How the Texas scores work

The vote records

• Every roll call comes from the House and Senate Journals, the Legislature's official record of each day on the floor, which print every member's vote by name. The Texas Legislative Council publishes them online, one for each legislative day. We use every Journal of the 89th Legislature: the 2025 regular session and both called sessions that summer, 7,930 roll calls (4,235 in the House, 3,695 in the Senate), Jan. 14, 2025 to Sept. 4, 2025. The Legislature doesn't meet again until January 2027, so there are no 2026 votes.
• The House numbers its record votes; every number in all three sessions is accounted for, and the only ones left out are quorum calls, which record who was present rather than a vote on a question.
• A roll call is used only if its lists add up to the counts the Journal prints and name every member serving that day exactly once. All of them did.
• The Senate names only the side it must: when it prints no list of yeas, every senator not named as voting nay, present not voting, or absent voted yea. Where it prints “Same as previous roll call,” the vote repeats the one before it. A Senate vote on which “all members are deemed to have voted” is not a roll call and isn't counted.
• The Senate usually takes two roll calls to pass a bill on one day: one to suspend the rule that a bill be read on three separate days, then final passage, often with the same result. Both are roll calls the Journal records, so both count.
• Committee votes aren't included. Neither are voice votes, which don't record how each member voted, or the House's election of its Speaker.
• After a vote, members can have a statement printed in the Journal saying how they meant to vote. Those statements don't change the record, and these numbers count only the record.
• Contested votes are roll calls where the losing side got at least 10% of the yeas and nays: 2,190 in the House and 1,634 in the Senate. Every roll call has its own page. Floor votes lists the contested and party-line ones, and every roll call on request.

Who cast each vote

• A Journal lists each member by surname, with an initial where members share one (“Bell, C.” in the House, “A. Hinojosa” in the Senate). Each name goes to the one legislator in that chamber with that surname on the day of the vote, the initial choosing among members who share it. Every name on every roll call matched exactly one legislator; a roll call with a name that didn't would be left out and reported here.
• Names and terms come from Open States' data on Texas legislators. Where it differs from the Legislature's own records, we follow those: Representative Caroline Fairly's name as the House and its Journals print it, and the dates members left office, from the Legislative Reference Library, the Governor's proclamations calling special elections, or news reports from the day.
• Each build checks our current members against the House's and the Senate's own member lists. The House's list doesn't show party, so House members' parties are Open States'; senators' parties are checked against their Senate pages.
• A member marked as presiding (C) and not voting isn't counted as missing that vote. Speaker Dustin Burrows presides over the House and, by custom, rarely votes: the Journals show him voting on 24 of the House's 4,235 roll calls this term, so he isn't scored.
• Photos are the official portraits from house.texas.gov and senate.texas.gov. A member without one shows initials.

Votes with the Republican Caucus chair

• Texas's presiding officers don't cast recorded votes: the Speaker, as above, and the Lieutenant Governor, who presides over the Senate and isn't a senator. Neither chamber has a Majority Leader. So members are compared with their chamber's Republican Caucus chair, the leader the majority party's members elect, who votes like any member: Tom Oliverson (District 130) in the House and Tan Parker (District 12) in the Senate. Both chaired their caucus for every vote here. The caucus chair is a party office, not an office of the chamber.
• The score is the share of roll calls on which the member voted the same way, yea or nay, as their chamber's caucus chair. A roll call counts only when both of them voted yea or nay. Oliverson voted on 4,016 of 4,235 House roll calls; Parker on 3,695 of 3,695 Senate roll calls.
• Many contested House votes in 2025 split Republicans from one another, and the House caucus chair often voted with the side that differed from most Republicans. So in the House this score shows how closely a member votes with the caucus chair, not with House Republicans as a whole; “votes with own party,” below, measures that.
• The headline number uses contested votes. On unanimous votes nearly everyone agrees with the chair, so the share on all votes, shown alongside, is high for almost everyone.
• A score needs at least 20 votes. The chairs aren't scored against themselves.
• This works like “votes with the President” on the Congress pages, with one difference: the President's position on a bill comes from the White House's public statements, while the chair's position here is the chair's own recorded vote.

Votes with own party

• Counts party-line votes: roll calls where most Democrats voted one way and most Republicans the other (1,025 in the House, 1,006 in the Senate). The score is the share of those votes where the member voted with most of their own party. The Congress pages use the same definition.
• Partisan rank orders each chamber's current members by this score, whichever their party: 1 votes with their party most often, and the last votes with it least. Members shown with the same whole percent share a rank, and each legislator's page says how many share it and how many vote with their party more often.
• A score needs at least 20 party-line votes.
• The table of contested votes on each legislator's page marks every contested vote where they voted against most of their party, whether or not it was a party-line vote, so it can list more votes than the score counts.

Didn't vote at roll call

• The share of roll calls, while the member was in office, where the Journal shows them absent: excused absences (including the House's “absent, excused, committee meeting”) and other absences alike.
• A member recorded “present, not voting” was on the floor and chose not to vote; that isn't counted as a missed vote, as “Present” isn't on the Congress pages.
• “In office” means the Journal's roll call lists the member: each one lists every seated member, whether or not they voted.
• In August 2025, during the first called session, most House Democrats left the state to deny the House a quorum; the House took three record votes in that session. The absences show in those roll calls like any others.

The seat chart

• Each chamber's current members are seats, ordered from most liberal (left) to most conservative (right). There's no DW-NOMINATE score for state legislators, so the order comes from the Legislature's own contested votes: for every pair of members, the share of contested roll calls on which they voted the same way, scaled to one left-right dimension (Poole's agreement-score method, the usual first step of roll-call scaling). Republicans are on the right. A member with fewer than 20 contested votes sits at their party's middle.
• Color uses the same rule as the Congress pages: how often a member crosses party lines toward the middle on party-line votes, siding with the other party alongside their own party's more moderate members. Solid blue or red means almost never; purple means at least 2 in 5 of those votes.
• Texas legislators break from their party on party-line votes far more often than members of Congress (one in ten breaks on at least 29.4% of them, against 7.4% in Congress; the median is 7.0% against 1.7%), about four times as often, so the Texas pages' color steps are four times Congress's: purple at 40% rather than 10%, then 30, 20, 12 and 6%. That keeps purple for the truly moderate.
• Gray seats: no party-line score, including senators who took office after the 2025 sessions.

Bills passed

• Every bill filed this term, from the Texas Legislative Council's bill history files: 6,253 House bills and 3,203 Senate bills in the regular session and both called sessions. Joint and concurrent resolutions aren't counted.
• A bill counts for its primary author, the first name on it, matched to the legislator in that chamber with that name when it was filed. Joint authors and coauthors aren't counted, and neither is the member who sponsors a bill in the other chamber.
• Passed both chambers: the Legislature sent it to the Governor (630 House bills, 604 Senate bills). It became law if the Governor signed it or let it take effect without his signature, and didn't if he vetoed it (27 vetoes).
• Local bills apply to one place: a county, a city, or a special district such as a municipal utility district. Texas's constitution requires notice in that place before a local law can be passed (Article III, Section 57), and a local bill's text says the notice was published; that's how bills are sorted here. The ranked number is statewide bills that passed both chambers. Local bills are shown but not ranked.
• Ranks are among current members of the chamber, and among current members of the chamber in the same party: 1 has the most, and members with the same number share a rank. Members who took office during the term had less time to pass bills.

Budget projects

• Texas's budget doesn't say which legislator asked for an item, so there's no budget figure for Texas legislators.

The November 3 ballot

• All 150 House seats and 16 of the 31 Senate seats are on the ballot. The candidates are the ones the Texas Secretary of State certified on August 28, 2026: each party's nominee and any independent who qualified. Each race lists the same candidates in every county it covers.
• Texas prints a race even when only one candidate is running; the list shows that candidate as unopposed.
• House District 93 and Senate District 22 also have special elections on November 3 to fill the rest of the current term, which ends in January. Those candidates aren't part of the certification, so they aren't listed here. Write-in candidates aren't named.
• A candidate who serves in the Legislature now links to their voting record.

Bill explanations

Texas vote pages don't carry an explanation of the bill. Each page's title is the bill's official caption, the Legislature's one-line description of what it's about (“Relating to ...”), which is too short to explain a bill from without going beyond it.

Data sources and downloads

Everything these pages show can be downloaded, free to reuse. Percent columns ending in “_shown” are the whole numbers the pages show; the counts behind each one are beside it. Terms of reuse

• members.csv: Every Texas legislator this term with each score, the counts behind it and the whole percent the pages show.
• votes.csv: Every Texas floor roll call with its totals, whether it was contested or party-line, how the leader and each party's majority voted, and the official record.
• member-votes-house-1.csv: How every Texas House member voted on each floor roll call, Jan. 14, 2025 to May 6, 2025 (part 1 of 3).
• member-votes-house-2.csv: How every Texas House member voted on each floor roll call, May 7, 2025 to May 21, 2025 (part 2 of 3).
• member-votes-house-3.csv: How every Texas House member voted on each floor roll call, May 22, 2025 to Sept. 3, 2025 (part 3 of 3).
• member-votes-senate.csv: How every Texas Senate member voted on each floor roll call.
• bills.csv: Every Texas bill this term with its sponsors, its kind (statewide, local or claim) and how far it got.

Checks

• PASS: Texas House: current members match the chamber's own list — 148 members and 2 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Texas Senate: current members match the chamber's own list — 30 members and 1 vacant seats agree
• PASS: Texas: every bill's sponsors are legislators on these pages, and their counts add up — 9,456 sponsor credits on 9,456 bills
• PASS: Texas: every bill's primary author matched to one legislator, every passed bill's outcome known — all of them
• PASS: Texas: the text of every bill that could be local read for its notice — all of them
• PASS: Texas: the vote-by-vote download's files match the state's settings — member-votes-house-1.csv, member-votes-house-2.csv, member-votes-house-3.csv, member-votes-senate.csv
• PASS: Texas: the address lookup's file lists every seat's holder — 181 seats
• PASS: Texas: every vote on the records credited to the right legislator — all matched
• PASS: Texas: bill explanations are approved and match their official source — 0 vote pages show one
• PASS: Texas: every vote page's bill has its title — 7930 votes
• PASS: Texas: every current legislator has an official portrait — 178 portraits
• PASS: Texas: the district map has every seat, and only those — 150 House districts, 31 Senate districts
• PASS: Texas: every incumbent on the ballot links to their voting record — all linked
• PASS: Texas: every Journal record vote adds up to its printed count and names every member serving once — all of them
• PASS: Texas: Nov. 3 legislative candidates cover every seat on the ballot — 166 races