Without a regular menu of legislation, individual lawmakers have fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves.
Without a regular menu of legislation, individual lawmakers have fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves.
A merica used to go through long periods of mostly durable congressional majorities. Political analysists talked about “sun and moon” parties in the American system. Those cycles began dramatically speeding up after 2006. Big-change elections that coincide with a presidential race can bring in a Congress that might have a significant majority, as in 2009 or 2015, but not an enduring one. Since 2019, majorities have been tiny.
Congressional midterm elections have always been a partial referendum on the performance of the president. But now they are little else, and the dynamic seems to be self-reinforcing. Legislators now pass something like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or a giant omnibus. Negotiation is behind closed doors and done by party leadership. There’s a little brinkmanship about the continuing resolutions or the debt ceiling. What there isn’t is a regular legislative agenda capable of seriously and substantially altering policy. Without a regular menu of legislation, individual lawmakers have fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves from the national party or on any individual issue their district cares about.
I live in one of the remaining swing districts. It’s a district that leans Democratic now but currently has a Republican congressman, Mike Lawler. The district has a deep-red center in Putnam County but stronger Democratic areas in Rockland and northern Westchester. Lawler, like many New York Republicans, does not focus on culture war issues. His ads focus heavily on the tax cuts given to “working people,” who earn tips or receive overtime pay. It’s a tougher than usual environment to do this, because everyone claims to be a tax cutter here. Politicians from right to far left campaign for a full restoration of state and local tax deductions. Lawler simply has a harder time branding himself the way the district demands he do, as a “different kind of Republican.” If there were a regular pattern of legislation, Lawler would be able to advertise even more substantive achievements to highlight his focus on commuter rail and housing costs.
A normal legislative schedule would push elections to be more about actual policy debate. But in the absence of a fuller legislative calendar, Lawler’s opponent is freer to harvest whatever popular discontent is about. And she has done so. Cait Conley, the Democratic candidate, has picked up the anti-data-center, AI-skeptical mood of the public. The One Big Beautiful Bill had an early version that barred states from regulating AI for a decade. Lawler voted for it — but he campaigns on the tax cuts portion. Five data centers have gone up in Rockland County. You can almost see how the previous populist mood, which demanded reindustrialization and jobs, became a factor in bringing those data centers to our district. Now the latest one is against them.
This dynamic is repeated all over the country. The atrophying of traditional social institutions, everything from mainline church congregations to the Elks Clubs to bowling leagues, leaves legislators more exposed to the national brand of the party that is coming through national news and social media.
Since the 1994 Republican Revolution, which brought a stonking majority to the GOP, there’s been a temptation to try to nationalize congressional elections — to run as a majority with one positive collective agenda. This really hasn’t worked since then — and the more creative political leaders, like Chuck Schumer in 2006, localized elections. That was mostly about persona and branding, and it included running against an increasingly unpopular second-term Republican.
But, when everything is considered, congressional members now spend too much time and money trying to stay in office by branding themselves on social media or inundating the airwaves with their sickest burns from an oversight hearing. They would help themselves accomplish what’s politically necessary in these tasks with so much more ease if they just did what we elected them to do: writing, revising, bargaining over, debating, and voting on discrete pieces of legislation.