BillTrack50 Help Center

Bill prognosis has become a hot topic in the bill tracking industry lately.  Some companies trying to differentiate themselves by guessing the probability of a bills passage based on a “complicated proprietary algorithm,” while others tell you the only way is to hire their team of “professional analysts” to help you make those determinations.

Here is my “complicated proprietary algorithm” and “professional analysis” all in one sentence.  Most likely (yes, that is a scientific term) the bill you are tracking is going to fail. In fact, an astounding 85% of bills (excluding resolutions) fail in the states every session.

In the spirit of BillTrack50, a more do-it-yourself sort of tracking tool, I’m going to show you how to … well … do it yourself.

Research, Not a Crystal Ball

First – Is the bill a hot topic?  Often times legislation becomes “must-pass” or at least “must-vote” after a high profile incident or an advocacy group has launched an advocacy campaign to raise awareness and push the issue. For example, ethics legislation after a string of elected officials are brought up on corruption charges, or the string of votes against Common Core education standards.

Second – Who is the sponsor(s)?  Bills with sponsors from the majority party and/or bi-partisan support have a much greater chance of passage than bills introduced by the minority party.

Third - Does the author hold a leadership position or chairmanship? Given the number of bills which are introduced and fail each session, a bill with an author with the ability to shepherd a bill through the legislative process has a powerful advantage and a much greater chance of passage.

You can find out the bill sponsors on the main summary page of any bill:

 If you click the name of a legislator, you'll be taken to the legislator page with a wealth of information about them, including their committee appointments and rank:

Some say having an author that also sits on a committee of jurisdiction helps. To me, it is something to note, but not a significant factor. While not as powerful as leadership or chairmanship, serving on a committee MAY be helpful, but certainly not something to bank on. It does mean at least one vote for the bill, and does offer the author the ability to internally lobby and possibly amend the bill during committee work sessions.

Fourth – Is the bill you are tracking the only solution? It is not unusual for bills on hot topics to have two or more competing bills. Take a look and see if there are any similar or competing bills (either in this session or in recent history). Are there any similar or competing bills that were introduced or passed in other states? States are the “laboratories of democracy,” legislators talk to other legislators in different states, advocacy and intergovernmental groups promote model legislation. Bills that pop up in one state, probably had an origin in another. So you should at least be tracking all the related bills on your given state, and checking on other bills across the country. See this video for a method to research effective legislation from other states.

Statistics Are Your Friend

The more you know about legislative trends in the relevant state, the better you will be able to make a good prediction. That's where our State Stats section comes in handy. We have crunched the numbers and displayed them in easy to follow graphs and charts for every state and Congress. Click on the State Stats menu item in the blue menu on the left. Then click your state hexagon on the US map:

You'll see a lot of information about the state, the makeup of the legislature and bills themselves. Two graphs are particularly useful for predicting whether a bill will pass. The Sponsorship of Enacted Legislation graph shows you how successful legislation breaks down according to whether it is sponsored by Democrats, Republicans or is bipartisan. In the graph below, for Alaska, the vast majority of enacted legislation is bipartisan - 78% in 2023. Whereas only 9% is sponsored by Democrats.

The graph next to it shows the other dimension - the percentage of legislation that is Democrat or Republican sponsored, or bipartisan, that is enacted. For Alaska, you can see that in 2023 while 22% of bipartisan legislation was enacted, only 2.5% of partisan legislation became law. Clearly, in Alaska, to have a good chance of becoming law a bill needs backing from both parties.

Below that you can see a graph that shows trends for different bill topics.

This graph shows what percentage of bills referred to different categories of committees were enacted over time. This lets you estimate the likelihood of your bill passing based on it's topic. For the graph above for California, in 2019 an education bill had a 24% chance of passing while a military affairs and security bill had a 42% chance of success.

More Tips

Once you get this far, you now have all the information you need to prioritize the bill for your organization and enough information to make a good guesstimate of the likelihood of passage to be able to better make resource allocation decisions.  However, sometimes you want or need more. What else can you do to give yourself to better determine the probability of passage?

• Research what is the current/ past level of support for the measure? How many sponsors, and does it have bi-partisan support? Is this an issue that has come up before? If so, how far did it get, and how did legislators vote, both in committee and on the floor?
• Will the measure be costly? State budgets are tight. In many states bills with significant costs or attached to significant tax increases are less likely to pass. Know the status of your state's budget, and the willingness of legislators to spend political capital to spend money or raise taxes. (NASBO is a great resource on state budgets).
• Read the state house newspaper and political blogs. See if your bill or topic is being discussed anywhere. These sources often give you an idea of whether the political winds are with you or against you.
• What is the timing? Timing is important, but certainly the least important. A bill introduced early in session has a better chance than a bill introduced later in session. I say timing is the least important, because even dead bills never really go away. A bill can miss crossover deadlines, or be dead at sine die, but that does not mean it won’t come back in the next session, especially in the author is still serving in the legislature. Just remember, in that next session that author will be even more senior and might just have a leadership position or chair a committee that can help or hurt you.

You now have all the information you need to reasonably guesstimate the probability of passage of just about any bill. It isn’t hard, doesn’t take that much time, and it is free. And I have found even if you are paying for a “complicated proprietary algorithm” or “professional analysis” you still might want to do this yourself. It is your organization after all.

But remember, likelihood of passage is really only the tip of the iceberg in determining your organizational resource allocation. Often on a priority issue, even one with a small probability of passage, your organization will need to spend time and resources educating legislators, offering (or opposing) amendments, swaying public opinion and doing all the other advocacy tactics that will ensure a positive outcome.