WASHINGTON — While most presidential support votes are straightforward, determining a president’s views on legislation can occasionally be fraught, especially when the president is Donald Trump.

Each year, CQ Roll Call assigns a presidential position to votes based on whether the president expressed a clear stance before members of Congress voted. Final Senate votes on nominees (a confirmation vote or an unsuccessful cloture vote), by virtue of the nominations being submitted by the president, are considered presidential support votes.

The exercise is a team effort, with researchers, reporters and editors all having important roles in making the determinations and tracking the results. This is one of those years when a key vote related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein deserves a bit of special attention for not being counted as a presidential support vote.

Traditionally, the metric relied on formal statements of administration policy from the Office of Management and Budget or when there was some other clear answer from the White House about the president’s views.

As communications have evolved, however, vote positions have also been determined through other sources, such as public statements and social media posts, including from Trump’s Truth Social account.

The most difficult votes to score are ones in which the president’s position evolves during the legislative process.

For CQ Roll Call’s 2025 vote studies edition, the most glaring example was Trump’s opposition to a measure directing the Department of Justice to release files relating to the federal investigation into Epstein.

When it became clear that a discharge petition would nevertheless be successful to force the bill onto the House floor, Trump publicly stated that House Republicans should support the measure “because we have nothing to hide.” But he continued to call the issue a “hoax” and criticize Republican proponents of the bill.

As Trump had dropped his opposition by the time of the vote, but was not clearly in favor of the legislation, CQ Roll Call did not assign a presidential position to votes on the measure.

Helpfully for us, OMB used the formal mechanics for announcing presidential positions on legislative matters much more frequently in 2025 than it did during Trump’s first term. The president weighed in on legislation 94 times via statement of administration policy last year, whereas his first-term average was 36 per year.

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