How we bridge the gap

Americans do not like their Congress. Gallup has been asking the same question since 1974, do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, and the answer, averaged across half a century, is that 28 percent of the country approves and 65 percent disapproves.¹ The all-time high was 84 percent, recorded in October 2001, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks.² The all-time low was 9 percent, recorded in November 2013, during a federal government shutdown.³ As of April 2026, approval stood at 10 percent, barely above the floor of Gallup's trend.⁴ Approval has been mostly underwater since the series began, with brief stretches of net-positive readings in the late 1980s, the late 1990s, and the months after the September 11 attacks.⁵

This is the institution that the seven preceding sections have argued represents Americans poorly, and the public has been reaching the same conclusion for as long as anyone has been keeping track. A reader who has made it this far might reasonably wonder whether anything can be done about it.

Something can.

The problem is not what the country wants. The country knows what it wants, has known for half a century, and tells pollsters the same thing in every survey that asks. Eighty-six percent want congressional stock trading banned.⁶ Seventy-five percent want a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.⁷ Seventy-six percent want dark-money disclosure.⁸ Seventy-one percent want open primaries.⁹ Eighty-two percent want districts drawn by independent commissions.¹⁰ Two-thirds want a longer cooling-off period before former members can lobby.¹¹ Seven in ten want a permanent ban on lobbying for foreign governments.¹² These are not contested questions. They are settled in the country and unsettled only in Washington.

The problem is coordination. Each of these reforms commands a cross-partisan supermajority among voters, and each of them faces cross-partisan opposition among the members of Congress who would have to pass them. Republicans and Democrats vote against the congressional stock-trading ban. Republicans and Democrats vote against the DISCLOSE Act. Republicans and Democrats accept board seats from the industries they used to regulate. The reforms are not blocked because the country is divided on them. The country is not divided on them. They are blocked because the people who want them have not yet acted together at the ballot box on what they share, rather than separately on what divides them.

The bridge across it is the act of consenting together, in the only forum where consent is registered with binding effect: the elections that decide who serves.

Most American congressional races are not close. The average House race in 2024 was decided by 27 points, and the average Senate race by 17.¹³ But the average is not the whole picture. The chamber is more contested than the averages suggest. In 2024, 37 House seats were decided by fewer than five points, and another 31 by margins between five and ten points. That is 68 House seats, roughly one in six, where the outcome was within reach of a small shift in the electorate.¹⁴

The Senate is proportionally more competitive. Of the 35 Senate seats up for election in 2024, six were decided by fewer than five points and another five by margins between five and ten points. That is 11 of 35, or nearly one in three.¹⁵

In any of these races, a bloc of voters organized around reform support, willing to set aside the partisan question for a single cycle, could decide the outcome. The bloc does not have to be large. The average margin in the 37 closest House races of 2024 was a little over two points. Across all 37 districts combined, the total margin of victory was roughly 350,000 votes. About 175,000 voters choosing differently would have flipped every race within five points.¹⁶ That figure assumes no new voters show up. It assumes the people who chose not to vote in 2024 still choose not to vote. It assumes the entire shift comes from voters who already cast a ballot deciding, for one cycle, that reform support mattered more than the party label.

One hundred seventy-five thousand voters is roughly the population of a single mid-sized American city, in a country of 340 million. It is about one-tenth of one percent of all registered voters. It is, by any reasonable measure, a small number of people.

The same math applies in the Senate. Across the eleven Senate races within ten points in 2024, the median margin was under three points, and the combined margin across the five closest was under 200,000 votes against aggregate turnout exceeding 25 million.¹⁷ In any given Senate cycle, three or four seats are close enough that a coordinated bloc of voters acting on reform support could decide them.

The cumulative effect is what matters. Replace a handful of reform opponents with reform supporters in one cycle, and the bills the previous Congress refused to vote on suddenly have a closer path to the floor. Replace another handful in the next cycle, and the calculation changes for everyone still in office. A member of Congress who watches three colleagues lose because their record on these reforms became the deciding factor in their race will think differently about the next vote. Some will cave to the demand and vote for the reforms. Some will lose their seats. Either outcome is consent of the governed, working as designed.

To make that practical, Project Curia is a free website that shows users where their representatives stand on each of the seven reforms in this paper. Visitors enter a zip code and see, for their House member and both of their senators, a record of votes, cosponsorships, and public positions on the congressional stock-trading ban, the constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, the DISCLOSE Act, open primaries, redistricting reform, the lobbying cooling-off period, and the foreign-lobbying ban. The website does not tell anyone how to vote. It shows the underlying record and lets readers draw their own conclusions.

What it does, more than anything, is lower the cost of coordinating. The polling has been clear for half a century. The legislation has been written and reintroduced in Congress after Congress. The state ballot measures have passed by margins that other reforms rarely see. What has been missing is the connection between the strength of the public's view and the votes that decide who serves. The website exists to close that distance, district by district.

This paper began with a question. Putting aside partisanship, what would we like our politics to be? The pages between then and now have laid out, in some detail, what most Americans say they would like it to be: a politics in which every citizen has an equal political voice, in which voters choose their representatives, and in which representatives are beholden to the people who elected them. None of those is an unreasonable aspiration. All of them have been written into the country's founding documents, reaffirmed by amendment, and stated as constitutional doctrine. The work that remains is to bring the practice back into line with the principle, and the path to doing so runs through a few hundred thousand voters in a few dozen races, in elections that take place every two years.

The country has wanted this for a long time. It is closer than it may seem.

Footnotes

1. Megan Brenan, "Disapproval of Congress Ties Record High at 86%," Gallup, April 22, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/708722/disapproval-congress-ties-record-high.aspx ↩

2. Same source. The October 2001 reading, taken in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, remains the highest in the trend's history. ↩

3. Andrew Dugan, "Americans' Approval of Congress at All-Time Low for 2013," Gallup, December 12, 2013. https://news.gallup.com/poll/166196/americans-approval-congress-time-low-2013.aspx ↩

4. Megan Brenan, "Disapproval of Congress Ties Record High at 86%," Gallup, April 22, 2026. ↩

5. Compiled from Gallup, "Congress and the Public" historical trends. news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx ↩

6. Program for Public Consultation, Americans on Money in Politics, 2023. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/stock-trading-by-members-of-congress/ ↩

7. Program for Public Consultation, Americans on Money in Politics, May 2018. https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Money_in_Politics_Report.pdf ↩

8. Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, "Americans' Views on Money in Politics," November 12–17, 2015. https://apnorc.org/projects/americans-views-on-money-in-politics/ ↩

9. RealClear Opinion Research / Emerson Polling national survey, January 9–11, 2026. https://www.independentcenter.org/articles/polling-snapshot-americans-across-party-lines-agree----open-primaries-are-the-fix-for-a-broken-political-system ↩

10. NBC News Decision Desk Poll, August 13 – September 1, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-americans-oppose-political-parties-drawing-election-lines-rcna229257 ↩

11. Program for Public Consultation, lobbying policy survey of 2,606 registered voters fielded June 13–29, 2022. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/large-bipartisan-majority-favors-increasing-lobbying-restrictions-on-former-members-of-congress-and-other-government-officials/ ↩

12. Same source. ↩

13. Ballotpedia, "Election results, 2024: Congressional margin of victory analysis," February 2, 2025. https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Congressional_margin_of_victory_analysis ↩

14. FairVote, "Monopoly Politics 2026: 81% of House Seats Already Decided," April 28, 2025. https://fairvote.org/press/house-elections-broken-release-2025/ and https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Congressional_elections_decided_by_10_percentage_points_or_fewer ↩

15. Ballotpedia, "Election results, 2024: Congressional elections decided by 10 percentage points or fewer," January 25, 2025. https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Congressional_elections_decided_by_10_percentage_points_or_fewer and https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_elections,_2024 ↩

16. Author's calculation. Across the 37 House races decided by fewer than five points in 2024, the combined margin of victory across all 37 races was roughly 350,000 votes. Flipping every race requires closing that gap, which under the simplifying assumption that voters switch sides (rather than abstain or be newly mobilized) means about 175,000 voters changing their vote — since each switch shifts the margin by two. ↩

17. Ballotpedia, "Election results, 2024: Congressional elections decided by 10 percentage points or fewer," January 25, 2025. ↩