For our third Palestine Congressional Scorecard, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) has tracked how every Member of Congress has aligned on a comprehensive set of Palestine-focused bills, resolutions, votes, and public letters. Unlike the 2024 edition, which assessed only Democrats, the 2026 scorecard assesses both Democrats and Republicans.

After more than two and a half years of genocide in Gaza, expanding annexation in the West Bank, mass starvation, and the destruction of nearly every civilian institution in Palestine, the question of where each Member of Congress stands is no longer narrowly partisan. Every Member has had repeated, public opportunities to use the tools of their office through sponsorship, votes, and letters to either advance Palestinian rights and humanitarian protections, or to entrench the policies that sustain apartheid, military aggression, settler colonialism, and genocide. This scorecard records what they did with those opportunities.

Our methodology includes every item that Members had an opportunity to act on, and could be publicly verified. This includes sources such as roll-call votes, cosponsorship records, and publicly released letters. Items are coded as either more supportive of Palestinian rights and humanitarian protections (positive points) or more supportive of policies opposed to those goals (negative points). A Member’s total score is the simple sum of their item-level positions. This is a different approach to 2024, in which we scored only post-October 7 items and rolled them into a weighted percentage score based on votes, Dear Colleague letters, public statements, and cosponsorships. House Members were judged mostly on votes and letters, while Senators were judged more heavily on statements, because there were fewer legislative opportunities in the Senate.

We did not grade Members who were sworn into Congress during 2026 — Christian D. Menefee (D-TX), Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), and Fuller Clay (R-GA) — because they took office after the legislative record covered by this scorecard. We also did not grade Members who left Congress before the end of the 119th term (through retirement, resignation, death, or assumption of an executive-branch role) or who have publicly withdrawn from re-election. These Members appear in our underlying data but are not assigned a letter grade, because they are not the Members voters will be deciding on in 2026.

Because freshmen sworn into the 119th Congress did not have an opportunity to vote on or cosponsor the items from the 118th Congress that make up roughly half of this scorecard’s record, we apply two grading scales per chamber: one for Members who served in both the 118th and 119th Congress, and one for Members whose service began with the 119th. The underlying scoring system — the points awarded per action — is identical across both cohorts. Only the grade-letter cutoffs differ, scaled to the smaller set of actions a first-term Member could have acted on. This prevents new Members from being structurally locked out of high marks (or low marks) simply because most items predate their swearing-in.