Definition
The Financial Comfort Score predicts how likely a person is to feel financially comfortable. Higher scores indicate greater prosperity; lower scores indicate financial struggle.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
How would you describe the current level of financial comfort for your household?
- Prosperous
- Comfortable
- Getting by
- Struggling
These responses were ordinally mapped to our score scale as follows:
- Prosperous → 100
- Comfortable → 67
- Getting by → 33
- Struggling → 0
The Financial Comfort Score was trained on polling data from the Summer 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 7,721 responses online from registered voters in July and August 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education, and geography.
The model was trained using a CatBoost ordinal regression model. A weighting scheme was used to ensure the model learned to discriminate lower frequency responses. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, vote history information, and American Community Survey data for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that an individual is financially comfortable or prosperous, and lower scores indicate a greater likelihood that an individual is financially getting by or struggling.
We validated the model’s accuracy using a held-out set of 1,524 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Common regression metrics
indicated that the model is able to usefully discriminate between levels of household financial comfort. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Financial Comfort Score, 74% responded “Prosperous” or “Comfortable”, which is 68% more likely than the combined baseline proportion of those responses across the whole held-out test set. Of individuals in the bottom 20% of the Financial Comfort Score, 81% responded “Getting by” or “Struggling”, which is 47% more likely than the combined baseline proportion of those responses.
Use Cases
Partners can use this score to cut universes whenever financial wellbeing is relevant:
- Messaging If a partner wanted to cut a targeting list for messaging centered around cost of living, they could use a threshold of middle to low (e.g. 43 and below) Financial Comfort Scores.
- Fundraising If a partner is looking to cut a list for fundraising around a specific issue, they could use a high Financial Comfort Score threshold (e.g. 62 and above) to target potential new wealthy donors. In this case, they should also use an issue-based score to filter on those who are supportive of their issue (e.g. Reproductive Rights Support Score).
- Universe Segmentation Household finances often predict partisanship and voting behavior. Partners can combine this score with turnout and support scores for more precise targeting—for example, by splitting their audience into financially comfortable (scores 43+) and less comfortable (scores below 43) groups.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Financial Comfort Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 70 |
| 20% | 62 |
| 30% | 55 |
| 40% | 49 |
| 50% | 43 |
| 60% | 38 |
| 70% | 33 |
| 80% | 28 |
| 90% | 22 |
| 100% | 0 |