Definition
The Ideology Liberal Score predicts how likely a person is to identify as politically liberal.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following survey question:
Which of the following labels best describes your current political ideology?
- Liberal
- Moderate
- Conservative
The Ideology Liberal 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 gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Three separate classifications models were built to predict the likelihood of an individual responding liberal, moderate, or conservative ideology. After model predictions were made, scores were normalized so that for each individual, the sum of their liberal, moderate, and conservative scores is 100.
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. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Ideology Liberal Score, 57% are actually liberal, making them 120% more likely to report that they are liberal than the average voter. At the other end of the distribution, individuals in the bottom 20% of the Ideology Liberal Score are 92% less likely than average to have a liberal ideology.
The model achieved a test set AUC of 0.81, demonstrating strong discriminative ability in identifying liberal voters. In held-out test data, the model correctly distinguished between liberal and moderate/conservative voters at rates significantly above baseline.
Use Cases
The Ideology Liberal Score can be used in a variety of ways when building a campaign strategy and planning voter engagement. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other scores. Below are a few examples for how partners could use this score:
- Primary Election Targeting: In heavily Democratic or Republican geographies where the primary winner often becomes the de facto general election winner, this score helps identify voters aligned with moderate candidates. For example, in a Democratic primary with a progressive candidate and a moderate candidate, partners supporting the progressive candidate can combine high Ideology Liberal Scores (scores of 34 and above) with high Partisan Scores (scores of 80 and above) to target voters most likely to support their candidate. This is particularly valuable when issue scores don't differentiate candidates within a target universe (e.g., when the vast majority of Democrats within a location support reproductive rights and gun control).
- Building Progressive Coalitions: Partners working to build coalitions around progressive policies can use this score to identify likely supporters. By filtering for voters with high Ideology Liberal Scores (e.g. 34 and above), partners can focus their organizing, volunteer recruitment, and fundraising efforts on individuals most likely to align with progressive policy positions. This allows organizations to efficiently allocate resources toward voters who share their values and are more likely to engage with their campaigns.
- Within-Party Voter Education: In Democratic-leaning areas, partners can use this score alongside the Ideology Moderate Score to segment Democratic voters by ideology. For example, when advocating for progressive policy changes that may face resistance from moderate Democrats, partners can identify high Ideology Liberal Score voters (34 and above) for early organizing and coalition building, while developing different messaging strategies for less liberal Democrats (those with Ideology Liberal Scores below 34). This allows for more nuanced communication that meets voters where they are at ideologically.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Ideology Liberal Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 51 |
| 20% | 42 |
| 30% | 34 |
| 40% | 28 |
| 50% | 23 |
| 60% | 18 |
| 70% | 13 |
| 80% | 6 |
| 90% | 3 |
| 100% | 1 |