Definition
The Rule of Law Support Score indicates the likelihood that a voter believes their elected officials need to comply with all laws, even if they disagree with them.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Elected leaders and officials need to comply with all laws, even if they disagree with them.
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
- No Opinion
Respondents who answered "Strongly Agree" are classified as rule of law supporters. Respondents who answered "Agree," "Neither Agree nor Disagree," "No Opinion," "Disagree," or "Strongly Disagree" are classified as non-supporters.
The Rule of Law Support Score was trained on polling data from the Winter 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 8,002 responses online from registered voters in December 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.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter strongly believes elected officials must comply with all laws. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual would strongly agree that elected leaders need to comply with all laws, even if they disagree with them.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,540 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 Rule of Law Support Score, 70% are actual rule of law supporters — making them 27% more likely to strongly support the rule of law than the average voter.
Use Cases
- Persuasion: Partners seeking to build broader support for government accountability initiatives could target voters with mid-range scores (e.g. 50 to 60) who may be open to messaging about the importance of elected officials complying with the law.
- Targeting: Partners focused on government accountability or anti-corruption campaigns could use a high threshold (e.g. 64 and above) to identify voters who strongly believe elected officials must follow the law. This score could be combined with a turnout score for GOTV efforts around elections where rule of law is a salient issue.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Rule of Law Support 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% | 64 |
| 30% | 60 |
| 40% | 56 |
| 50% | 54 |
| 60% | 52 |
| 70% | 50 |
| 80% | 48 |
| 90% | 45 |
| 100% | 34 |