Capwiz:
Capwiz is a Capitol Advantage program that various national groups contract with to provide their web sites with a political/legislative section. They can be found at http://www.capwiz.com or http://www.capitaladvantage.com. Among the services that a group can buy from Capwiz are key votes and annual voting record scorecards. Particular information varies from group to group, depending on what they have contracted for, but the style and layout is always the same and very easy navigate once you are familiar with it.
From an individual group's homepage, there will most often be a link to "Legislative Action Center" or "Political Action Center." This is the best clue that the group contracts with Capwiz. If such a link isn't obvious on the homepage, you may find it after a link or two to find; for example, you may first have to select a Political Resources link, which will then have a Legislative Action Center option.
The main Capwiz page embedded in a group's page or site always looks the same-though it will have more or less options depending on how many services the group buys. (A copy of the Capwiz "home" layout is included on the next page.) Once you get to this Home page, you can navigate by clicking on the tabs along the top.
To find ratings:
1. Click on the Issues & Legislation tab
2. Click on Key Votes at the top of the page
3. Scroll down; the scorecard links may be at the bottom of this page.
4. If not, there should be a "view all key votes" option directly below the shaded grid of votes; click on this.
5. Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page; you should see the scorecard links. Senate and House are compiled separately.
Important Things to Remember About Capwiz:
- Capwiz compiles the voting records on an ongoing basis, as votes come to the floor throughout the Congressional session. Even if they are available on the web mid-year, the scorecards are not complete until after the session has ended! Do not enter (or even print) the scorecards before the end of the year.
- Oddly enough, Capwiz doesn't include the name of the group anywhere on their scorecard. Be sure to write out the full name as soon as you print the ratings, while you're still on the group's website.
- Finally, there are groups who do not want us to use Capwiz scorecards but instead use a rating they have done-example Gun Owners of America. They compile a Rating based on letter grades and prefer us to use those scores.
Final Note
- There is an R script for scraping Capwiz.This means Capwiz scores do not need to be manually entered. Save the page to the appropriate SIGs folder on the drive and copy the link into the Google tracking sheet as usual. Next, go to the Google tracking sheet change the status cell to scrape and add a comment in the note cell specifying the rating span with the link to the Capwiz page. Finally, tag walker@ in the comment, so that he knows to run the script.
