The Purple Strip
Seven votes your Texas House actually took in 2025. We hid who voted which way. Where do you land?
About two minutes · no sign-up · your answers stay on this device unless you send them
Seven votes your Texas House actually took in 2025. We hid who voted which way. Where do you land?
About two minutes · no sign-up · your answers stay on this device unless you send them
Put the marker where you expect your own answers to put you. At the end you'll see both: your guess, and where the actual votes placed you.
Drag it, tap the bar, or use the arrow keys.
The first two produce almost the same net lean: a single blended swatch would render both as the same purple. They are opposite findings, so the readout separates them on partisan load.
I'm Marco Arras, and I built this on my own time. Nobody paid for it. No campaign, no party, no PAC, no organisation. There was no budget. The cost was evenings.
I donate to the Democratic Party. You should know that before you read anything else here, and it is the reason this page is built the way it is rather than a footnote. I have a side, so the rule that picks the comparison members runs identically on both caucuses. A third of the questions are reserved for votes where the two parties agreed, the selection rule is named and published, and every vote, count and score sits in one file you can download and check. None of that asks you to trust me, and that is the whole point of it.
I used AI to build this. The code and most of the writing were drafted with Claude and edited by me. None of it touches the record. Every vote, count and date comes from the Texas House journals and LegiScan, the arithmetic is checked on every build, and the whole file is downloadable, so you can check any figure here against the source instead of taking my word for it.
What I do for a living. I work as a solutions architect in energy. The sector buys and sells power, which overlaps the utilities votes on this page, so you should weigh what I say about those accordingly. My employer had no involvement in this, did not fund it and did not review it. I do no paid political work of any kind.
As a fellow Texas resident, I picked these three races. Governor, Lieutenant Governor and U.S. Senate. That is an editorial decision, not a measurement, and it is the choice most worth arguing with, but I believe they are three of the most important races for all Texans. I also picked them because all three Democratic candidates sit in the Texas House, which means their records can be checked against your answers vote for vote. Their opponents cannot be, so this page gives them no score at all rather than an invented one.
Why I made it. Almost everything that reaches people about how their state is actually governed arrives pre-framed by someone who wants something. The votes themselves are public, tedious, and genuinely hard to get at. I wanted a way to see the record before seeing the label, and to hand over the entire file so that anyone can check the record is what I say it is.
The site counts visits, how many people came, which link sent them, and how many reach each step of the quiz, using Vercel’s analytics, which sets no cookies and cannot follow you to another site. Your answers are not part of that. They never leave your browser while you answer. Reaching the end is counted; what you answered is not, and the two are never connected. If you then tap add my result on the result screen, one request goes out, and it carries where you landed, three numbers about your answers, and which way you answered each vote. No name, no address, or anything that identifies you, and only totals are kept at the other end. There is no record of your particular submission to look up. If instead you tap challenge someone, you get a link holding your seven answers in the part of the address after the # symbol, which browsers never transmit, so nothing about it reaches this site at all. If you ask the page to find your district, it downloads the district map to your device. That is a request for a file and carries nothing about you. Tap none of them and nothing but the visit count is ever sent. This is checked on every build, the test answers five questions and fails if a single byte goes out beyond that count, then taps each button and fails if what goes out carries anything more.
If something here is wrong, tell me: arras.marco@gmail.com. Corrections get made, and noted on the page.
Texas lawmakers vote yes or no on new laws. We took real votes from 2025 and hid who voted which way. Now you vote.
For each one we count how many Republicans said yes, and how many Democrats said yes. Mostly Republicans? We colour it red. Mostly Democrats? Blue. Both parties agreed? Grey. That vote doesn't tell us much about sides.
Every answer you give becomes one dot. Dots on the left mean you agreed with Democrats. Dots on the right mean you agreed with Republicans. If your dots land on both sides, you don't fit neatly in one party. That's the purple part.
Then we show you what these areas actually look like in Texas today (school funding, health coverage, and so on), with the source for every number.
Nobody's opinion decides the colours. They come from the actual vote counts, and you can check them on every question. The outcome numbers are real too, but a state ranking has many causes. We show you the numbers and the votes, and leave the connecting to you.