We have officially kicked off the 2021 rankings season (abbreviated as it may be) with our biennial Election Strength Report. This report quantifies election results for each member of the General Assembly and presents it in an easy to understand metric. While Election Strength is not a measure of job performance, this metric was fairly predictive of how well a member would do against a typical candidate in the 2020 elections.

Election strength ranks legislators on how large of a victory margin they had in their last 3 election cycles, with primaries and more recent elections being given a higher weight.

Additionally, this report highlights the large number of districts with uncontested elections, which can be quite dangerous to democracy. On a positive note, the report shows impressive results when incumbents are challenged in primaries and should be encouraging for those looking to run in 2022.

RI Rank’s next rankings release will be the 2021 Social Media Rankings, which rank members of the General Assembly on their use of social media and the web to interact with constituents. This segment was especially important this past year as COVID-19 kept us from engaging with our representatives in person.