Salience Is Not Impact

Three questions that get tangled

Ask "is this bill a big deal?" and you are usually asking three questions at once without noticing. How much attention is it getting? How much would it actually change in the real world? And how closely does it fit what you care about?

Those are different questions with different answers, and most coverage collapses them into one. A bill that is loud gets treated as important. A bill that is important to you gets treated as good. The blur is comfortable, and it is misleading.

A bill can dominate the news and barely change a thing — or change a great deal while barely making the news.

We keep the three apart on purpose, and we show them apart.

Salience: how loud

Salience is attention. It measures how much a bill is being discussed — in the news, in debate, in the public square. High salience tells you a bill is in the conversation. It tells you nothing about whether the bill does much, or whether it would help or hurt anything you value.

We surface salience because it is genuinely useful to know what is being argued about. But we label it as what it is: a measure of noise, not of consequence. A quiet bill can still reshape a program that affects millions, and a loud one can fade without changing a single rule.

Impact: how much it changes

Impact is the real-world question. How many people would a bill touch, and how much money or how big a change would it move? This is the slowest and most careful of the three, because it is the easiest to overstate.

Impact figures come with their provenance attached, and where an official estimate exists, we use it and link to it. Where we only have a model's estimate, we say so and hold it as provisional until a human has checked it. We would rather show a smaller, honest number than a larger, impressive one we can't stand behind.

Crucially, impact is not alignment. A bill can have enormous impact and still cut hard against your values — or fit your values perfectly while changing almost nothing. Mixing the two would tell you a bill is good simply because it is big, which is not a claim we are willing to make for you.

Alignment: how well it fits your values

Alignment is the personal question. Given what you have told us you care about, how closely does this bill match your stated stance? This number is computed against your values, not ours, and it looks different for different people by design.

Alignment says nothing about how loud the bill is or how much it changes. A perfectly aligned bill might be tiny and ignored. A poorly aligned one might be enormous and everywhere. Keeping alignment separate from the other two is what lets you decide for yourself how to weigh fit against consequence — instead of having that weighing done for you and handed back as a single verdict.

Why we refuse to merge them

It would be easy to multiply these together into one tidy score. It would also quietly bury a value judgment inside the math: a decision about how much attention should count, or how much a good fit outweighs a big effect. Those are your decisions, not ours.

So we keep three answers to three questions, visible side by side, each with its own meaning and its own sources. You can read how each one is built in our methodology. The point is the same throughout: inform the choice, never make it for you.