Indivisibles,

Over the last few months, Indivisible’s network of activists have requested again and again a tool to evaluate the 2020 presidential candidates. After a lot of work and consistent input from our Indivisible group leaders, we’re excited to share our 2020 Presidential Candidate Scorecard with the movement. 

Let’s be clear: we’re all in for whoever wins the primary. Every one of the Democratic candidates is Abraham Lincoln compared to Donald Trump. We launched the We Are Indivisible 2020 Pledge earlier this year to commit our movement to rally around whoever wins, because all of us need to be all in to save our democracy. The first part of that pledge is to engage in a constructive primary, and Indivisible's scorecard is an effort to do exactly that. 

How the scorecard evaluates candidates. In our scorecard, we’ve centered certain issues and priorities the Indivisible movement has told us are important. Those issues fall into three categories:

• Progressive Policy Stances: Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed to enacting bold, popular, progressive policies across a range of areas, including immigration, climate, economic justice, health care, and other critical policy areas.
• Day-One Democracy Agenda: None of the policy reforms we want to see in 2021 are possible without a democracy that responds to the people. Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed first and foremost to ambitious reforms to save our democracy. 
• Building Grassroots Power: Indivisibles know that national change won’t come from any one leader -- it will take a movement. Indivisibles want a candidate who is committed to building grassroots power, as demonstrated by their fundraising, campaign strategy and management, support for other progressive candidates, and their engagement with Indivisible groups.

Learn more about how the candidates stack up by clicking here to read the full scorecard. 

A months-long, in-depth process with the movement and candidates. We did not throw darts at a wall to get here! Every candidate first had to take the We Are Indivisible pledge. For those who did, we provided an in-depth questionnaire with more than 80 questions about policy, priorities, and strategy, which we put together with input from Indivisible group leaders and national partners. Candidates who completed the questionnaire were then invited to participate in a live interview last month. We’re releasing details on all of this, which you can read about on the scorecard site -- feel free to dive in and check our work!

The scorecard is a living project intended to be put to use. The scorecard is not an endorsement and it’s not static: it’s living and evolving. Each candidate is graded based on their current alignment with the movements’ values, and we will continue to invite the candidates to clarify or adjust their priorities to reflect those of the grassroots. We were making changes as recently as Sunday based on new information. We expect to see the candidates’ scores change over time, hopefully improving as the months go on.

We want candidates to try to out-democracy one another. We want them to feel pressure from you and the broader Indivisible movement to take stronger positions on the issues we care about. If they do, we’ll gladly make changes to the scores to reflect their evolving positions. We would be thrilled if every candidate had a 100% score by the Iowa caucuses. 

You should think of these scorecards as a tool in your activism. If your pick has a low score on an issue you care about, push them on it. Indivisibles have spent much of the last three years building relationships and power: making sure we’re pushing the candidates on our top issues is a crucial way to spend that power, and the scorecard is a tool to empower you to do that. That’s how we’ll get the strongest candidate possible who will beat Trump.

We’re so excited to be releasing this scorecard -- we hope you’ll take a look!

- Indivisible Team 

P.S. We know you may have questions about why candidates got particular scores. Over the next few days, in addition to the information already on the website, we’ll be delving into candidate scores more deeply on social media -- follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page.