What do we want our politics to be?

If any principle could claim to be foundational to democracy, this would be it. The word itself, coined in ancient Athens, joined dēmos (the people) with kratos (rule). Democracy was defined, from the beginning, by what it was not: it was not oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, and it was not tyranny, the rule of one. This political framework was specifically built to ensure that no citizen's voice carried disproportionate weight in the governance of the whole.

When the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the drafters wrote that "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." When the Constitution was written, it opened with "We the People of the United States," not "We the Rulers of the United States." And over the past 250 years, the country has repeatedly amended that document to widen who counts among "the People." The 15th Amendment established that race could not be used to deny the vote; the 19th Amendment did the same for sex. The 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes, establishing that wealth could not be used as a barrier to political participation. The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, ensuring that young adults sent to fight the country's wars could also vote on the policies that decided them.

The Supreme Court has affirmed the same principle. By the mid-twentieth century, many state legislatures had become imbalanced. Some districts had remained unchanged for decades despite massive population shifts, with a vote in some districts worth many times a vote in others. In Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that this was constitutionally intolerable, and legislative districts would need to be drawn so that no citizen's vote carries more weight than another's. "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, establishing what has become known as "one person, one vote."

Taken together, all of this amounts to a single claim: that whether you are a citizen without a dollar to your name or a Wall Street financier, a rural farmer whose nearest neighbor lives miles down the road or a city resident whose apartment building holds more people than many American towns, you should count equally in the decisions that govern you.

That is the principle, established and reaffirmed across nearly 250 years of American history. The question is whether we have lived up to it.

Most Americans have already answered, and they have been answering the same way for half a century. When the American National Election Studies first put the question to a national sample in 1964, nearly two-thirds of Americans said the government was run for the benefit of all the people. Just 29 percent said it was run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. By the mid-1970s, the country had inverted, and the "few big interests" answer has held a clear majority in nearly every survey since. If anything, the gap has widened. In 2024, more than four in five Americans said the country is run by a few big interests.

If we merely had a single data point, this wouldn't be as telling. People can be wrong about their government. But when a majority of Americans, sustained across half a century, keep reaching the same conclusion, something is going on that has very little to do with which party is in power. Republicans said it under Obama, Democrats said it under Trump, and both said it under each other's predecessors. So the question worth asking is not who they blame, but what they are responding to. And the natural place to start is with the most visible piece of the system, the apparatus through which "big interests" crowd out the voices of "the People."

Heads: I Win

In 2024, organized interests spent $4.4 billion on federal lobbying, money paid to professional advocates working to shape legislation and regulation, separate from any spending on elections themselves.¹ To put that number into perspective, it exceeds the annual profit of Starbucks.² Every store, every drink, every customer, across roughly 40,000 locations serving tens of millions of customers every week, produces less in net earnings each year than is spent in Washington trying to shape what the federal government does.³ Put another way, over the past 15 years, more than $53 billion has been spent on lobbying, an amount that has held steady through recessions and pandemics and surged to record highs in recent years, regardless of which party controlled the White House.⁴ That same sum, redirected to the federal food assistance program, could have provided a full year of grocery support to 24 million Americans, more than the population of Florida.⁵

If lobbying did not work, it would not be a multi-billion dollar industry. The firms paying for it are not in the habit of paying for things that do not produce returns. The economic literature confirms what the spending implies. A 2014 study in the American Economic Review found that while both issue expertise and political connections drive what lobbyists are paid, the monetary premium for connections is more consistent than the premium for expertise.⁶ When their connected members move to new committees, lobbyists follow them, regardless of subject matter. A separate study, examining a tax provision passed in 2004, calculated that firms received roughly $220 in tax savings for every dollar they spent lobbying for it.⁷ To match that sort of return in a casino, you would have to win eight blackjack hands in a row, doubling your stake each time, with the odds of doing so roughly one in 250. Returns of that magnitude are unusual. The more general finding is that lobbying is, in the strict economic sense, a profitable allocation of resources.

The pattern isn't unique to corporations. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) spent $86.3 million on federal lobbying in 2024, which was more than any other single organization in Washington.⁸ The reason for the surge is not difficult to find. In late 2023, a federal jury found NAR liable for an antitrust conspiracy to inflate real estate commissions, and the case would be settled in 2024 for $418 million.⁹ The settlement required NAR to change the rules governing how its 1.5 million members are paid for their work. The trade group was, in effect, lobbying to shape the legislative and regulatory response to its own legal defeat.

One could reasonably argue that an organization representing realtors will naturally lobby for realtors, and that this is what trade associations are designed to do. The point is not that NAR shouldn't lobby. The point is the scale at which it does, and the asymmetry that this scale represents. The AFL-CIO, a federation of American unions representing roughly 12.5 million workers across virtually every sector of the economy, spent $5.2 million on federal lobbying in 2024.¹⁰ The National Education Association, the country's largest single union, representing about 3 million public school teachers and education staff, spent $2.8 million.¹¹ The Service Employees International Union, representing about 1.85 million workers in healthcare, public services, and property services, spent under $1 million.¹² NAR alone outspent these three organizations combined by more than tenfold, even though they represent, collectively, more than ten times as many Americans.

The natural question is why this is allowed.

The short answer is that it has always been protected. The First Amendment guarantees "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists, in the strict legal sense, are citizens exercising that right on behalf of clients who pay them to do so.

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, anticipated this. Writing in Federalist No. 10, he called organized interests "factions" and argued they were inevitable in any free society. People hold different views and form competing groups around their interests. Madison thought a free country could not eliminate factions without eliminating freedom itself. The remedy, he wrote, was to be found "in the means of controlling its effects."¹³ So the system the Founders designed accepted that factions would form, and worked instead to keep any one of them from dominating. The country would be a large republic, with the people's views filtered through elected representatives, and with so many varied factions across the territory that no single one could easily assemble a stable majority. Power would be split between the national government and the states, and within the national government among three branches that could check one another. This design would, ideally, lead to a country where factions would have to compete. Madison's design assumed factions would compete. It did not assume that the cost of competing would rise to a point where most citizens could not afford to participate.

Tails: You Lose

Before every American football game, a coin is tossed. The winner chooses how the game begins. In American politics, citizens like to think that at least one side of the coin might land in their favor; that one of the two great mechanisms of political influence might serve the people rather than the few. In practice, both sides have come to serve big interests. Heads or tails, the same names choose how the game begins, how it is played, and how it ends. If lobbying calls the plays, campaign finance picks the players. And no Supreme Court decision has shaped how players are picked more than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.¹⁴

In 2008, a conservative nonprofit called Citizens United produced a ninety-minute documentary critical of Hillary Clinton, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination. The group wanted to distribute the film through video-on-demand during the primary season. The Federal Election Commission held that doing so would violate a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which prohibited corporations and unions from using their general funds to pay for "electioneering communications" close to a federal election. Citizens United sued, and the case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments twice and issued its decision on January 21, 2010.

By a vote of five to four, the Court held that the law violated the First Amendment. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that political speech sits at the core of what the First Amendment protects, and that the government cannot suppress political speech based on the identity of the speaker. But what happens when that speaker is a corporation or a union?

The Court's answer was that corporations and unions are associations of citizens, and the political speech they fund deserves the same constitutional protection as the speech of an individual. A 1990 precedent that had upheld restrictions on corporate political spending was overturned, along with the portion of a 2003 ruling that had upheld the same restriction in the McCain-Feingold law.¹⁵ After the decision, corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts of their general funds on independent political communications, as long as they did not coordinate directly with a candidate's campaign.

And spend they did. In 2008, the last election cycle before the decision, outside groups spent $574 million attempting to influence federal elections. In 2024, that figure was $4.5 billion. Outside spending grew nearly eightfold in fifteen years, faster than any other category of political money.¹⁶

If "We the People" are the quarterback in this game, calling the plays and reading the field, Citizens United was the sack that rocked the quarterback. And the play that followed made it even harder to get up. Within months of Citizens United, a federal appeals court extended the ruling's logic to political action committees, holding in SpeechNow.org v. FEC that if independent expenditures could not be limited, then contributions to committees making only independent expenditures could not be limited either.¹⁷

The result was a new kind of political organization, the super PAC. Super PACs can accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions, and spend unlimited amounts on political activity, as long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate's campaign. They emerged in 2010 and have grown into the dominant vehicle for outside spending in federal elections. By 2024, super PACs were spending more on individual races than the candidates' own campaigns.¹⁸

For example, the most expensive House primary in American history took place that year in New York's 16th Congressional District, where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) affiliated super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $14.5 million to defeat Representative Jamaal Bowman.¹⁹ The contributors funding that spending lived largely outside the district, and the issue motivating their effort was U.S. policy toward a country thousands of miles away. That figure was more than five times what Bowman's own campaign spent, and it was decisive. Bowman lost by seventeen points.²⁰

The pattern crosses party lines. The same year, Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, lost his Republican primary to a state senator named John McGuire. McGuire ran with Donald Trump's endorsement, which Trump had given after Good backed Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary. He also drew support from outside groups tied to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Good had voted to remove from the speakership the previous year. Outside groups poured nearly $11 million into the race, one of the most expensive Republican House primaries of the cycle. Good's own campaign raised $1.4 million; outside spending against him reached $6.9 million. He lost by 370 votes.²¹

Both races show the mechanism, but only one of them keeps going past the primary. Good's defeat closed out an intra-party fight about who held the speakership. Bowman's defeat was one move in a longer effort with a clear policy direction, and that direction shows up in the votes Congress has been taking.

Returning to AIPAC, its reach goes well beyond a single race. Across the 2024 election cycle, the organization deployed roughly $127 million through its lobbying operation, its political action committee, and the United Democracy Project.²² Organized money on this scale can even produce policy outcomes that diverge from what voters say they want.

The gap between Democratic voters and Democratic representatives on Israel policy is unusually concrete. In April 2024, the House passed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, sending roughly $17 billion in additional military and security assistance to Israel as part of a $26 billion supplemental package. House Democrats backed it 173 to 37, with more than four out of five voting in favor of its passage.²³ Their constituents were not with them. Polling around the same time found that only about a third of Democrats viewed Israel favorably, just a quarter supported continued U.S. military aid, and roughly three-quarters disapproved of Israel's military actions in Gaza.²⁴ In the same months that Democratic representatives cast their votes and the people who elected them spoke with pollsters, the two looked nothing alike.

The original principle was that every citizen has an equal political voice, and so far we've been exploring the ways in which that notion has been strained. So far the conversation has stayed with institutions: lobbying firms, super PACs, the legal architecture that turns money into influence. But voice is something people have, and nothing puts the claim of equal voice to a fairer test than the individuals whose voices, by any measure worth taking, now carry vastly more weight than those of their fellow citizens.

In the 2024 federal election cycle, the top five individual contributors to American politics were, in order: Elon Musk, who gave roughly $291 million; Timothy Mellon, who gave roughly $197 million; Miriam Adelson, who gave roughly $148 million; Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who gave roughly $143 million; and Kenneth Griffin, who gave roughly $108 million.²⁵ All five directed their contributions toward Republican candidates and causes. The cycle's total individual contribution from these five people alone approached $900 million. Musk's $291 million was nearly as much as Donald Trump's entire campaign committee raised from all sources combined.²⁶ Every donor, large and small, over the entire two-year cycle.

It would be tempting to view that graphic as a story about one party, one candidate, or one man, but the pattern is older and broader than any single cycle. In the 2022 cycle, the largest individual contributor in the country was George Soros, who gave roughly $178 million, almost entirely to Democratic candidates and causes, which was more than the next two contributors combined.²⁷ In the 2020 cycle, four of the top ten individual contributors gave principally to Democrats, including Michael Bloomberg at roughly $152 million and Tom Steyer at roughly $72 million.²⁸ The names and the partisan tilt change from cycle to cycle, but the system does not. In every recent cycle, a small number of individuals have provided a share of the country's political spending that no ordinary citizen, regardless of party, could plausibly match.

The 2024 cycle is worth dwelling on, because it produced something the country has not previously seen. Elon Musk's $291 million was not only the largest individual contribution of the cycle; it was, by available reporting, the largest disclosed individual contribution in the history of American federal elections.²⁹ After the election, the candidate he supported took office, and Musk was given a role with broad authority over the federal workforce, authority that included reducing the headcount of agencies, accessing internal government data systems, and shaping the operations of departments whose work touched directly on his own companies' regulatory environment.³⁰

Consider one example. In late January 2025, Musk's social media platform X announced a partnership with Visa to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service, the first step toward what Musk has described as turning the platform into an "everything app" through which users could conduct their "entire financial life."³¹ Within ten days, Musk's team at the federal Department of Government Efficiency had arrived at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate consumer financial products.³² Within weeks, the bureau's leadership had begun moves to terminate nearly all 1,700 of its employees, its work was halted, and its headquarters was closed.³³ There is no precedent in American history for a private citizen contributing at this scale to an election and then assuming this kind of role inside the government that election produced.

But this has nothing to do with the particulars and everything to do with the system that allows for it. Consider how this would read in a history textbook written a century from now, describing a different era. Imagine if the entry for the 1904 election noted that John D. Rockefeller, having spent heavily to support the winning candidate, was subsequently given an office inside the federal government with authority to dismiss civil servants, access agency records, and oversee the operations of departments that regulated the oil industry. Most Americans would find it strange, and it would be strange regardless of what they thought of Rockefeller, the president, or the policies the arrangement produced.

None of what has been discussed thus far is illegal. The Supreme Court has, in fact, affirmed much of it.³⁴ Some readers may agree with what Elon Musk wants for the country, others with what George Soros wants. But given the scale at which money now operates in our politics, it might be time to ask whether the principle this country was founded on, that every citizen has an equal political voice, still describes the country we live in. That principle was written into the nation's founding, reaffirmed by amendment after amendment, and stated again as constitutional doctrine. The question is whether we practice it, or whether it is something we have merely learned to tell ourselves.

Footnotes

1. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024," February 13, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/02/federal-lobbying-set-new-record-in-2024. ↩

2. Starbucks Corporation, "Starbucks Reports Q4 and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Results," October 30, 2024. Net income reported at $3.76 billion. (Starbucks's fiscal year 2024 ran October 2023 – September 2024; the federal lobbying figure is for calendar 2024.) ↩

3. Starbucks Corporation, "Starbucks Reports Q4 and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Results," October 30, 2024. Store count of 40,199 at fiscal year-end. ↩

4. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying: Trends in Spending." Cumulative figure calculated from annual totals, 2010–2024. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/trends-in-spending ↩

5. Author's calculation based on average SNAP benefit of $187.20 per participant per month in fiscal year 2024 (USDA ERS). Florida population estimate (approximately 23 million) from U.S. Census Bureau, 2024. ers.usda.gov ↩

6. Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, and Francesco Trebbi, "Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process," American Economic Review 104, no. 12 (December 2014): 3885–3920. ↩

7. Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen W. Mazza, and Susan Scholz, "Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures: An Empirical Case Study of Tax Breaks for Multinational Corporations," Journal of Law and Politics 25, no. 4 (2009): 401–457. ↩

8. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024," February 13, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/02/federal-lobbying-set-new-record-in-2024. NAR spending data also at https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-assn-of-realtors/summary. ↩

9. Burnett v. National Association of Realtors, W.D. Mo., No. 4:19-cv-00332, jury verdict October 31, 2023; settlement of $418 million granted final approval November 26, 2024. ↩

10. OpenSecrets, AFL-CIO organization profile. AFL-CIO membership figure of approximately 12.5 million workers across affiliated unions. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/afl-cio/summary ↩

11. OpenSecrets, National Education Association organization profile. NEA membership figure of approximately 3 million. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-education-assn/summary ↩

12. OpenSecrets, Service Employees International Union organization profile. SEIU membership figure of approximately 1.85 million. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/service-employees-international-union/summary ↩

13. James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 22, 1787. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10 ↩

14. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). Argued March 24, 2009; reargued September 9, 2009; decided January 21, 2010. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html ↩

15. The overturned precedents were Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990), and the relevant portion of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003). https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/ ↩

16. OpenSecrets, "By the Numbers: 15 Years of Citizens United," January 27, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/01/by-the-numbers-15-years-of-citizens-united/. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_cycle. ↩

17. SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010), decided March 26, 2010. https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/ ↩

18. OpenSecrets, "By the Numbers: 15 Years of Citizens United," January 27, 2025. Super PAC spending grew from $62.6 million in 2010 to more than $4.1 billion in 2024. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/01/by-the-numbers-15-years-of-citizens-united/ ↩

19. Brett Bachman, "Democrats Groan at AIPAC's $14.5 Million 'Overkill' Against Jamaal Bowman," Axios, June 26, 2024. The figure represents United Democracy Project spending alone, which the New York Times reported "eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race." https://www.axios.com/2024/06/26/democrats-aipac-jamaal-bowman-george-latimer ↩

20. Latimer defeated Bowman by approximately 17 percentage points. Bowman's pre-primary spending was approximately $2.7 million. https://abcnews.com/538/live-updates/new-york-colorado-utah-primaries/latimer-projected-to-defeat-bowman-in-new-yorks-16th-district-111426585. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jamaal-bowman/summary?cid=N00044790 ↩

21. Edward Sebastian and Tyler Englander, "Virginia's 5th District GOP Primary Between Bob Good and John McGuire Could Head to Recount," WRIC, June 19, 2024. Total race spending of $10.9 million per Virginia Public Access Project. https://www.wric.com/news/politics/local-election-hq/virginias-5th-district-gop-primary-between-bob-good-and-john-mcguire-could-head-to-recount/ ↩

22. Donald Shaw, "Here Is All the Money AIPAC Spent on the 2024 Elections," Sludge, January 24, 2025. AIPAC's PAC and the United Democracy Project together spent $126.9 million in the 2023–2024 cycle. https://readsludge.com/2025/01/24/here-is-all-the-money-aipac-spent-on-the-2024-elections/ ↩

23. Roll Call 152, H.R. 8034 (Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024), April 20, 2024. Final passage was 366 to 58, with 173 Democrats and 193 Republicans in support. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2024152 ↩

24. Lydia Saad, "Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza," Gallup, March 27, 2024. Pew Research Center, "Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting," March 21, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx. Pew report: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/03/PRC_2024.3.21_Israel-Hamas_REPORT.pdf ↩

25. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2023–2024." Figures reflect total contributions to federal candidates, parties, PACs, and outside groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2024 ↩

26. Trump campaign committee fundraising figure from OpenSecrets, "Donald Trump – Candidate Summary, 2024 Cycle." Musk's contributions went almost entirely to outside groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-trump/candidate?id=N00023864 ↩

27. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2021–2022." https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2022 ↩

28. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2019–2020." https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2020 ↩

29. OpenSecrets, "Big Money, Big Stakes: 5 Things Everyone Should Know About Money in 2024 Elections," November 2024. The $291 million figure includes Musk's contributions to America PAC and other outside groups supporting Donald Trump. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/11/big-money-big-stakes-5-things-everyone-should-know-about-money-in-2024-election/ ↩

30. Eric Katz, "Project 2025 Wanted to Hobble the Federal Workforce. DOGE Has Hastily Done That, and More," Government Executive, April 9, 2025. https://www.govexec.com/transition/2025/04/project-2025-wanted-hobble-federal-workforce-doge-has-hastily-done-and-more/404390/. See also https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/0512/doge-elon-musk-federal-government ↩

31. Hugh Son, "Elon Musk's X Begins Its Push into Financial Services with Visa Deal," CNBC, January 28, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/28/elon-musk-x-visa-digital-wallet.html. See also https://fortune.com/article/elon-musk-x-money-visa-partnership-impact/ ↩

32. Evan Weinberger, "Musk's DOGE Descends on CFPB With Eyes on Shutting It Down," Bloomberg Law, February 7, 2025. https://news.bgov.com/esg/musks-doge-descends-on-consumer-financial-protection-bureau ↩

33. Hugh Son, "Trump Administration, Musk's DOGE Plan to Fire Nearly All CFPB Staff and Wind Down Agency, Employees Say," CNBC, February 28, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/cfpb-leaders-and-elon-musk-doge-planned-to-fire-nearly-all-staff.html. See also https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5294479/cfpb-workers-fired-trump-doge ↩

34. See Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014). ↩

Democracy was invented in a place small enough to practice it in person. The citizens of ancient Athens could assemble, hear the arguments, and vote together on the questions that governed them. That mode of governance was already considered unworkable by the Founders at the scale of a single nation, and the problem has only intensified since. Hundreds of millions of people scattered across a continent, deciding continuously on questions that require sustained attention and technical expertise, cannot govern themselves by assembly. Every modern democracy has solved this problem the same way: representation. Citizens choose representatives, and those representatives deliberate on what the laws should be.

This is the standard implementation of democracy at scale, as is the case in Norway, Ireland, Japan, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and practically every other functioning democracy. Parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multi-party, federal or unitary, democracies often vary widely in their architecture, but what they share is representation. There is no functioning modern democracy in which the people themselves, rather than their representatives, do the legislating, because no such system has ever been made to work above the scale of a township.

America's version of representation was designed with this scale problem in mind. The Constitution created two chambers with different logics: the House of Representatives, popularly elected every two years with seats apportioned by population, and the Senate, with equal representation per state and members originally chosen by state legislatures rather than voters. The same amendments that progressively expanded who could vote, the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th, also widened, by definition, the circle of who got to choose. In 1913, the 17th Amendment went further, taking the selection of senators away from state legislatures and giving it directly to voters. The arc of American democratic development has been a long, contested movement toward putting the choosing in the hands of "the People."

If representation is the only viable form of democracy at scale, and if America has spent its history working to make the choice belong genuinely to "the People," then the way representatives are chosen matters as much as the principle of equal voice itself. So, how are representatives chosen?

Primarily A Secondary Issue

The way Americans choose their representatives today is not the way they always have. For most of the nineteenth century, candidates for office were selected by party leaders in conventions and caucuses. A small number of insiders decided who would appear on the ballot, and voters decided between the two names the parties had handed them. By the late 1800s, this had become a target of reform. The Progressive Era's leading figures, such as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, argued that candidate selection should not be left to party bosses but given directly to voters.¹ The remedy was the direct primary. La Follette pushed it through the Wisconsin legislature in 1903, where voters ratified it the following year; by 1917 all but four states had adopted some form of it.² The reform was sold as more democracy, not less. Its purpose was to take power from a small group of party insiders and put it in the hands of the people.

A century later, it is worth asking how that worked out.

The most basic measure of whether voters control candidate selection is whether voters show up. In American primaries, they generally do not. Across the past quarter-century, primary turnout has hovered between roughly fourteen and thirty percent of eligible voters, with the lowest figures concentrated in midterm years.³ In 2014, fewer than fifteen percent of eligible Americans cast a primary ballot. In 2022, the figure was about twenty percent.⁴ General-election turnout swings with the calendar, climbing past sixty percent in presidential years and falling closer to forty in midterms, but even the worst-attended general election in this period drew more than twice the share of eligible voters as the average primary. The general election that follows then ratifies a choice that a much smaller electorate already made.

The state-level picture can be even more grim. Consider New Jersey, where most congressional districts have leaned reliably toward one party for most of this period, which means the primary in the dominant party is usually the election that decides who serves.⁵ Primary turnout in New Jersey was 6.9 percent of eligible voters in 2014, 8.2 percent in 2010, and 7.1 percent in 2006.⁶ Across every midterm cycle of the past quarter-century, fewer than one in eight eligible New Jerseyans cast a primary ballot, and in five of those cycles it was fewer than one in ten. The general elections that followed drew far higher participation, in line with the national average, but in the safe districts that make up most of the state's congressional map, the names on the November ballot had already been chosen by an electorate of fewer than one in ten eligible voters.

Behind the turnout numbers is a simpler fact. In most congressional districts, the general election is a formality. The way district lines are drawn, combined with where voters of each party live, means the outcome of the great majority of House races is predictable long before November. In 2024, the Cook Political Report rated only 22 of 435 House races as toss-ups in its final pre-election ratings. The vast majority of the other 413 were rated likely or solid for one party, and the dominant party's candidate in each was already on track to win.⁷

If the general election is a formality, the primary is the consequential election, because that is where the dominant party's nominee is chosen. In 2024, about 18 million voters cast primary ballots that decided the occupants of 380 House seats. That is roughly seven percent of voting-age Americans choosing eighty-seven percent of the House. In 169 of those districts, the dominant-party nominee faced no primary opponent and secured a seat in Congress without earning a single vote. The general election that followed ratified outcomes that had been settled months earlier, and in nearly two-fifths of House seats, by no voter at all.⁸

One response is that if primaries decide outcomes, more people should vote in them. But for millions of Americans, the question of whether to vote in a primary is not theirs to answer. The rules of who counts as a primary voter exclude them by design.

In most states, primaries are open or partially open, meaning any registered voter, or any voter not registered with the opposing party, can participate. However, in fifteen states, the primary is closed, meaning only voters who have registered with a party in advance can cast a ballot in that party's primary. New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maryland are among those fifteen.⁹ In those states, voters who have declined to register with either major party are formally excluded from the only election that, in safe districts, decides who represents them. Roughly 17.6 million registered voters are in that situation, and the share of voters not registered with either major party has grown by about twenty percent in the past fifteen years.¹⁰ According to Gallup, forty-three percent of American adults now identify as political independents, compared to twenty-eight percent each for Democrats and Republicans.¹¹ The group most reliably excluded from primaries is also, by a substantial margin, the largest political group in the country.

The closed-primary problem is part of a larger one. Even where independents can vote in primaries, a registered Republican in a safely Democratic district has no meaningful vote in the election that decides who represents them. They can vote in the Republican primary, but it selects a candidate who will lose the general by a wide margin. They can vote in November, but the outcome was settled before the campaign began. The same is true in reverse for a Democrat in a safely Republican district.

So the question of who has a meaningful vote does not really come down to turnout, closed primaries, or who shows up to a primary. It comes down to how many districts are safe in the first place. If most districts were genuinely competitive, every voter in November would have something at stake. The fact that they are not is what gives the small primary electorate its outsized power, which raises the question of how the districts came to be that way.

Gerry Meandering Around Town

In March 1812, the governor of Massachusetts signed a bill redrawing the boundaries of the state's senate districts. The map had been engineered by his party, the Democratic-Republicans, to disadvantage the rival Federalists in the upcoming election. One of the resulting districts, in the area north of Boston, was so contorted that it ran for nearly a hundred miles in a thin curve along the coast. A cartoonist for the Boston Gazette drew the district as a winged dragon, and the editor coined a new word by combining the governor's name with "salamander." The governor was Elbridge Gerry, and the practice has been called gerrymandering ever since.¹²

Gerry was a serious figure. He had signed the Declaration of Independence, served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and would later be elected vice president under James Madison. By contemporary accounts he disliked the redistricting bill and signed it reluctantly. He lost his reelection that fall.¹³ The map he had signed survived him, and so did the word. Two centuries later, the practice it named has become more sophisticated, more deliberate, and considerably more effective than anything Gerry's mapmakers could have managed with a pen and paper. But the basic idea is the same. The party in power draws the lines so that its own voters are distributed efficiently across many districts and the opposing party's voters are concentrated into a few. The result is a legislature whose composition reflects the cartography as much as the votes.

The most candid descriptions of gerrymandering come from the people who do it. In 2000, Thomas Hofeller, the Republican strategist who would go on to design many of the most aggressively partisan congressional maps of the next two decades, described his trade to a conference of state legislators. "Redistricting is like an election in reverse," he said. "It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters."¹⁴ Sixteen years later, in 2016, Republican state representative David Lewis defended a North Carolina congressional map he had helped draw with similar candor on the floor of the General Assembly. "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats," he said. "So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country." He went on to say that he had proposed a ten-to-three Republican advantage only because he did not believe it was possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats.¹⁵ North Carolina that year was a state where Republican congressional candidates would win 53 percent of the statewide vote, and Democratic candidates 47 percent. The map produced ten Republican seats and three Democratic ones, exactly as Lewis had said it was designed to do.¹⁶

The pattern is bipartisan. In a 2017 deposition, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, was asked under oath about the congressional map he had overseen in 2011, which had transformed a six-to-two Democratic delegation into a seven-to-one one. "I did everything in my power to draw a map that would be more favorable to the election of a Democratic congressional delegation," he said. Asked whether the redrawn district had been intended to elect a Democrat rather than a Republican, he replied, "Yes, this was clearly my intent."¹⁷ What gets called fair maps in public is described, in private rooms and sworn testimony, as something else.

The principle at stake is that voters choose their representatives. A congressional district is the unit through which that choice is made: a defined geographic area whose residents share enough common ground that one person can credibly speak for them in Washington. A district should outline a cohesive area representing a cohesive group of people with shared concerns a single representative could meaningfully address.

Gerrymandering inverts this. Instead of drawing districts that fit communities, the lines are drawn to fit electoral outcomes. The illustration below shows how. Imagine a state of fifty voters, sixty percent of whom support one party and forty percent the other, divided into five equal districts that will each elect one representative. Three different ways of drawing the lines produce varied outcomes. In the first, the lines roughly track where voters live, and the resulting delegation reflects the population, three to two in favor of the majority. In the second, the lines are drawn so that every district contains a slim majority of the larger group, and the larger party wins every seat. In the third, the lines bend and twist so that the smaller party wins three districts out of five, despite being a minority of the total population. Same voters, same votes, three different governments. The lines decide. And in most American states, the people drawing the lines are the legislators themselves, which means the people whose jobs depend on the outcome of the next election are the ones deciding which voters they will face.

Having seen what gerrymandering can accomplish, the question is how often it actually happens in the United States. After the 2020 census, of the 435 congressional districts in the country, 177 were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures and roughly 50 by Democratic-controlled ones. Another 28 were drawn by political commissions, 82 by independent or advisory commissions, around 50 by courts after legislative deadlocks or successful gerrymandering challenges, and the remaining 48 by bipartisan compromise or in single-seat states with no district lines to draw at all.¹⁸ In other words, roughly half of the country's congressional districts were drawn by the legislators of one party, sitting in a state capitol, deciding which voters they would face in the next election.

The dynamic this produces is most visible in real time. The events described below were still developing as this was written, and some of the maps will have been changed, challenged, or reinstated by the time it is read.¹⁹

In the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump asked the Republican- controlled Texas legislature to redraw the state's congressional map mid-decade in order to add Republican seats before the 2026 midterms. Texas did so in July, in a special legislative session, producing a map projected to flip up to five Democratic-held seats to Republicans.²⁰ In the weeks that followed, Trump described the effort plainly. "We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats," he told CNBC in early August. "I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats."²¹ Within weeks, Republican legislatures in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Utah followed, each drawing new maps targeting Democratic seats in their states.²²

California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded by placing Proposition 50 on the November ballot, asking voters to suspend the state's independent redistricting commission for one cycle and adopt a new Democratic-drawn congressional map. The official title voters saw on the ballot was unusually direct. "Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas' partisan redistricting."²³ California voters approved it, and the new map was projected to flip up to five Republican-held seats to Democrats.²⁴ Virginia's Democratic-led legislature began a similar process. Florida and Indiana Republicans considered the same. Within six months, six states had adopted new mid-decade maps drawn for partisan advantage, more than at any point since the 1960s.²⁵

What was most striking was not that any individual map was unusually contorted by historical standards. It was that the maps were drawn outside the normal redistricting calendar, in direct response to a political moment, and entirely without the participation of voters in the affected districts. Voters in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and California found themselves in different districts than they had been in months earlier, and would vote in 2026 under maps they had no part in choosing.

The practice of letting elected legislators draw their own districts is not a feature of representative democracy itself. It is a feature of American democracy specifically. In late 2025, in the middle of the mid-decade redistricting wave, the Pew Research Center analyzed how 107 democracies around the world elect their national legislatures. The researchers found that exactly one other country gives the job of drawing legislative districts to subnational legislatures the way the United States does. That country is the Federated States of Micronesia, a Pacific nation of roughly 100,000 people.²⁶

The other 105 democracies in the study, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, and every other wealthy democracy the United States is usually compared to, draw their legislative districts through national election agencies, independent boundary commissions, or other bodies whose members are not the legislators whose seats are being drawn. The American arrangement is not how representative democracy works in the world. It is how it works here. The problem the United States has spent two centuries discussing is one that every comparable democracy has solved.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymandering, Justice Elena Kagan read her dissent aloud from the bench, a step justices reserve for decisions they find catastrophically wrong. "If there is a single idea that made our Nation," she wrote, "it is this one: The people are sovereign…. The people get to choose their representatives. And then they get to decide, at regular intervals, whether to keep them…. Election day…is what links the people to their representatives, and gives the people their sovereign power. That day is the foundation of democratic governance. And partisan gerrymandering can make it meaningless."²⁷

The principle this section opened with was that representatives are chosen by voters. When the people choosing the voters are the people running in the districts they drew, the principle is a farce.

Footnotes

1. On La Follette's role in the direct-primary movement, see Robert M. La Follette, La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison: The Robert M. La Follette Co., 1913); and Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). ↩

2. Wisconsin enacted the first statewide direct-primary law in 1903 (effective 1905). By 1917, all but four states had adopted some form of direct primary. See Alan Ware, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–3. ↩

3. Author's calculation from States United Democracy Center, "Voter Turnout in American Elections Since 2000," and U.S. Election Project voting-eligible-population estimates from Michael McDonald, University of Florida. https://statesunited.org/resources/voter-turnout-since-2000/ and https://www.electproject.org ↩

4. Joshua Ferrer and Michael Thorning, 2022 Primary Turnout: Trends and Lessons for Boosting Participation, Bipartisan Policy Center, March 2023, finding 21.3 percent eligible-voter turnout in 2022 primaries; 14.3 percent in 2014. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/2022-primary-turnout/ ↩

5. On the partisan composition of New Jersey's congressional map in 2014, see "Only One Congressional District in N.J. Considered Competitive in 2014," IVN, November 3, 2014. https://ivn.us/2014/11/03/one-congressional-district-n-j-considered-competitive-2014 ↩

6. Author's calculation from States United Democracy Center and U.S. Election Project VEP estimates. ↩

7. The Cook Political Report's final 2024 House ratings (issued November 1, 2024) classified 22 of 435 House races as Toss Up. https://www.270towin.com/2024-house-election/cook-political-report-2024-house-ratings — live ratings at https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings ↩

8. Unite America Institute, "Analysis: 87% Of U.S. House Elections Already Determined In Primaries By Just 7% Of Americans," October 8, 2024. The analysis identifies 380 of 435 House seats as effectively decided in their primaries. https://www.uniteamerica.org/articles/analysis-87-of-u-s-house-elections-already-determined-in-primaries-by-just-7-of-americans ↩

9. Ballotpedia, "Closed Primary"; National Conference of State Legislatures, "State Primary Election Systems," January 2024. https://ballotpedia.org/Closed_primary and https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Elections/Primary-Types-Table-2024.pdf ↩

10. Unite America Institute, Not Invited to the Party Primary: Independent Voters and the Problem with Closed Primaries, February 2024. https://www.uniteamericainstitute.org/research/not-invited-to-the-party-primary-independent-voters-and-the-problem-with-closed-primaries ↩

11. Lydia Saad, "GOP Holds Edge in Party Affiliation for Third Straight Year," Gallup, January 8, 2025. Combined 2024 Gallup telephone surveys (n = 14,162). https://news.gallup.com/poll/655157/gop-holds-edge-party-affiliation-third-straight-year.aspx ↩

12. Erin Allen, "Gerrymandering: The Origin Story," Library of Congress Blog, July 2024. The "Gerry-mander" cartoon first appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2024/07/gerrymandering-the-origin-story/. See also https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_509530 ↩

13. Greg Bradsher, "A Founding Father in Dissent," Prologue Magazine 38, no. 2 (Spring 2006), National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/gerry.html ↩

14. Miles Parks, "Redistricting Guru's Hard Drives Could Mean Legal, Political Woes For GOP," NPR, June 6, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/730260511/redistricting-gurus-hard-drives-could-mean-legal-political-woes-for-gop ↩

15. Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow, "North Carolina's Gerrymandered Map Is Unconstitutional, Judges Rule," Washington Post, August 27, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2018/08/27/fc04e066-aa46-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html ↩

16. Simon Jackman, Assessing the Current North Carolina Congressional Districting Plan, expert report submitted in Common Cause v. Rucho, 2017. https://roseinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Expert-Report-of-Simon-Jackman.pdf ↩

17. Robert Barnes, "Democrats Did 'Duty' in Md. Redistricting," Washington Post, March 27, 2018. O'Malley's testimony was given in a deposition for Benisek v. Lamone in spring 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/democrats-did-duty-in-md-redistricting-now-the-supreme-court-will-evaluate/2018/03/27/e41b4ad0-30fc-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html ↩

18. Brennan Center for Justice, "Who Controlled Redistricting in Every State," October 5, 2022. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/who-controlled-redistricting-every-state. See also https://ballotpedia.org/Redistricting_commissions ↩

19. This section was drafted in May 2026. The mid-decade redistricting effort that began in July 2025 was ongoing at the time of writing. ↩

20. Acacia Coronado and Nadia Lathan, "Texas Republicans Pass Trump-Backed Congressional Map," Associated Press, August 23, 2025. ↩

21. Donald Trump, interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, August 5, 2025, as reported in Russell Lewis, "Trump Says GOP Is 'Entitled' to Five More Texas Seats Amid Redistricting Push," Axios, August 5, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/05/trump-texas-five-seats-entitled ↩

22. David A. Lieb, "Missouri Governor Signs Trump-Backed Plan," Associated Press, September 28, 2025. On North Carolina, see Travis Fain, "NC Republicans Pass New Congressional Districts Into Law," WRAL News, October 22, 2025. ↩

23. California Secretary of State, "Proposition 50: Title and Summary," November 4, 2025 special election. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/public-display/prop-50-title-summary.pdf ↩

24. Marisa Lagos, "Federal Court Allows California's Redistricting Plan to Proceed," NPR, January 14, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5647442/midterm-elections-redistricting-trump-california ↩

25. Nathaniel Rakich, "How Trump's Redistricting War Is Affecting Texas, Indiana, and North Carolina," Votebeat, December 8, 2025. https://www.votebeat.org/2025/12/08/2025-redistricting-problems-texas-indiana-north-carolina/ ↩

26. Drew DeSilver, "U.S. Stands Out Globally in How It Draws Legislative Districts," Pew Research Center, December 19, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/19/us-stands-out-globally-in-how-it-draws-legislative-districts/ ↩

27. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting opinion, Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), as delivered from the bench on June 27, 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-422 and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/elena-kagan-audio-partisan-gerrymandering-dissent.html ↩

A senator and a representative both hold seats they were given on the condition of acting on behalf of the people that put them there. The Constitution made the House popularly elected from the start, and the 17th Amendment did the same for the Senate in 1913, replacing selection by state legislatures with selection by voters. Madison's case for the design, made in Federalist 57, was that the aim of every constitution is "first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust." The precautions he named were short terms in the House, regular elections, and the prospect of going back to live under the laws one had a hand in writing.

This is the third premise of the American system. Voters choose members of Congress, and those members answer to the voters who chose them. Edmund Burke, in his 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol, made the case for a softer version of the principle. A representative owes his constituents his judgment, not his obedience, Burke argued. The Burkean trustee is still answerable to those he serves, but he is allowed to disagree with them on the way to serving them well.

Members of Congress vote against the wishes of their districts and states often enough that Burke's tradition gets cited in their defense. Take that defense at face value and the question becomes whose interests they are voting for instead. Four constituencies have a plausible claim today. Donors and organized interests pay for the campaigns. Primary voters decide whether the next nomination happens. Personal investment portfolios sit on the other side of the legislation members vote on. And after the seat is given up, an industry the member used to regulate is often waiting with a job. Each is worth taking seriously on its own.

Out of Stock

In 2011, the journalist Peter Schweizer published Throw Them All Out, a book documenting how members of Congress had been buying and selling stocks in industries their committees regulated. The underlying academic research found that senators' purchases beat the market by roughly twelve percentage points a year, and House members' by about six.¹ CBS News followed in November of that year with a 60 Minutes segment on the same practice, naming specific trades by specific members.²

Until then, members of Congress had not been clearly subject to insider trading law. Their access to nonpublic information through committee briefings and pending legislation was not treated as the kind of fiduciary relationship that triggered Section 10b of the Securities Exchange Act, and a bill to clarify that it should be, first introduced in 2006, had been reintroduced and stalled three times.

After the 60 Minutes segment aired, that bill picked up 84 House co-sponsors in five days. President Obama called for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union. It was signed into law in April of that year as the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act.³

The STOCK Act did two things. It made explicit that members of Congress and their staff are subject to federal insider trading laws when they trade on nonpublic information acquired through their official duties, and it required disclosure of any individual trade above $1,000 within 45 days of execution. It did not ban members from owning or trading individual stocks. An amendment passed quietly in 2013 removed the requirement that disclosures be machine-readable in a searchable, sortable, downloadable database, the form in which they had been most useful to journalists and the public. What remained was the disclosure regime as it now exists. Members file periodic transaction reports listing the asset, the date, and a wide value bracket like "$1,001 to $15,000" or "$500,001 to $1,000,000." Late filings carry a $200 fine.⁴

Because the passage of the STOCK Act didn't prohibit trading, it continued. In February 2020, Senator Richard Burr, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $628,000 and $1.7 million in stocks across 33 transactions on February 13. He had been receiving classified briefings on the coronavirus in his capacity as committee chair in late January and early February. A week after his sale, the Dow began a slide that wiped out roughly 30 percent of its value over the following month.⁵

The FBI seized Burr's phone, the SEC opened a parallel investigation, and the Justice Department closed the criminal case in January 2021 without filing charges. A 2020 affidavit from the FBI investigation, unsealed in 2022, estimated that Burr's February trades had produced more than $164,000 in profits and avoided $87,000 in losses. He served out his term and retired from the Senate in January 2023.⁶

Burr's case is the most documented but it is not unusual. Each year since the financial-tracking firm Unusual Whales began publishing annual analyses of congressional trading, dozens of members have outperformed the benchmark S&P 500.⁷ To make the comparison concrete, imagine three Americans putting $10,000 into the market at the start of 2021. The first follows the S&P 500. The second mirrors the aggregate trades of Republican members of Congress. The third does the same for Democrats.

Across the five years, Democrats and Republicans alike outperformed the market. Although the three moved roughly together in the first year, the gap opens in 2022, when the S&P fell roughly 18 percent and the average American with money in the market lost a fifth of it, while Congress, on the whole, finished the year roughly where it had started. From there it compounds. The Republican aggregate beat the index by about eighteen percent, and the Democratic aggregate beat it by thirty-two percent.

A defender of the practice might point to what Speaker Pelosi said in 2021, when she was asked whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks. "We're a free-market economy," she replied. "They should be able to participate in that."⁸ Some members of Congress may be good investors; some may even have been lucky. The gap is not, on its own, evidence of anything illegal. The pattern that breaks the defense is what they are trading.

In September 2022, the New York Times published an investigation that mapped three years of congressional trades against committee assignments. The reporters, drawing on Periodic Transaction Reports filed under the STOCK Act, identified 97 members of Congress whose trades intersected with the work of the committees they served on. The investigation covered more than 3,700 such trades and split almost evenly along party lines, with 49 Democrats and 44 Republicans.⁹

A third of the members of the House Environment subcommittee traded oil-field services stocks. A quarter of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bought or sold ExxonMobil or Chevron. Eight members of the Armed Services Committee traded defense or aerospace stocks while they were writing the budgets that determined how much those companies would earn from federal contracts. Representative Bob Gibbs, an Ohio Republican on the House Oversight Committee, bought shares of the pharmaceutical company AbbVie in 2020 and 2021, while his committee was investigating AbbVie and five rivals over high drug prices. The wife of Representative Alan Lowenthal sold Boeing shares one day before a committee on which he sat released damaging findings on Boeing's handling of its 737 Max jet. In 2025, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene purchased up to $300,000 in stocks hours before President Trump announced a pause on tariffs against most U.S. trading partners. The markets soared on the announcement.¹⁰

Whether any individual trade was legal is the wrong question. The trade may be legal. The information may be public. The vote may be consistent with the member's stated position. Whether the member is voting on behalf of constituents or on behalf of a portfolio is a question the system asks the member to answer for themselves, and is content with whichever answer they provide.

A 2025 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted by researchers at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, ran a controlled experiment in which Americans were shown nonpartisan reports on congressional trading and then asked about their views of Congress. Participants who saw the trading data were significantly more likely to describe Congress as corrupt and less legitimate, and significantly less willing to comply with the laws Congress passed. The effect held across party lines. As Tage Rai, a co-author, put it, what damages public trust is not whether the trades are profitable or even illegal. It is the perception that lawmakers are using their power for personal gain. Even the attempt is enough.¹¹

Friends With Benefits

Campaign donors have a different kind of claim on a member of Congress than stocks do. Campaigns cost money, and the money has to come from somewhere. The pattern worth examining is what happens when a member's stated reason for a position is technically defensible but the underlying driver is a long-running financial relationship with the interests on the other side of the legislation.

Carried interest is one such seam. It is a provision in the tax code that lets private equity executives and hedge fund managers pay capital gains rates on their fee income, rather than the higher ordinary income rates that apply to wage earners. Three consecutive presidents, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, have called for its closure. It has survived all of them.¹²

In 2017, as Congress wrote the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the largest rewrite of the tax code in three decades, the carried-interest loophole was on the table. Trump had campaigned on closing it, calling hedge fund managers "getting away with murder."¹³ Gary Cohn, the chair of his National Economic Council, said publicly that the White House tried twenty-five times to get the provision removed and Congress refused.¹⁴ What Congress did instead was extend the holding period required for carried interest to qualify for capital gains treatment from one year to three years, a change that did not affect most private equity firms because they typically hold investments longer than three years anyway.¹⁵

The architect of the Senate's tax legislation was Mitch McConnell, then Senate Majority Leader. In 2014, Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm, had spent $217,000 to help re-elect him. By the end of 2017, Blackstone employees had given another $212,000.¹⁶ Across Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR combined, private equity money to GOP lawmakers in 2017 alone reached $1.31 million, more than three times what those same firms gave Democrats.¹⁷

In 2022, the carried-interest provision came up again, this time inside the Inflation Reduction Act. The proposed change would have closed it for an estimated $14 billion in revenue over a decade, money earmarked for climate and health spending.¹⁸ Kyrsten Sinema, the freshman Democrat from Arizona whose vote was decisive in the evenly divided Senate, refused to support the bill unless the carried-interest provision was removed. So, it was removed.¹⁹

Between 2018 and the August 2022 vote, Sinema received more than $2 million from the securities and investment industry, outraising the Senate Banking Committee's Democratic chair over the same period.²⁰ In the months leading up to the vote, executives across the private equity industry contributed more than $500,000 to her campaign.²¹ After the bill passed without the carried-interest provision, Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, posted on Twitter, "Hats off to the P/E lobby!"²²

The two outcomes were produced by different people, in different parties, in different years, but the structure of what happened was identical. A tax preference that three presidents had called for closing, that polled poorly across the political spectrum, that no constituency outside the industry's executive ranks defended on its merits, was kept in the tax code because the people writing the legislation were responsive to the people who funded their campaigns. Neither Kentucky nor Arizona is home to a meaningful private equity industry; both senators were defending an interest that had almost no presence among the people they were elected to represent.

Representatives are supposed to answer to the people they represent. What McConnell and Sinema showed is that they often answer to their donors instead. Donors aren't the only people a member of Congress has to keep happy. There's a second group with the power to end their career, and most of their actual voters aren't part of it.

Job Security

The most reliable predictor of whether a member of Congress will be in office next year is whether they are in office this year. House incumbents seeking reelection have won at rates above eighty-five percent in every cycle for sixty years and above ninety percent on average for the past decade.²³ In 2022, every single one of the twenty-eight senators who sought reelection won, the first time that had happened in the history of the chamber.²⁴ These are not the numbers of a workforce facing meaningful evaluation. In fact, they are the numbers of a workforce that has been substantially insulated from it.

The insulation has several layers. The first is geographic. After the redistricting work described earlier, most congressional districts are no longer competitive. The Cook Political Report rates only nine percent of House seats as competitive in 2026, meaning roughly nine in ten are decided before any voter casts a ballot in November.²⁵ The Senate is somewhat more contested by design, since statewide constituencies cannot be drawn around partisan lines the way House districts can, but the picture is broadly similar. Of the thirty-five Senate seats on the 2026 ballot, the Cook Political Report rates six as competitive.²⁶

The second layer is financial. Incumbents raise money on a different scale than the people running against them. In the 2022 cycle, the average House incumbent raised $2.8 million; the average challenger raised $308,000. The average Senate incumbent raised $29.7 million; the average Senate challenger raised $2.1 million.²⁷ Political action committees concentrate their giving with a discipline that reflects the underlying math. In 2022, eighty-six percent of all PAC contributions to congressional candidates went to incumbents.²⁸ Donors are paying attention to the same reelection statistics everyone else is, and they are placing their bets accordingly.

The third layer is the voters themselves. Americans used to split their tickets at meaningful rates. They would vote for one party for president and another for Congress, or pick a familiar incumbent regardless of national mood. That pattern has largely disappeared. Both parties have moved away from the political center since the 1970s, and the voters who turn out for each have sorted along with them. In the 2024 election, only sixteen of the 435 House districts split their ticket, voting for one party for president and the other for House.²⁹ When voters consistently pick the same party up and down the ballot, the partisan lean of a district becomes the dominant predictor of the outcome. A district that leans Republican by ten points used to be competitive in a strong Democratic year. Today it is not.

The same sorting has happened inside Congress. Political scientists track this with a measure called overlap, which counts the share of House members whose voting record places them between the two parties. A Republican is in the overlap zone if their voting pattern is more liberal than the most conservative Democrat. A Democrat is in the zone if their voting pattern is more conservative than the most liberal Republican. In other words, overlap measures whether there is anyone in the chamber whose votes give the other side a natural partner. In the early 1970s, more than half the House sat in that zone.³⁰ By the mid-1980s, after a collapse, it was around one in ten. By the mid-1990s it was under one percent. Since 2003, when the last two Republicans whose voting records crossed into Democratic territory left office, the overlap has been zero.³¹

The fourth layer is the one that matters most for the principle at hand. When a seat is safe in November because of the district lines, the money advantage, and the voters' own party loyalty, the only voters who can plausibly end a member's career are the ones who show up for the primary. A general election in a congressional district draws Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A primary draws only the voters of one party. That smaller group sits further from the political center than the district as a whole, and the candidates it favors do too. An incumbent in a safe district who answers to the primary voters is answering to a group of constituents further from the center than the district they were elected to represent. And they have no electoral reason to answer to anyone else.

The principle being tested here is that representatives are beholden to their constituents. The reality is that representatives are beholden to a much smaller and more partisan subset of their constituents, and only when those constituents are sufficiently aroused to vote in a primary. The other constituents, the ones whose preferences sit closer to the district's center, are an afterthought by the time November arrives.

Exit Interview

When a member of Congress leaves office, the most likely next job is one that lobbies the colleagues they left behind. This was not always true, and it is not how things work in comparable democracies. It is, however, how things work in Washington, and it produces a kind of representation problem the earlier sections did not address. While in office, a member is the target of lobbying. After office, they often become the lobbyist.

Billy Tauzin spent nearly twenty-five years in the House, the last several as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the pharmaceutical industry.³² In 2003 he was the chief architect of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, the legislation that created Medicare Part D.³³ The bill prohibited the federal government from negotiating drug prices and barred the reimportation of cheaper drugs from abroad.³⁴ Both provisions were worth billions of dollars a year to pharmaceutical companies. Tauzin announced his retirement from Congress shortly after the bill passed. The day after his term ended in January 2005, he began work as president and CEO of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm, at a reported salary of roughly $2 million a year. By 2010 he was earning $11.6 million.³⁵

Tauzin maintained then and since that there was no connection between the bill and the job, and he broke no laws.³⁶ The point of the story is that the member who chaired the committee that wrote the most consequential pharmaceutical legislation in a generation moved directly from writing it to representing the companies that benefited from it. When he was writing the legislation, was he representing the interests of his constituents in Louisiana, or the interests of the pharmaceutical industry?

Dick Gephardt's case shows the same pattern across a different kind of issue. Gephardt served in the House for twenty-eight years, fourteen of them as Democratic Leader.³⁷ While in Congress he was a public supporter of recognizing the Armenian genocide, the systematic killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman government beginning in 1915. In 2000 he wrote to Speaker Dennis Hastert urging immediate floor consideration of the recognition resolution, stating that "this issue requires little if any additional deliberation by the House."³⁸ He left Congress in 2005 and founded a lobbying firm.³⁹ In 2007 the firm signed a contract with the government of Turkey worth $1.2 million a year.⁴⁰

Turkey's central foreign-policy priority in Washington was, and remains, defeating the same Armenian Genocide recognition resolution Gephardt had championed. According to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and reporting in the Washington Post and New Republic, Gephardt's firm arranged meetings between Turkish officials and House Democratic leaders, helped the Turkish ambassador secure an audience with Speaker Pelosi, and circulated a booklet denying that what happened in 1915 was a genocide.⁴¹ Gephardt did nothing illegal. He simply represented one set of constituents while in office and a different one after.

When we zoom out, we find that these aren't rare occurrences. Public Citizen found that nearly two-thirds of former members of the 115th Congress who entered the private sector took jobs designed to influence federal policy.⁴² An academic study tracking House and Senate members from 1976 to 2012 found that the share of departing members becoming registered lobbyists rose steadily over the period, and that the members most likely to make the jump were committee chairs and members of the most powerful committees.⁴³

On the executive branch side, a 2023 Senate report found 672 former government officials, military officers, and members of Congress working as lobbyists, board members, or executives for the top twenty federal defense contractors in 2022.⁴⁴ The largest hirers were Boeing, Pfizer, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin. Pfizer's place on the list reflects the wave of federal contracting tied to pandemic-era vaccine procurement, but the other four are the same names that dominate every other measure of the defense industry.⁴⁵ These are the most regulated industries in the country, and the people who used to write the rules now work for the regulated.

What makes this a representation problem rather than a corruption problem is that it does not require any individual member to be acting in bad faith. A member of Energy and Commerce in 2025, weighing a vote on drug pricing, knows what Tauzin's path looks like and knows what kind of record keeps it open. A member of Armed Services knows that the board seats and executive positions exist, that they pay well, and that they are not offered to people who spent their committee years making the contractors' lives difficult. None of this needs to be conscious to do its work. The future employer is a presence in the room while the current vote is being cast, and the constituent who will never offer a board seat or a managing director title is not.

Stocks, donors, primary voters, and future employers are four different audiences a member of Congress can be representing at any given moment. None of them is the median voter in the district they were elected from. The principle this section opened with was that representatives are beholden to their constituents. The reality is that they are beholden to whoever will most plausibly end or extend their career, and the people who can do that are mostly not the people who voted for them.

Footnotes

1. Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Alan J. Ziobrowski et al., "Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 39, no. 4 (December 2004): 661–676 (Senate findings); Alan J. Ziobrowski et al., "Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives," Business and Politics 13, no. 4 (2011) (House findings). ↩

2. Steve Kroft, "Congress: Trading Stock on Inside Information?," 60 Minutes, CBS News, November 13, 2011. ↩

3. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, Public Law 112-105, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 4, 2012. Office of Government Ethics STOCK Act materials at https://www.oge.gov ↩

4. The 2013 amendment removing the searchable-database requirement was S. 716 (113th Congress), enacted as Public Law 113-7 and signed by President Obama on April 15, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/177496734/how-congress-quietly-overhauled-its-insider-trading-law and https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-congress-hides-stock-holdings-plain-sight ↩

5. Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis, "Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness," ProPublica, March 19, 2020. https://www.propublica.org/article/senator-dumped-up-to-1-7-million-of-stock-after-reassuring-public-about-coronavirus-preparedness ↩

6. Dan Mangan and Dan Diamond, "Unsealed FBI Docs Reveal a Flurry of Calls and Stock Trades by Sen. Burr in Early 2020," CNBC, September 6, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/06/unsealed-fbi-docs-reveal-a-flurry-of-calls-amid-burrs-stock-trades.html. See also https://www.rcfp.org/sen-burr-search-warrant-unsealing/ ↩

7. Unusual Whales, Congress Trading Reports (annual), 2022–2026. https://unusualwhales.com/politics ↩

8. Dan Mangan, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Opposes Banning Congress Members from Owning Individual Stocks: 'We're a Free Market Economy,'" CNBC, December 15, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/15/house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-opposes-banning-stock-buys-by-congress-members.html ↩

9. Kate Kelly, Adam Playford, Alicia Parlapiano, and Brian M. Rosenthal, "Stock Trades Reported by Nearly a Fifth of Congress Show Possible Conflicts," The New York Times, September 13, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/congress-stock-trading-investigation.html ↩

10. Same source. On the Marjorie Taylor Greene tariff trade, see Brian Schwartz, "Marjorie Taylor Greene Disclosed Stock Purchases on the Same Day Trump Paused Tariffs," CNBC, April 10, 2025. Clerk of the House Financial Disclosure database at https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov ↩

11. Raihan Alam and Tage S. Rai, "Knowledge of Politician Stock Trading Reduces Congressional Legitimacy and Compliance with the Law," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 21 (May 27, 2025): e2501822122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2501822122. See also https://today.ucsd.edu/story/congressional-stock-trading-severely-undermines-public-trust-and-compliance-with-the-law ↩

12. Bipartisan Policy Center, "The 2025 Tax Debate: Carried Interest and Tax Breaks for Sports Teams," October 11, 2025; Alec MacGillis, "Despite Trump Campaign Promise, Billionaires' Tax Loophole Survives Again," ProPublica, November 3, 2017. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/the-2025-tax-debate-carried-interest-and-tax-breaks-for-sports-teams/, https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/warren_colleagues_letter_to_trump_recarriedinterestloophole.pdf, https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-trump-campaign-promise-billionaires-tax-loophole-survives-again ↩

13. Sarah N. Lynch, "Trump says tax code is letting hedge funds 'get away with murder,'" Reuters, August 23, 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-26/trump-puts-a-serious-wall-street-issue-on-the-table-hedge-fund-carried-interest ↩

14. Tae Kim, "Gary Cohn: We 'tried 25 times' to cut hedge fund loophole in tax reform bill, but failed," CNBC, December 20, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/cohn-tried-25-times-to-cut-hedge-fund-loophole-but-failed.html. See also https://www.axios.com/2018/01/05/gary-cohn-blames-congress-for-carried-interest-loophole-1515110725 ↩

15. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Public Law 115-97, signed December 22, 2017, Section 13309, codified at 26 U.S.C. § 1061. https://www.pionline.com/article/20171222/ONLINE/171229941/trump-s-carried-interest-pledge-sinks-as-mnuchin-cohn-split and https://nctr.org/taxing-carried-interest-as-ordinary-income-private-equity-fights-back-using-public-pensions-as-human-shields/ ↩

16. Charlie Gasparino and Brian Schwartz, "Money Talks: Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR dial up donations to key GOP lawmakers as tax bill protects carried interest loophole," Fox Business, December 20, 2017. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/money-talks-blackstone-carlyle-kkr-dial-up-donations-to-key-gop-lawmakers-as-tax-bill-protects-carried-interest-loophole ↩

17. Same source. ↩

18. Becky Sullivan, "A tax loophole made fund managers rich. Closing it may help pay for the climate bill," NPR, August 3, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115218183/carried-interest-close-tax-loophole ↩

19. Brian Schwartz, "How Wall Street wooed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and preserved its multibillion-dollar carried interest tax break," CNBC, August 9, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/how-wall-street-wooed-sen-kyrsten-sinema-and-preserved-its-multi-billion-dollar-carried-interest-tax-break.html ↩

20. Same source. ↩

21. Jake Johnson, "Sinema Received Over $500K From Private Equity Before Shielding Industry From Tax Hikes," Common Dreams, August 8, 2022. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/08/sinema-received-over-500k-private-equity-shielding-industry-tax-hikes. See also https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/15/kyrsten-sinema-has-many-friends-in-private-equity/ ↩

22. Schwartz, "How Wall Street wooed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema." Blankfein's tweet was dated August 7, 2022. ↩

23. Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 2-7, "House Incumbents Retired, Defeated, or Reelected, 1946–2012." https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Vital-Statistics-Chapter-2-Congressional-Elections.pdf. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates ↩

24. Karl Evers-Hillstrom, "Incumbent Politicians Enjoy Record Reelection in an Aging Congress," OpenSecrets, October 26, 2023. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/10/incumbent-politicians-enjoy-record-reelection-in-aging-congress/ ↩

25. Cook Political Report, "2026 House Race Ratings." https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings. See also https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/monopoly-politics-and-the-fair-representation-act/ ↩

26. Cook Political Report, "2026 Senate Race Ratings." https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings ↩

27. Evers-Hillstrom, "Incumbent Politicians Enjoy Record Reelection." ↩

28. Same source. ↩

29. Jim Ellis, "Only 16 Districts Split the Ticket," The Ellis Insight, January 23, 2025. https://www.ellisinsight.com/election-analysis/only-16-districts-split-the-ticket/. See also https://split-ticket.org/ ↩

30. Voteview, "House Polarization 1st to 113th Congresses," compiled by Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. https://legacy.voteview.com/k7ftp/house_polarization46_113.txt ↩

31. Drew DeSilver, "The Polarization in Today's Congress Has Roots That Go Back Decades," Pew Research Center, March 10, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/ ↩

32. "Wilbert Joseph (Billy) Tauzin," History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Tauzin served from May 22, 1980 to January 3, 2005. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/22705 ↩

33. Public Citizen, "Nearly Two Thirds of Former Members of 115th Congress Working Outside Politics and Government Have Picked Up Lobbying or Strategic Consulting Jobs," May 30, 2019. https://www.citizen.org/article/revolving-congress/ ↩

34. Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, Public Law 108-173, signed December 8, 2003. https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal/ ↩

35. Drew Armstrong, "Tauzin's $11.6 Million Made Him Highest-Paid Health-Law Lobbyist," Bloomberg, November 29, 2011. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-29/tauzin-s-11-6-million-made-him-highest-paid-health-law-lobbyist. See also https://billmoyers.com/story/the-man-who-made-you-pay-more-at-the-drugstore/ ↩

36. Bill Allison, "Tauzin aided drug firms, then they hired him," NBC News, March 22, 2006. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11714763 ↩

37. Dick Gephardt served as the U.S. Representative from Missouri's 3rd district from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 2005. ↩

38. "Gephardt Reverses Prior Support for Genocide Recognition to Serve as Foreign Agent for Turkey," Armenian National Committee of America, May 11, 2007. https://anca.org/?p=15562. See also https://newrepublic.com/article/61335/final-resolution ↩

39. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "For Gephardt, a New Career in Lobbying — and a Lot More," Washington Post, July 31, 2007. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2007/07/31/for-gephardt-a-new-career-in-lobbying-and-a-lot-more/ ↩

40. Marc Tracy, "Final Resolution," The New Republic, July 23, 2007. ↩

41. Mary Beth Sheridan, "Armenia-Turkey dispute over genocide label sets off lobbying frenzy," Washington Post, March 4, 2010; Tracy, "Final Resolution." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030303786.html and https://efile.fara.gov ↩

42. "Revolving Door Class of 2019: Nearly Two-Thirds of Former Lawmakers With Jobs Outside Politics Land in Influence Business," Public Citizen, May 30, 2019. https://www.citizen.org/news/revolving-door-class-of-2019-nearly-two-thirds-of-former-lawmakers-with-jobs-outside-politics-land-in-influence-business/ ↩

43. Jeffrey Lazarus, Amy McKay, and Lindsey Herbel, "Who walks through the revolving door? Examining the lobbying activity of former members of Congress," Interest Groups & Advocacy 5, no. 1 (2016): 82–100. https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2015.16 ↩

44. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, "Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold," April 2023. https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/DoD%20Revolving%20Door%20Report.pdf ↩

45. Same source, Table 1. ↩

A country in which citizens do not have an equal political voice, in which voters do not choose their representatives, and in which representatives are not beholden to the people who elected them is not, in the meaningful sense of the word, a democracy. Elections still happen. The Constitution has not been suspended. But the word describes a relationship between a people and their government that does not exist.

If this was where the paper ended, it would be a fairly bleak conclusion. Americans are already keenly aware of these issues and the problems that follow from leaving them unsolved. They have been telling pollsters for half a century that big donors have too much influence, that lobbyists sway politicians, that constituents have too little say, that members of Congress should not be trading stocks in industries they regulate, that districts should not be drawn by the people running in them. Where Americans disagree—abortion, immigration, tax policy—the gaps are vast, but every issue covered in this paper is one where an overwhelming percentage of Americans find agreement.

In 1857, Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Canandaigua, New York, on the anniversary of the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies. "Power concedes nothing without a demand," he told the crowd. "It never did and it never will."¹ Douglass was speaking about American slavery, but the point holds wherever a public wants something its government has not given it. The pages that follow take seven of these issues one at a time, with the reform most Americans support in each case.

Footnotes

1. Frederick Douglass, "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies," address delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Add: Published in Two Speeches, By Frederick Douglass (Rochester, N.Y.: C.P. Dewey, 1857). Full text at https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/10509 ↩

The 2010 Citizens United decision held that the First Amendment prevents the government from limiting independent political spending by corporations and unions. The fifteen years since have produced the consequences described in the section on equal political voice: the rise of super PACs, the eightfold growth in outside spending, the $291 million from a single donor in 2024, and the dominance of dark money in the primaries that decide who serves in Congress. The decision strains the principle that every citizen has an equal political voice, and as the Bowman and Good primaries showed, it strains the principle that voters choose their representatives as well.

Americans saw this coming. In the weeks after the decision was handed down, 80 percent of the country said they opposed it, including 85 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of independents, and 76 percent of Republicans.¹ The position was not a partisan reaction to a Court that had ruled in a particular direction. It was a near-consensus that the country had gotten something fundamentally wrong about how money should function in elections.

Fifteen years later, the position has held. In a 2018 University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey of nearly 2,500 registered voters, roughly three-quarters of the country supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, with majorities across party lines.² More than four in five agreed that "the rich should not have more influence just because they have more money."³ At the state level, the demand has been organized and persistent: 22 states and more than 800 cities and towns have passed resolutions or ballot initiatives calling for an amendment.⁴

The amendment Americans are asking for has been written. The Democracy For All Amendment, first introduced by Senator Tom Udall in 2013 and reintroduced in every Congress since, would explicitly authorize Congress and the states to set limits on the raising and spending of money in elections, and would affirm that constitutional rights are the rights of individual human beings rather than corporations or other artificial entities.⁵

The path from introduction to ratification is a steep one. A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Only 27 amendments have cleared this bar in the country's history, the most recent in 1992.⁶ The Democracy For All Amendment came closest to clearing the first hurdle in September 2014, when Udall's earlier version reached the Senate floor. The cloture vote was 54 to 42, with every yea vote cast by a Democrat and every Republican voting no.⁷ The amendment needed 60 votes to advance to a final vote, and 67 to pass. It got neither.

An amendment that three-quarters of the country supports has not, in fifteen years, been able to advance past cloture. That is the shape of the gap this paper is about, and it repeats across the six reforms that follow.

Footnotes

1. Dan Eggen, "Poll: Large majority opposes Supreme Court's decision on campaign financing," Washington Post, February 17, 2010. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021701151.html ↩

2. Program for Public Consultation, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Americans on Money in Politics, May 2018. Survey of 2,481 registered voters. https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Money_in_Politics_Report.pdf ↩

3. Same source. The statement read to respondents was: "The rich should not have more influence just because they have more money." Eighty-eight percent agreed. ↩

4. Public Citizen, "Movement to Amend the Constitution to Overturn Citizens United," updated 2024. https://www.citizen.org/article/democracy-for-all-amendment-resolutions-map/ ↩

5. S.J. Res. 19 (113th Congress), "Democracy For All Amendment," introduced by Senator Tom Udall on June 18, 2013. https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/19 and https://freespeechforpeople.org/the-democracy-for-all-amendment/ ↩

6. U.S. Constitution, Article V. The 27th Amendment was ratified on May 5, 1992. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27 ↩

7. Roll Call Vote 113th Congress, 2nd Session, Vote No. 261, September 11, 2014. The cloture motion on S.J. Res. 19 failed 54 to 42. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=2&vote=00261 ↩

The reform in the previous section would change how much money can be spent and by whom. The reform in this one would change whether the public knows who is doing the spending. One limits, the other illuminates. They address the same principle from different angles, and the public broadly supports both.

Dark money is the term for election spending by groups that are not legally required to disclose their donors. Most of it flows through 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofits and 501(c)(6) trade associations, which under current IRS rules can spend nearly half of their budgets on political activity without ever naming their funders. These groups can then contribute to super PACs, which are legally required to disclose their donors but only by the name on the check. When that name belongs to a 501(c)(4) or a shell LLC, the super PAC's filings show the intermediary, and the original donor stays hidden. Direct ad spending by dark money groups peaked in 2012 and declined through the 2010s, as the same groups increasingly routed their money through allied super PACs instead. By 2024, super PAC contributions from undisclosed sources accounted for $1.3 billion of the roughly $1.9 billion total, almost double the 2020 cycle, and the most in any cycle since Citizens United.¹ Most of that spending would have been illegal before 2010.

The strangest thing about the current situation is that the Supreme Court itself pointed to disclosure as the safeguard. The majority opinion in Citizens United devoted several pages to it, arguing that the new spending the Court was permitting would be acceptable because disclosure would let citizens "see whether elected officials are 'in the pocket' of so-called moneyed interests." Eight of the nine justices joined that part of the opinion, including the four dissenters.²

Americans have been clear about what they want done. In a 2015 AP-NORC poll asking whether all groups that raise and spend unlimited money to support candidates should be required to publicly disclose their contributors, 76 percent said yes, 23 percent said it was acceptable for the information to remain private.³ A New York Times / CBS News poll the same year found the same number on a near-identical question, with 76 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats saying these groups should publicly disclose.⁴

The federal reform Americans have been asking for has also been written. The Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act, known as the DISCLOSE Act, was first introduced in 2010 by Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Chris Van Hollen in response to Citizens United, and it has been reintroduced in every Congress since. The bill would require any organization spending more than $10,000 in an election to publicly identify donors who contributed $10,000 or more, close the routing loopholes that let money pass through intermediary groups to obscure its source, and require shell companies engaged in election spending to disclose their true owners.⁵

It came closest in the summer of 2010. The House passed it in June by a vote of 219 to 206.⁶ In the Senate, where 60 votes were needed to break a filibuster, no Republican voted to advance it, and the bill failed on two cloture attempts that fall.⁷ In every Congress since, the same pattern has held. The last Senate cloture vote, in September 2022, failed 49 to 49 on a strict party line.⁸

The similarities between the two issues covered so far are, frankly, absurd. Similar reasons for reform, similar support across party lines, similar inaction in Congress, similar result.

Footnotes

1. Anna Massoglia, "Dark Money Hit a Record High of $1.9 Billion in 2024 Federal Races," Brennan Center for Justice, May 7, 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark-money-hit-record-high-19-billion-2024-federal-races. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/01/dark-money-groups-have-poured-billions-into-federal-elections-since-the-supreme-courts-2010-citizens-united-decision and https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/top-election-spenders ↩

2. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), Part IV. Joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Alito, Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html ↩

3. 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/ ↩

4. Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan, "Poll Shows Americans Favor Overhaul of Campaign Financing," The New York Times, June 2, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/us/politics/poll-shows-americans-favor-overhaul-of-campaign-financing.html ↩

5. H.R. 5175 (111th Congress), introduced by Representative Chris Van Hollen on April 29, 2010. https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/5175, https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-cicilline-reintroduce-disclose-act-to-end-corrupting-influence-of-dark-money-in-american-democracy/, and https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/4822 ↩

6. U.S. House of Representatives, Roll Call Vote 391, H.R. 5175 (DISCLOSE Act), June 24, 2010. Final passage 219 to 206. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2010391 ↩

7. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 220, motion to invoke cloture on S. 3628, July 27, 2010. Cloture rejected 57 to 41. Second attempt September 23, 2010 rejected 59 to 39. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1112/vote_111_2_00220.htm and https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1112/vote_111_2_00240.htm ↩

8. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 346, motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 4822 (DISCLOSE Act of 2022), September 22, 2022. Cloture rejected 49 to 49. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00346.htm. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/09/with-deadlocked-vote-on-dark-money-disclose-act-fails-to-clear-senate/ ↩

Forty-three percent of American adults identify as political independents.¹ In fifteen states, none of them can vote in the primary that, in most congressional districts, decides who represents them.² The reform that would change that is straightforward: open the primaries.

A January 2026 national survey by RealClear Opinion Research and Emerson Polling found 71 percent of voters support requiring states to hold open primaries, with 79 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents, and 65 percent of Republicans in agreement.³ Sixty-five percent said a primary is a public election in which all voters should be able to participate, whereas thirty-five percent said it is a party's internal nomination process, restricted to members.⁴ In other words, the public, largely, believes that primaries are akin to public elections, even though, in fifteen states, the law treats them as something else.

The numbers are even higher among the voters who are directly impacted. In a survey of independents in closed-primary states conducted by Change Research for the Unite America Institute, 87 percent supported opening primaries to independents, 77 percent called their exclusion unfair, and 74 percent called it a violation of voting rights.⁵

The Supreme Court has held that parties, not states, decide who votes in primaries. In 1984, the Republican Party of Connecticut adopted a rule allowing independents to vote in its primaries, only to find that a state law required primary voters to be registered party members. The party sued, and in Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut (1986), the Supreme Court ruled in the party's favor, holding that the state could not force a political party to keep its primary closed when the party itself wanted to open it.⁶ Closed primaries are not a constitutional requirement. They persist because state legislatures and party leadership, working together, choose to keep them that way.

There is no single federal bill to point at here the way there is for the first two reforms, because primary rules are set by states, not by Congress. Some states have opened their primaries through legislation; others through ballot initiative. New Mexico opened its primaries to independents in 2025.⁷ At the federal level, the bipartisan Let America Vote Act, introduced in the House in 2024, would end closed congressional and presidential primaries nationwide and provide funding incentives for states to open their state and local primaries.⁸ It has not advanced.

The principle that representatives are chosen by voters assumes that voters have a vote worth casting. In closed-primary states, more than seventeen million Americans do not. The next reform addresses a prior question: who gets to be in your district in the first place, and who gets to decide.

Footnotes

1. Lydia Saad, "GOP Holds Edge in Party Affiliation for Third Straight Year," Gallup, January 8, 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/655157/gop-holds-edge-party-affiliation-third-straight-year.aspx ↩

2. Ballotpedia, "Closed Primary"; National Conference of State Legislatures, "State Primary Election Systems," January 2024. https://ballotpedia.org/Closed_primary, https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Elections/Primary-Types-Table-2024.pdf, https://www.uniteamericainstitute.org/research/not-invited-to-the-party-primary-independent-voters-and-the-problem-with-closed-primaries ↩

3. RealClear Opinion Research / Emerson Polling national survey of 1,500 active registered voters, sponsored by the Unite America Institute, 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, https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2026/poll-us-voters-want-significant-primary-election-reforms ↩

4. Same source. ↩

5. Carlo Macomber and Tyler Fisher, Not Invited to the Party Primary: Independent Voters and the Problem with Closed Primaries, Unite America Institute, February 2024. https://www.uniteamericainstitute.org/research/not-invited-to-the-party-primary-independent-voters-and-the-problem-with-closed-primaries ↩

6. Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut, 479 U.S. 208 (1986). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/479/208 ↩

7. New Mexico Senate Bill 16, signed into law by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham on April 7, 2025. https://sourcenm.com/2025/04/23/advocates-election-officials-celebrate-new-mexico-semi-open-primaries-law/ and https://www.uniteamerica.org/articles/nm-bill ↩

8. Let America Vote Act, H.R. 155 (119th Congress), introduced January 3, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/155 and https://fitzpatrick.house.gov/2024/7/fitzpatrick-leads-bipartisan-group-in-bold-fight-for-election-reform-integrity ↩

No comparable democracy in the world lets its sitting legislators draw their own districts.¹ In 2025, six states did exactly that. The wave began in Texas, where Republican lawmakers redrew the state's congressional map mid-decade to add five seats before the 2026 midterms.² Missouri, North Carolina, California, Ohio, and Utah followed within months.³ It was the largest off-cycle redistricting cycle since the 1960s.⁴ Public reaction was unambiguous in every poll taken at the time.

An NBC News Decision Desk poll of more than 30,000 adults, conducted as Texas was finalizing its new map, found that 82 percent of Americans prefer that congressional districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions rather than by the party in power.⁵ The number held across partisan lines and across state political contexts. In Republican-controlled states, 71 percent of Republicans preferred nonpartisan commissions. In Democratic-controlled states, 88 percent of Democrats preferred the same.⁶ Even when their own party stood to benefit from gerrymandering, voters of both parties said they would rather it stopped.

A separate national poll conducted in the same weeks by Noble Predictive Insights for Common Cause found 77 percent of voters supporting independent commissions over state legislators.⁷ Fifty-seven percent of Republicans, 76 percent of Democrats, and 72 percent of independents said it is bad for the country when one political party controls how districts are drawn.⁸ Sixty percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in 2024 told the same pollster that Congress should step in to stop mid-decade redistricting.⁹

Where voters have been given a direct ballot choice on the question, they have answered consistently. Redistricting reform appeared on the ballot in five states in 2018, and every measure passed. Ohio approved Issue 1 with 75 percent of the vote in May.¹⁰ In November, Colorado approved Amendments Y and Z with 71 percent each,¹¹ Michigan approved Proposal 2 with 61 percent,¹² Missouri approved Amendment 1 with 62 percent,¹³ and Utah approved Proposition 4 with 50.3 percent.¹⁴

In every case the reform was approved by voters, and in two of the five it was rolled back or weakened afterward by state legislators. In 2020, Missouri's General Assembly referred Amendment 3 to the ballot, undoing most of the redistricting changes voters had approved two years earlier.¹⁵ Utah's legislature passed Senate Bill 200 the same year, weakening the commission and giving lawmakers authority to override its maps.¹⁶ The Utah Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that the legislature had acted unconstitutionally, and in 2025 and 2026 the legislature attempted to repeal Proposition 4 outright through a ballot measure that ultimately failed to qualify.¹⁷ When voters approve redistricting reform, the legislators whose seats it affects often do not accept the result.

The federal reform that would address this has been written and reintroduced for fifteen years. The For the People Act, H.R. 1 in the 117th Congress, required every state to establish an independent redistricting commission to draw congressional maps and banned mid-decade redistricting nationally. It passed the Democratic-controlled House on March 3, 2021, by a vote of 220 to 210, with every Republican voting against.¹⁸ In the Senate, a motion to begin debate failed on a 50 to 50 party-line vote on June 22, 2021, with every Republican opposed and every Democrat in favor, ten votes short of the 60 needed to invoke cloture.¹⁹ A revised version, the Freedom to Vote Act, came up for cloture on January 19, 2022, and failed 49 to 51 on a substantively party-line vote, again with every Republican opposed.²⁰ A subsequent motion to allow a talking-filibuster carve-out for voting rights legislation failed 48 to 52, with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats, joining every Republican in voting against the rule change.²¹

The bill has been reintroduced in every Congress since. The most recent version, the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025, was introduced on September 18, 2025, by Representative Zoe Lofgren in the House and Senator Alex Padilla in the Senate.²² At the time of writing, the House version had 55 cosponsors and the Senate version had three.²³ No Republicans have signed on. Both bills sit in the Judiciary Committee.²⁴

Eight in ten Americans want what the bill would do, and the legislators whose seats depend on the lines are the ones being asked to give up the pen.

Footnotes

1. Drew DeSilver, "The US stands out globally in how it draws legislative districts," Pew Research Center, December 19, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/19/us-stands-out-globally-in-how-it-draws-legislative-districts/ ↩

2. J. David Goodman and Reid J. Epstein, "Texas Republicans Pass New Congressional Maps Drawn to Help G.O.P.," The New York Times, August 21, 2025. ↩

3. Ballotpedia, "Redistricting ahead of the 2026 elections"; National Conference of State Legislatures, "Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting." https://ballotpedia.org/Redistricting_ahead_of_the_2026_elections and https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting ↩

4. Drew DeSilver, "Redistricting between censuses has been rare in the modern era," Pew Research Center, August 28, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/28/redistricting-between-censuses-has-been-rare-in-the-modern-era/ ↩

5. Scott Bland, "Poll: Most Americans oppose political parties drawing election lines," NBC News, September 7, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-americans-oppose-political-parties-drawing-election-lines-rcna229257 ↩

6. Same source. ↩

7. Common Cause, "September Poll: 64% of Republican and Independent Voters Want Ban for Mid-Decade Redistricting," September 10, 2025. https://www.commoncause.org/press/september-poll-64-of-republican-and-independent-voters-want-ban-for-mid-decade-redistricting/ ↩

8. Same source. ↩

9. Same source. ↩

10. Ohio Secretary of State, official certified results for the May 8, 2018 primary election: Issue 1 approved with 74.89 percent. https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio_Issue_1,_Congressional_Redistricting_Procedures_Amendment_(May_2018) ↩

11. Colorado Secretary of State, certified 2018 general election results. https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/Results/Abstract/2018/general/amendProp.html ↩

12. Michigan Department of State, certified 2018 general election results: Proposal 2 approved with 61.3 percent. https://ballotpedia.org/Michigan_Proposal_2,_Independent_Redistricting_Commission_Initiative_(2018) ↩

13. Missouri Secretary of State, certified 2018 general election results: Amendment 1 approved with 62 percent. https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Amendment_1,_Lobbying,_Campaign_Finance,_and_Redistricting_Initiative_(2018) ↩

14. Utah Lieutenant Governor's Office, certified 2018 general election results: Proposition 4 approved with 50.34 percent. https://ballotpedia.org/Utah_Proposition_4,_Independent_Advisory_Commission_on_Redistricting_Initiative_(2018) ↩

15. Missouri Secretary of State, certified 2020 general election results: Amendment 3 approved with 51 percent. https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Amendment_3,_Redistricting_Process_and_Criteria,_Lobbying,_and_Campaign_Finance_Amendment_(2020) ↩

16. Utah Senate Bill 200 (2020), signed by Governor Gary Herbert on March 26, 2020. ↩

17. League of Women Voters of Utah v. Utah State Legislature, 2024 UT 21 (July 11, 2024). https://ballotpedia.org/Utah_Eliminate_the_Independent_Redistricting_Commission_Initiative_(2026) ↩

18. U.S. House of Representatives, Roll Call Vote 62, March 3, 2021, on the For the People Act (H.R. 1, 117th Congress). The bill passed 220 to 210. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202162. See also https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/annotated-guide-people-act-2021 ↩

19. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 226, 117th Congress, 1st Session, June 22, 2021. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00226.htm ↩

20. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 9, 117th Congress, 2nd Session, January 19, 2022. The recorded vote was 49 to 51; Majority Leader Charles Schumer switched his vote to "no" at the end so he could move to reconsider under Senate rules, making the substantive partisan split 50 Democrats and independents in favor and 50 Republicans against. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00009.htm ↩

21. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 10, 117th Congress, 2nd Session, January 19, 2022. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00010.htm ↩

22. Office of Senator Alex Padilla, "Padilla, Lofgren Introduce Redistricting Reform Act to Ban Mid-Decade Gerrymanders and Establish Independent Commissions," September 18, 2025. https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padilla-lofgren-introduce-redistricting-reform-act-to-ban-mid-decade-gerrymanders-and-establish-independent-commissions/ ↩

23. Cosponsor counts as of late 2025 from Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5449/cosponsors and https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2885/cosponsors ↩

24. H.R. 5449 and S. 2885, both referred to the Judiciary Committee on September 18, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5449 and https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2885 ↩

Eighty-six percent of Americans want it banned, and they have wanted it banned for as long as anyone has thought to ask. The issue covered is one of the few questions in American political life on which Republicans and Democrats agree by margins that pollsters rarely see on anything else. In a 2023 University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey of more than 2,500 registered voters, 87 percent of Republicans, 88 percent of Democrats, and 81 percent of independents said members of Congress should be prohibited from owning or trading individual stocks in companies.¹ Subsequent polling by Data for Progress, the Campaign Legal Center, RealClear, and several news organizations has produced numbers within a percentage point or two in either direction.² On almost no other question of American politics is the cross-partisan margin this wide or this stable.

The bipartisan ridicule of the practice has become its own minor genre of American commentary. In May 2024, the comedian Jon Stewart, guest-hosting The Daily Show, replayed a press-conference clip in which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had defended congressional trading as the workings of a free market.³ "In a free market, everyone has access to the same information," Stewart said. "So unless you're going to put all of us on the committees, I don't get it."⁴ Eighteen months later, at a January 2026 press conference in Clearwater, Florida governor Ron DeSantis described members of Congress who "get elected having never shown any investment acumen ever in their life, and then all of a sudden, they become Warren Buffett on steroids."⁵

The clearest sign that congressional trading has become a settled feature of American economic life is that Wall Street has built financial products around it. In February 2023, an asset manager called Subversive Capital launched two exchange-traded funds designed to mirror the disclosed trades of members of Congress.⁶ The fund tracking Democratic members was given the ticker NANC, in honor of Pelosi. The fund tracking Republican members was given the ticker KRUZ, in honor of Senator Ted Cruz.⁷

What has not happened is a vote. The current vehicle in the Senate is the HONEST Act, negotiated by Hawley with Democratic Senators Gary Peters, Jeff Merkley, and Jon Ossoff. The bill would ban members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and their spouses and dependent children from holding or trading covered investments, require divestment beginning in 2027, and raise the late-filing penalty under the STOCK Act from $200 to $500.⁸ It passed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 30, 2025, with Hawley joining every Democrat on the committee and every other Republican voting against.⁹ President Trump first said he would "absolutely" sign the bill, then attacked it on Truth Social the night after the committee vote, then walked back to "conceptual" support the following day.¹⁰ No floor vote has been scheduled.

The current vehicle in the House is the Restore Trust in Congress Act, introduced in September 2025 by Representatives Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, and Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, and cosponsored by 126 members from both parties, ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Lauren Boebert.¹¹ On December 2, 2025, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, filed a discharge petition to bypass leadership and force a floor vote.¹² A discharge petition requires the signatures of 218 members. As of January 2026, the petition had 79.¹³

Eighty-six percent of the country wants the practice banned. The bills have been written and rewritten, renamed and renegotiated, introduced in every Congress for more than a decade. The names of the lead sponsors include senators of both parties, a sitting Republican governor, two of the three most recent presidents, and the current Democratic minority leader of the House.¹⁴ No version of the bill has reached the floor of either chamber.

Footnotes

1. Steven Kull et al., Americans on Money in Politics, Program for Public Consultation, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, 2023. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/stock-trading-by-members-of-congress/ ↩

2. Campaign Legal Center, "Congressional Stock Trading and the STOCK Act," updated 2026. https://campaignlegal.org/update/congressional-stock-trading-and-stock-act, https://fitzpatrick.house.gov/2024/7/fitzpatrick-golden-lead-bipartisan-coalition-demanding-vote-on-congressional-stock-trading-ban, https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/sens-moody-gillibrand-announce-new-bipartisan-bill-to-ban-congressional-stock-trading/ ↩

3. Dan Mangan, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Opposes Banning Congress Members from Owning Individual Stocks," CNBC, December 15, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/15/house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-opposes-banning-stock-buys-by-congress-members.html ↩

4. Sharon Knolle, "Jon Stewart Commends Government Officials Like Nancy Pelosi for Getting Away With Legal Corruption," TheWrap, May 14, 2024. https://www.thewrap.com/jon-stewart-daily-show-nancy-pelosi-corruption/ ↩

5. Liv Caputo, "'Warren Buffet on Steroids': DeSantis Calls for Transparency on Congressional Stock Trading," The Floridian, January 6, 2026. https://floridianpress.com/2026/01/warren-buffet-on-steroids-desantis-calls-for-transparency-on-congressional-stock-trading/ ↩

6. Chris Katje, "Want To Copy 'Master Trader' Nancy Pelosi's Investments? There's An ETF For That," Benzinga, February 7, 2023. https://www.benzinga.com/markets/penny-stocks/23/02/30768851/ ↩

7. Subversive ETFs, "Unusual Whales Subversive Republican Trading ETF Ticker Change," March 18, 2025. https://subversiveetfs.com/gop/ ↩

8. Office of Senator Jeff Merkley, "Committee Advances Peters, Hawley, Merkley, and Ossoff Bipartisan Legislation to Ban Member Stock Trading," July 30, 2025. https://www.merkley.senate.gov/committee-advances-peters-hawley-merkley-and-ossoff-bipartisan-legislation-to-ban-member-stock-trading/ ↩

9. Caitlin Yilek, "GOP Sen. Josh Hawley and Democrats Vote to Advance Congressional Stock Trading Ban," CBS News, July 30, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hawley-democrats-vote-stock-trading-ban-committee/ ↩

10. Henry Gass, "Congress Considers Ban on Member Stock Trades, Going Beyond Transparency," Christian Science Monitor, December 10, 2025. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/1210/insider-trading-stocks-congress-ban. See also https://readsludge.com/2025/08/01/senate-panel-advances-stock-trading-ban-for-lawmakers-with-trump-exemption/ ↩

11. H.R. 5106, the Restore Trust in Congress Act, introduced September 3, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106 and https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/sens-moody-gillibrand-announce-new-bipartisan-bill-to-ban-congressional-stock-trading/. See also https://www.notus.org/money/congress-stock-ban-bill-vote-anna-paulina-luna-florida ↩

12. House Discharge Petition No. 119-11, filed December 2, 2025, by Representative Anna Paulina Luna. https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2025120211. See also https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5630696-luna-stock-trading-ban-discharge-petition/ ↩

13. Signature count as of mid-January 2026 per Clerk of the House. https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2025120211 and https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5654104-democrats-stock-trading-discharge-petition/ ↩

14. Stephen Groves and Lisa Mascaro, "Biden Backs Banning Stock Trades for Congress," Associated Press, December 17, 2024. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/24/remarks-president-state-union-address, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-backs-calls-ban-congressional-stock-trading/story?id=116888132, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5249112-congress-stock-trading-ban/ ↩

When a member of Congress leaves office, federal law does not let them begin lobbying their former colleagues right away. A former member of the House must wait one year; a former senator must wait two.¹ This is the cooling-off period. The restriction on members of Congress dates to the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, built on the theory that a brief enforced distance between holding office and selling access to it would blunt the conflict of interest the revolving door otherwise creates.²

A year is shorter than a single session of Congress. When the waiting period ends, the committee assignments are the same, the staff are the same, the leadership is the same, and the relationships a departing member spent a career building are all still in place. As discussed earlier in the section on representatives' obligations to their constituents, nearly two-thirds of the members of the 115th Congress who left for the private sector took jobs in the influence business, and the committee chairs and party leaders were the most likely to make the move. A pause measured in months does not interrupt that pattern.

A majority of Americans would like to see this cooling-off period extended. In the 2022 University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey, the same series that produced the figures on stock trading and Citizens United, respondents were given a briefing on the current rule and asked to weigh the arguments for and against extending it. Sixty-five percent favored lengthening the cooling-off period to five years, including sixty-five percent of Republicans and sixty-seven percent of Democrats.³ Support held across the political map; in both the most Republican and the most Democratic districts, large majorities favored the longer wait.⁴ PPC had asked a similar question in 2017 and found seventy-seven percent in favor.⁵

The same survey marks where the agreement stops. Offered the option of going further, to a permanent lifetime ban on former members lobbying at all, only thirty-two percent agreed.⁶ What Americans broadly support is a longer wait rather than a closed door, and the distinction matters, because the legislation now drawing the most attention asks for the closed door.

A five-year cooling-off period has been written into bills repeatedly. The Public Service Integrity Act in the House and the Cleaning up Washington Act in the Senate both proposed extending the ban on former members to a uniform five years, along with a longer restriction on senior congressional staff.⁷ Neither advanced. Since the 117th Congress, the five-year proposal has had no prominent vehicle, and the legislative attention on the revolving door has moved past it. In July 2025, Representatives Joe Neguse and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Close the Revolving Door Act, which would impose a lifetime lobbying ban on former members.⁸ In May 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Rick Scott introduced the BLAST Act, which would do the same, replacing the cooling-off periods with a permanent ban and authorizing the Justice Department to pursue criminal penalties for violations.⁹ The BLAST Act pairs one of the Senate's most progressive members with a close ally of President Trump. Neither bill has received a floor vote.

On most of the reforms in these pages, the public has settled on a position and Congress has declined to act on it. Here the public settled on a five-year wait, and Congress has passed neither that nor the longer ban some of its members now propose instead. The waiting period a former representative faces today is the same one year it has been since 1989.

Footnotes

1. Under 18 U.S.C. § 207, former Members of the House are barred for one year, and former Senators for two years, from lobbying Congress. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IN10625.html ↩

2. The Ethics Reform Act of 1989, Public Law 101-194, extended post-employment lobbying restrictions to Members of Congress. ↩

3. 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/ ↩

4. Same source. ↩

5. Program for Public Consultation, lobbying policy survey of 2,482 registered voters, September 7 – October 3, 2017. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/overwhelming-bipartisan-majorities-favor-greater-restrictions-on-lobbying-by-former-government-officials/ ↩

6. Program for Public Consultation, lobbying policy survey, 2022. ↩

7. Identified by the Program for Public Consultation as the bills, current at the time of its 2022 survey, that would extend the post-employment lobbying ban to five years. ↩

8. Close the Revolving Door Act of 2025, introduced July 10, 2025, by Representatives Joe Neguse and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. https://neguse.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-neguse-and-rep-ocasio-cortez-introduce-legislation-impose-lifetime-ban ↩

9. BLAST Act, introduced May 14, 2026, by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Rick Scott. https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-rick-scott-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-ban-former-members-of-congress-from-lobbying ↩

Since 2000, exactly one hundred former members of Congress have gone to work for foreign governments.¹ They have represented the interests of nearly half the countries on earth. Turkey has hired the most, sixteen of them, followed by South Korea with twelve and Taiwan with eleven, then China and Saudi Arabia with eight apiece.² The two governments just behind Turkey are democracies, but they are the exception. Across all hundred former members, eighty-five percent registered as agents of governments that Freedom House rates "not free" or "partly free."³

This is the same revolving door described earlier, with one turn added. The Exit Interview section followed Dick Gephardt from championing recognition of the Armenian genocide in Congress to signing a contract, after he left, with the government of Turkey to help defeat the recognition resolution. Gephardt was an early entry in a long pattern, one the Quincy Institute, drawing on Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, counted to exactly one hundred by 2026. The work is legal, and it is disclosed. FARA, passed in 1938 to track foreign propaganda, requires an American working for a foreign government to register with the Justice Department and file what he is being paid to do.⁴ It stops there. A former House member waits one year before lobbying his old colleagues, a former senator two; once the wait is over, a foreign government may hire him on the same terms as a trade association or a drug company. The filing goes in, and that is the whole of the safeguard.

The filing can make for strange reading. In December 2024, as Pete Hegseth's nomination for secretary of defense neared a contested Senate vote, a former Republican senator named Norm Coleman served as his guide on Capitol Hill, escorting the nominee through meetings with the senators whose votes would decide the confirmation.⁵ Coleman was a registered lobbyist for the government of Saudi Arabia, working through Hogan Lovells, a firm the Saudi embassy had paid roughly $2.7 million in 2019.⁶ A former United States senator, on a foreign government's payroll, was helping to seat the man who would run the American military. Every part of it was disclosed, and every part of it was lawful.

Americans, asked about the practice, want it stopped. In the 2022 University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey, the series behind the figures on stock trading and the lobbying cool-off period, seventy-one percent of respondents said former senior officials should be barred for life from lobbying for a foreign government, with 71 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of Democrats agreeing.⁷ PPC asked the question about former executive branch officials, the group named in the bill it was testing. The legislation that has gathered the most support since reaches former members of Congress and retired military officers too.

Several versions of that legislation exist. Jared Golden and Mike Gallagher wrote one in 2021, the Congressional and Executive Foreign Lobbying Ban, which would bar former members of Congress, senior executive officials, and retired generals and admirals from ever registering as foreign agents.⁸ The bipartisan Fighting Foreign Influence Act, six sponsors split evenly between the parties, would do the same and also require American think tanks to disclose large gifts from foreign governments.⁹ Both have sat without a floor vote.

One related bill has moved. The CLEAR Path Act, from Senators John Cornyn and Peter Welch, would bar former senior executive officials from lobbying for a short list of adversary nations: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2026 with votes from both parties.¹⁰ Its reach is narrow by design. It covers no former members of Congress, and the list of five adversaries leaves out Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the two governments that have hired the most of them. The hundred former lawmakers this section began with would be free to keep working under a CLEAR Path Act signed into law tomorrow. The bill written to reach them has been introduced and reintroduced across multiple Congresses, and not once has it been called for a vote.

Footnotes

1. Nick Cleveland-Stout and Ben Freeman, "These 100 Former US Lawmakers Have Become Foreign Lobbyists," Responsible Statecraft (Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft), April 17, 2026. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/revolving-door-congress/. See also https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/06/28/the-revolving-door-from-congress-to-foreign-interest-lobbyist-is-well-traveled/ ↩

2. Nick Cleveland-Stout and Ben Freeman, "The Well-Traveled Road from Member of Congress to Foreign Agent," Responsible Statecraft, June 28, 2022. Note: the per-country counts (Turkey 16, etc.) reflect this 2022 analysis when the total was approximately 90; the April 2026 update raised the total to 100 but did not publish revised per-country counts. ↩

3. Cleveland-Stout and Freeman, "These 100 Former US Lawmakers Have Become Foreign Lobbyists," April 17, 2026. https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores ↩

4. Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, 22 U.S.C. §§ 611–621. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10499. See also https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IN10625.html ↩

5. Spencer Ackerman, "Pete Hegseth's 'Sherpa' Is Never Trumper Who Lobbies for Saudis," The Daily Beast, December 5, 2024. https://www.thedailybeast.com/foreign-agent-for-saudis-is-trumps-sherpa-for-pete-hegseth/, https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pete-hegseths-congressional-sherpa, https://jewishinsider.com/2024/12/norm-coleman-pete-hegseth-trump-nomination-defense-secretary/ ↩

6. Hogan Lovells reported receiving approximately $2.7 million from the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in 2019 and roughly $13.7 million since 2014, per FARA filings. https://dawnmena.org/norm-coleman-former-u-s-senator-now-lobbyist-and-agent-for-the-saudi-government/ ↩

7. 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/ ↩

8. Congressional and Executive Foreign Lobbying Ban Act, H.R. 3389 (117th Congress), introduced May 20, 2021. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3389/text ↩

9. Fighting Foreign Influence Act, H.R. 8106 (117th Congress), introduced June 16, 2022. https://us.transparency.org/news/fighting-foreign-influence-act-statement/. See also https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8176 ↩

10. CLEAR Path Act, sponsored by Senators John Cornyn, Peter Welch, Jim Risch, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 15, 2026. https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-colleagues-bill-to-mitigate-foreign-influence-on-u-s-policymaking-passes-senate-judiciary-committee/ ↩

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. ↩