in more collaborative governance for our common interests.
A project of non-partisan Mediators Foundation, Bridge Grades is deliberately an educational resource and neither participates in campaigns nor endorses specific candidates.
Created by Brad Porteus and built through a collaboration of a wide roster of contributors, Bridge Grades is a project of non-profit organization Mediators Foundation of Boulder, Colorado.
Grading rubric contributors
Across 2024 and into 2025, the initial development of the Bridge Grades rubric and methodology was a collaboration with IU Innovates (Indiana University’s Data Science as a Service) thanks to program sponsor Dr. David Wild at Luddy, program design mentor Kyle Stirling, Maria Aroca, and more than a dozen Masters candidates across two cohorts (Liz, Andy, Tyler, Siddharth, Utkarsh, Sai, Paul, Jason, Jaimie, Katrina, Bryant, Sanjana, Joy, Abubakar).
From there, Universidad del Norte, Data Science undergraduate phenoms Emanuel Carbonell Naranjo and Zharick Molina re-built our systems and elevated our processes through 2025-26 under Maria Aroca’s exemplary leadership and oversight.
Web, database, search, and other technical development had been led by Serge Scevenels, who serves as fractional CTO for Bridge Grades since late 2025. Since mid-2026, Ryan Sockwell has assisted with social media content development.
Other contributors
Michael Ernst for elegant graphic design. Dr. Royce Carroll for poly-sci sanity checks. Rich Hansen for helping kick off our very first alpha grading model. And to Rob Chesnut, Vanessa Otero, Mark Gerzon, Ron Cadet, and Al Cave for counsel, guidance, and mentorship along the way.
Gratitude to early patrons, friends, and family for providing seed funding to get us here.