(MONEY Magazine) – Summer is changing to autumn, and you're in for some stormy weather as Election Day approaches--political weather, that is. Between now and Nov. 5, you can expect to endure blizzards of sound bites, a downpour of negative campaign ads and steady accumulations of political promises. But once you step into the voting booth, things should be perfectly clear on at least one front: whether your representatives have been standing up for your financial interests. That's because MONEY has graded every member of Congress based on how each voted on the issues that directly affect your wallet.

To do that, we first asked Legi-Slate, a Washington, D.C. service that monitors federal legislation, to track votes in the Senate and House of Representatives since January 1995 on 20 economic and personal-finance issues. We then matched the votes of every member to the preferences of the American public, as expressed in a nationwide poll of 510 adults conducted for MONEY in late June by ICR Survey Research Group of Media, Pa. (margin of error: 4.3%). For a description of the votes, as well as a look at whether the public agreed with the House's and Senate's action in each case, see the box on page 75. To learn which lawmakers voted most and least often in sync with majority opinion, check out the tables that begin on page 77. On the MONEY Website (http://moneymag.com), you can find the voting records of all members of the House and Senate and determine which congresspeople voted most often the way you would have.

No member of Congress agreed with the public on every issue: The closest any came to a perfect score was Rep. Bill Hefner (D-N.C.), a moderate who sided with the majority of Americans on 11 of 12 votes. The best in the Senate was John McCain (R-Ariz.), with a correct score of eight out of 10. Those least aligned with public opinion: Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), a liberal from Los Angeles, with only three of 12 votes matching the majority view, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), with three of 10. Becerra says protecting the disenfranchised is not popular. "Chances are if politicians are going to stab someone, they'll stab someone who can't fight back," he adds.

Former Republican Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas stood with the public on six of nine issues before resigning his post to run for President. As for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), by tradition he votes only if a close tally is expected or he feels strongly about an issue. Of the four bills we tracked on which he did cast a vote, Gingrich sided with majority opinion twice and against twice. "His votes were mainly symbolic," says spokesman Tony Blankley.

The top lawmakers overall are conservatives and moderates--Republicans and Democrats--who weren't afraid to cross party lines. In the cellar, by contrast, are uniformly liberal Democrats, mostly from big cities, who oppose efforts aimed at reducing the scope of federal assistance for their constituents.

Shockingly few members of either party regularly voted as a majority of Americans would have liked, however. Fewer than a dozen lawmakers supported the public's stance on the pocketbook issues 80% of the time. Only 28% of Republicans and just 21% of Democrats backed the public on two-thirds of the bills.

The public and their representatives part ways dramatically on two issues: the federal budget and Medicare. Republicans, led by Speaker Gingrich, pushed far-reaching deficit-reduction and Medicare-reform bills through Congress--but Americans much prefer the defeated, scaled-back alternatives proposed by Democrats. Indeed, such party-line voting prevented many legislators from scoring well in our study. The public does favor numerous ideas advocated by Republicans and opposed by the Democratic congres- sional leadership, such as a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, creating so-called medical savings accounts, reforming product-liability laws and returning regulatory control of nursing homes from the federal government to the states. But Americans strongly back raising the minimum wage, as most Democrats do and many Republicans don't. For a member to vote consistently with public opinion, therefore, he or she needed to step across party lines--which only a handful of lawmakers were willing to do in this extremely partisan Congress.

Strikingly, when it comes to personal-finance matters, this Congress hasn't accomplished a whole lot. Of the 20 bills we analyzed, only four have become law: measures to allow a health insurance tax deduction for self-employed people, reduce securities litigation, deregulate the telecommunications industry and extend the amount of income Social Security recipients can earn before losing any federal retirement benefits. And the public disapproves of two of those four laws--loosening telecom regs and weakening investor rights in securities cases.

Before we take a closer look at your most and least favorite members of Congress, you need to know two more things about our ratings. First, on five topics, public opinion was split so evenly that we could not assign a statistically significant majority position to either side of an issue. We've listed members' votes on them but didn't include the votes in our scoring.

Also, five House members, all Democrats, tied Rep. Becerra with a correct score of just three votes (Bobby Rush, Ill.; Jose Serrano, N.Y.; Bennie Thompson, Miss.; Edolphus Towns, N.Y.; and Maxine Waters, Calif.). We broke the tie by weighting the issues according to the size of the plurality supporting the majority position on each topic. The other five members, for example, favored increasing the minimum wage, which got the strongest backing of any item in our poll (83%). Becerra missed the vote on that issue; he told MONEY that he was en route to Los Angeles to speak at a college commencement.

The winners in the House and the Senate are very different types of politicians. Rep. Hefner, 66, an 11-term Democrat from North Carolina's textiles-dominated 8th District, disagreed with the public only in voting for telecommunications deregulation. He supported Democratic positions on the budget and Medicare but also voted for two G.O.P. initiatives: a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget and a bill that would let individuals or their employers make tax-deductible contributions into medical savings accounts while guaranteeing that workers could keep their health insurance if they lose or leave their jobs.

Running for re-election against Curtis Blackwood, a retired schoolteacher and administrator, Hefner believes his prior experience as the owner of a Kannapolis, N.C. radio station has shaped his voting philosophy. "I was in business before I was in government," he says, "and I know the importance of always running an enterprise on principles like keeping a balanced budget."

Republican Sen. McCain, 59, was a Vietnam War hero who spent five years in P.O.W. camps before moving to Arizona and winning election to the House in 1982 and then the Senate in 1986. McCain has a reputation as a conservative with an independent mind. Though an early supporter of Sen. Phil Gramm's Republican presidential campaign, McCain has become a key adviser to Bob Dole. As we went to press, Dole was considering him as a potential running mate.

Of the votes we tracked, McCain voted against the wishes of the public only when supporting the Republicans' seven-year budget plan in 1995 and opposing the 90' proposed increase in the $4.25 minimum wage this year. Significantly, he broke party ranks to oppose telecom deregulation and securities litigation revisions--placing him on the right side of the two laws that Congress passed against public opinion. McCain credits the one serious black mark on his career--he was one of the Keating Five, senators who intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Phoenix S&L magnate Charles Keating--for his vote against securities litigation reform. "I have been visited by many of the bondholders who lost their life savings in the Keating debacle," he told MONEY, "and I'd be lying if I didn't say it didn't have a significant effect on me. I believe we have to do everything we can to protect the small investor."

On the flip side is Democrat Feinstein, 63, the former mayor of San Francisco elected to the Senate in 1992 and not up for re-election until 2000. She voted along with Senate liberals on most of these issues but was one of only two senators to vote against the 1995 overhaul of federal job-training efforts (Democrat Paul Simon of Illinois was the other). Feinstein was concerned that the programs would be inadequately funded after being consolidated into a small number of block grants. She also voted for telecom reform and the securities litigation bill--which the public opposes--and against turning nursinghome regulation back to the states, as the public wishes.

In the House, California Democrat Becerra, 38, sided with the majority of our poll respondents on only the Democrats' 1995 budget and Medicare plans and in his opposition to the securities bill. First elected to Congress in 1992, Becerra was easily re-elected in '94 and is running against legal secretary Patricia Jean Parker this year. The scores of Becerra and the other five lowest-ranked House members, most representing inner cities, demonstrate today's tension between the conservative national mood and the priorities of urban Americans, mirrored in the votes of these congresspeople. None of the six House members, for example, supported the creation of medical savings accounts, believing that the tax-sheltered arrangements would boost health insurance costs for low-income people. Nor did any of them support temporarily repealing the 4.3'-per-gallon federal gas tax imposed in 1993, because Republicans planned to pay for this change by repealing a tax break for minority-owned broadcasting firms.

Of course, personal-finance matters shouldn't be the only criteria by which you rate Congress or candidates. But you owe it to yourself to see how your emissaries to Washington have watched your wallet. The lists that follow will help you make that call this fall.

Reporter associates: Kelly D. Smith and Brian L. Clark