Virginia FREE ranks the General Assembly on the pro-business performance by your legislators. They are ranked 1 to 100 in the House of Delegates and 1 to 40 in the Senate.
Our formula is based on a simple concept – to highlight those who perform the best while encouraging continual pro-business performance improvement throughout the rest of the General Assembly.
We use differentiation to show the General Assembly in three performance groupings- the top 20%, the middle 70%, and the bottom 10%.
This model has been used very effectively by businesses and it enables us to educate and engage the legislature. After each election cycle, we wipe the record clean and start over. Several years ago we stopped holding scores for “lifetime ratings.” Virginia FREE seeks continual improvement.
Additionally, Virginia FREE totals up the campaign contributions from the business community to the lowest performing legislators in order to gauge the effectiveness of those investments.
The business community contributed directly or through leadership PACs over $1,200,000.00 to the lowest performing legislators, the bottom 10%, of the General Assembly in the 2015 election cycle.
We offer that only to better inform the Virginia business community.
Please look for those rankings.
Political party identification is never considered in our deliberations or is displayed in our rankings. Virginia FREE is steadfastly non-partisan.
Virginia FREE prepares a commentary we call our Narrative from the General Assembly session. This is a consensus document that travels through our Evaluations Committee and then onto our Board of Directors.
The Narrative provides guidance on what Virginia FREE believes is in the best interest of the Virginia business community and, naturally, the rest of the Commonwealth.
Our mission is to foster the best possible free enterprise economy as well as the most responsible pro-business government.
Virginia FREE is currently building a network of local and regional business leaders throughout the Commonwealth to facilitate a more robust dialogue within the business community. The enthusiasm and desire for this effort among business leaders thus far has been crystal clear – they get it and they want to help educate our elected officials on the policies that will help grow their business in order to raise the standard of living for their employees.
If you would like to be a part of that network, please reply to this email.
Have a great day!
Please hydrate and stay cool.
Chris Saxman
Virginia FREE
Leave a Reply