CAPRICOR

Think of this as a size-of-presence score. It rolls four things into one number — how much the sponsor spends on lobbying, how many lobbying firms it hires, how many topics it lobbies on, and how many parts of government it contacts — and weighs each against every other sponsor we track over the same year.

More of any of those four pushes the score up. A 0 means no measurable lobbying footprint at all. A 10 means this sponsor sits at the top of the pack on every dimension.

Below 4 — an occasional or modest presence. Most sponsors are here.

4 to 7 — a substantial, sustained operation.

7 and above — one of the largest footprints in Washington.

Because it's a comparison against everyone else, the score can move even when a sponsor's own activity holds steady: if the rest of the field ramps up and this sponsor doesn't, the score drifts down. Read it as relative standing, not as a dollar figure.

Spending is only part of the story, which is why the other three ingredients are in here. A company that writes one big check to one firm about one issue is doing something very different from a company spending the same money across a dozen firms, twenty issues, and thirty agencies. The second has its hands in far more of Washington, and the score reflects that.

Worth keeping in mind:

• It covers a rolling year of filings, so it moves slowly by design. A single busy quarter won't swing it much.
• Trade associations lobby on behalf of their members, so a trade group's footprint can overlap with the footprints of the companies inside it.
• Everything here comes from what sponsors themselves report in public lobbying disclosures. Late filings and amendments can shift a score after the fact.

This score never compares a sponsor to anyone else — only to its own history. That matters, because "a lot of lobbying money" means something completely different for a Fortune 50 company than for a small trade association.

Around 0 — spending is right where this sponsor normally runs.

Above +2 — running high for this sponsor. Uncommon, but it happens.

Above +3 — a genuine spike, and usually worth a look. Something changed: an active fight, a new campaign ramping up, or occasionally a filing worth double-checking.

Below −2 — a meaningful pullback, often a campaign winding down.

Negative readings are the noisier half. A missing or late filing looks exactly like a real pullback at the time, so treat drops with more caution than spikes.

The score is blank when a sponsor doesn't have enough history to compare against, or when its spending has been so flat that there's no normal variation to measure it against.

The point of this score is to catch real changes without being fooled by noise. Quarterly lobbying spending is genuinely messy — budgets land unevenly, regulatory cycles create real bursts, amended filings restate quarters after the fact, and smaller sponsors post near-zero quarters routinely. A plain "up 40% from last quarter" reading would flag all of that as news.

So the score is built around what's typical for this sponsor across its whole filing history, rather than around an average that one enormous quarter could drag out of shape. A sponsor with a couple of wild quarters in its past doesn't end up with a permanently numb signal because of them.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A sponsor needs a few periods of filing history before it gets a score at all.
• A sponsor that has always spent heavily won't show high momentum for spending heavily again. Spending a lot and spending more than usual are different questions, and this answers the second one.