The Public Ledger · The Rivals Ledger — What Was Said, and What Followed

How to read this ledger

What is recorded: Critical statements, in both directions — a rival's about the eventual winner, and his about the rival or the rival's family. An entry appears because it was critical, not because it merely mentioned the other; praise and routine references are out of scope. The acts that followed — an endorsement, a nomination, an appointment — appear in the same columns as dated entries, because they are the second half of what each record exists to show.
Reading a column: Each column runs in date order, oldest first, and hangs off a line. A hollow marker is an entry made before the act that changed the relationship. A filled marker is that act — an endorsement, a nomination, an appointment — with the elapsed time stated beside it. Entries after it run against a heavier line. Where nothing changed, the markers stay hollow the whole way down, and that is a finding too. The page does not say what the change meant; only when it happened, and what sat on either side of it.
Who spoke: A statement carries no tag when it is the person's own words, which is the great majority of what appears here. Where the words were authored by someone else acting for them — a named campaign spokesman, a press release or memo written in the campaign's voice, an approved advertisement — the entry is tagged Campaign statement or Surrogate or allied group. The tag tracks who authored the words, not where they are archived: a statement the candidate spoke aloud stays untagged even when the retrievable text survives in a campaign press release. The absence of a tag is itself a statement: those are the person's own words.
The badges: Each rival's row answers two questions separately, because they are separate facts. Backing: Endorsed Partial or conditional Did not endorse Backed a rival. Position: Took office Nominated, did not take office No position. The two are independent — a rival could back the winner only conditionally and still take office, or endorse fully and take nothing — and the dates and sources behind both sit inside the card.
Absence is stated: Where nothing of a given kind has been found, the entry says so rather than leaving a gap, because a blank looks like an oversight and the shape of a record is part of what is being reported. The wording is that a statement “has been located,” not that none exists: that is the claim the search actually supports.

The full method · thirteen more rules

Who is in a field: Every candidate who appeared on a nationally televised primary debate stage for that cycle, main stage or undercard, whether or not they later reconciled. The bar is set by someone other than this site, and it is countable, so a reader can check that nobody has been left out.
Why these five fields: A field enters the ledger only where its winner went on to hold the presidency, because only then did anyone hold the appointing power that makes the second half of a record possible. The fields won by John Kerry in 2004, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 are absent for that reason, not by choice. The same rule sets the ledger's balance — three Republican fields and two Democratic — decided by who won elections, not by this site.
Why the winner has no card: He is the axis of every card rather than the subject of one; what he said appears on each rival's record. The field is organised around him for one reason: he alone went on to hold the appointing power, so his decisions afterward are government acts and part of the public record. The candidate with no entry is the candidate who won. His side is totalled at the head of each field, so that he is counted rather than merely assumed.
Rivals, not candidates: Counts here are of rivals, meaning the field minus its winner. The 2016 Republican field is usually described as seventeen candidates; that figure includes Trump, so sixteen is the number of cards.
He was not president yet: Everything in the two columns was said while all of them were candidates. In 2016 the sitting president was Barack Obama; Trump held no office at all. The office came afterward: these are things said between rivals, one of whom later had something to give.
Rivals attacking each other is out of scope: Cruz and Rubio spent 2016 attacking one another, and neither could give the other anything. Nothing followed, so there is nothing to record. A card exists only where one party later held the power to appoint the other; that is what makes the second half of the entry possible.
One field, one winner: Each field is organised around the one candidate who went on to hold the appointing power. A rival later appointed by a different president has no row here that can express it — Tulsi Gabbard ran against Joe Biden, took nothing under him, and now holds office under Donald Trump, whom she never ran against. Where that happens, the record says so; the appointment itself sits outside this ledger's scope, not outside the public record.
Why the record starts in 2000: Complete debate transcripts and video become consistently retrievable, free of charge, from the 2000 cycle onward. The pattern is older than that — George H. W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's plan “voodoo economics” while running against him in 1980, then served eight years as his vice president. Earlier cycles are absent because the sourcing standard cannot be met for them consistently, not because they did not happen.
Where no one can be named: Some of what is aimed at a candidate has no established author: anonymous calls, leaflets, advertising placed by groups the campaigns disclaim. It cannot sit in a column headed by someone's name. Where it matters it appears in a separate block, carrying the same evidence labels used across this site — Documented Reported In litigation. Those describe whether the conduct itself is established. Whether anyone can be held responsible is a separate question, answered in words, including the denials.
Positions carry dates: Every office is given as a date range. Terms that have ended are closed, and are therefore permanently true. An office still held is marked “present” with the date it was last checked, so a page that has gone stale says so rather than misleading quietly.
The interval: Measured from the statement to two later events wherever each is documented: the endorsement, and the day the person took office. One rule, applied the same way to every record. Where there was no critical statement, or no endorsement, there is nothing to measure and the entry says so.
Comparing fields: The totals at the head of each field are only comparable between fields researched to the same depth. All five fields have reached that standard: every debate transcript of every cycle — including, for 2016, the seven undercard stages — has been read end to end, and the totals may be compared with one another. The reading was independently re-verified on 28 August 2026, when every transcript was checked through to the moderator's sign-off; the three statements that pass surfaced are recorded on their cards and in the corrections log. Where a total is provisional because a field's cards are not yet complete, it says so. A figure that reflects how long has been spent looking rather than what was found would be worse than no figure at all.
What this is not: This ledger makes no claim about anybody's motives. It records three things that are each matters of public record — a statement, a statement in reply, and an office — and sets them beside one another with their dates attached. Rivals joining administrations is ordinary politics. What the reader makes of any particular case is theirs to decide.