Hat-in-Ring Radar

About & Methodology

A source-linked tracker of 2028 U.S. presidential campaign signals. It grades potential candidates on two independent things and rebuilds every day from public filings and reporting.

Status is not support. A poll front-runner who keeps saying "no plans" can sit low on status and high on momentum. We track activity, not popularity, and we keep the two separate on purpose.

How to read it

Every candidate is scored on two axes that move independently:

Status tier — the furthest verifiable step taken

Tier	Meaning	Evidence standard
Declared	Running	FEC Statement of Candidacy (Form 2) / launched campaign / explicit "I'm running"
Exploratory	Testing the waters	Exploratory committee or testing-the-waters org
Considering	On-record interest	Direct, on-record "I'm considering it" quote
Positioning	Acting like it	Early-state travel, donors, staffing, or media — no quote yet
Floated	Soft signal	"Not ruling it out" / hedged interest
Inactive	Out or ineligible	Ruled out, constitutionally barred, or dormant

Status takes the single highest verified step — it never stacks.

Momentum (0–100) — how much they're doing right now

A weighted sum of activity that cools over time: declared/exploratory/quotes weigh most, then early-state travel, donors, staffing, and media; recency adds a small boost under 30 days and a penalty past 90. Open any candidate to see the exact math behind their number (e.g. +20 considering quote, +10 donors, −10 stale).

Sources & how signals are gathered

FEC filings (OpenFEC API) — statements of candidacy and principal-committee registrations. Note: an FEC registration is a legal/financial threshold (a candidate must register after raising or spending more than $5,000), not a public announcement — we don't treat the two as the same.
News wire (Google News) — interviews, early-state visits, donor/staffing moves, and denials, from outlets including AP, Reuters, Time, the Washington Post, ABC, and C-SPAN.

Each candidate's drawer shows the latest signal, a confidence rating, the date, and — where available — a link to the source. It is a manually-defensible tracker, not a live feed.

Confidence levels

Level	Basis
Very high	FEC filing, campaign site, or official announcement
High	Direct quote from the candidate or a spokesperson
Medium	Credible reporting from named sources
Low	Ally chatter, unnamed sources, speculation
Noise	Social rumor, parody, unsourced

What it won't do (guardrails)

Unknown names and parody never hit the live board — they go to a human review queue.
Denials are never auto-applied. A "won't run" headline goes to review for confirmation, not straight onto the board.
Of the many perennial/nuisance FEC filers, only those with a registered principal committee surface.
Money is a separate axis — campaign-finance totals are shown on their own, never folded into the momentum score.
Curated context is never overwritten by automation.

Money

Where a candidate has a registered FEC committee, the dashboard shows receipts, disbursements, and cash on hand from FEC reports. Non-filers show "not filed" — never $0 — so a registered campaign with no money isn't conflated with someone who hasn't filed at all. This far out (2026), most potential candidates have no committee yet, so this panel is sparse by design.

Follow what moves each day without checking the board: subscribe to the daily-brief RSS feed (top movers, new filers, and status changes, rebuilt every day).

Data & openness

The full dataset can be exported as JSON from the board (the Export button). The pipeline and source are open at github.com/DaveHomeAssist/hatinring; see the technical spec.

Corrections & contact

Spot something wrong or out of date? Corrections are welcome. Open an issue at github.com/DaveHomeAssist/hatinring/issues with the candidate, what's wrong, and a source. Confirmed corrections are applied on the next daily build.