The Bridge Grades Origin Story
The inspiration for Bridge Grades came in mid-2023 as a one-two punch.
First, Tim Urban’s provocative book “What’s Our Problem” helped explain that our political enemies are not specifically “the other guys” but rather when our primitive minds hijack our higher minds. His frameworks enlightened me that our allies are more vertical (how we think) than horizontal (what we think).
Second, the discovery of Vanessa Otero’s enlightening media bias chart (produced by her company Ad Fontes Media) which measures media outlets like newspapers, channels, and podcasts and plots them on a 2x2 matrix comparing political bias against a news reliability scale.
Political spectrum on horizontal axis
"Higher mind" vs "Primitive mind" on the vertical axis
Political Bias on the horizontal axis
News Value and Reliability on the vertical axis
We wondered, could we do something similar for members of Congress?
Bridge Grades was born from a goal to plot members of Congress onto a 2x2 framework: ideology on the left-to right horizontal axis, and a collaboration score on the vertical axis, based on compiling non-partisan data to measure how collaboratively or divisively each member governs.