Congress

House members keep losing their bids for higher office. Some think they know why.

Published

4 weeks ago

June 5, 2026

Nearly 30 House members who were sworn in at the start of this Congress have launched campaigns for other, more prestigious offices. Voters have not been especially interested in granting them promotions.

The trend was on full display in recent weeks: Rep. Randy Feenstra lost the GOP nomination to be Iowa governor Tuesday despite a late endorsement from President Donald Trump, just as Rep. Dusty Johnson fell short in his bid for governor of South Dakota. A week prior, Rep. Chip Roy lost a runoff to be Texas attorney general.

House Democrats have been similarly hapless. In the Illinois Senate primary, Reps. Robin Kelly and Raja Krishnamoorthi both lost to the state’s lieutenant governor, and in Texas, Rep. Jasmine Crockett fell to a state representative in the Democratic Senate race.

Some of those who have been on the campaign trail this year have a simple explanation for the trend: It’s hard for members of a dysfunctional and unpopular institution to ask voters to reward them with even bigger jobs.

“There’s definitely those out there who think, ‘Well, it’s broken, and they’ve been in it a long time, and obviously it’s still broken,’ so we kind of get the blame for it,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, who fell short last month in making it to a runoff in Georgia’s Republican Senate primary.

Even as public sentiment toward Congress has crashed to historic lows and partisan mudslinging has crescendoed to a fever pitch, some House members have found success.

Rep. Mike Collins advanced in the race Carter lost and has led most polls of the GOP runoff. Reps. Andy Barr and Ashley Hinson are now the Republican Senate nominees in Kentucky and Iowa, respectively, and Rep. Julia Letlow is the favorite in a GOP Senate runoff in Louisiana. One Democrat sworn in for the 119th Congress, New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, is now governor.

But if congressional service was once considered a helpful asset not so long ago — half of last year’s elected class of freshmen senators served previously in the House — members now fear that their time on Capitol Hill has become politically toxic.

In the races House members are losing, state-level officials and political outsiders have found more success.

“The voters all across the country aren’t particularly fond of D.C., so are you perceived to be part of the establishment or someone that’s been battling it?” said Rep. David Schweikert, who is now running for the GOP nomination for Arizona governor.

As he spoke to a reporter in the Capitol, he held a mug with the words, “I’d rather be in Arizona.”

Schweikert is facing a colleague, Rep. Andy Biggs, in next month’s primary. Polls suggest either man would face an uphill battle to unseat Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

Other House members are finding long odds as they look for seats in the Senate or in state houses — even as some distance themselves from their current positions.

In Tennessee, for example, GOP Rep. John Rose has trailed Sen. Marsha Blackburn in public polling even as he plays down his service in Washington. In one recent ad, he identified himself as “a father, a farmer and a CEO,” and his website also makes no mention he is a sitting member of Congress.

Tuesday’s GOP primary for South Carolina governor could at least temporarily extinguish the political careers of two more other members, Reps. Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace. Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette was already a front-runner in several public polls, and won Trump’s endorsement last week.

The pileup of losses could weigh even more heavily on House leaders who have struggled to get members to show up for votes in the closely divided chamber. Speaker Mike Johnson has already canceled multiple voting days this year to accommodate House members’ primary schedules, and the risk of no-shows is likely to increase.

For instance, Dusty Johnson, usually a reliable leadership ally, missed votes Wednesday just as a contentious effort to curb Trump’s military campaign against Iran hit the House floor.

There are, of course, many reasons for success or failure in politics, and some members who have been on other ballot lines this year have been more careful about attributing their fortunes to the House itself. Roy, for instance, pointed out that he was facing a largely self-funded opponent — an oil-and-gas executive who poured $17 million into the race and was able to use the funding advantage to connect with voters.

“You just got to go to where the voters are,” he said. “Some guys have gone out, done well. Some have not.”

Kelly, whose House career is ending after 14 years representing a Chicago-area district, blamed bad timing, insufficient fundraising and other pressures as reasons she and other members have struggled.

“Most people highly respected me for my work in Congress,” Kelly said in an interview. “Even the ones that didn’t endorse me out loud.”

Still, voter sentiment is growing clear to many lawmakers, who are warily watching their own races ahead of November.

“People are anti-incumbent,” said one House Republican who is seeking reelection and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “They’re mad. They want change across the board.”

The rest of the year is likely to be a mixed bag for House incumbents. GOP Reps. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma and Harriet Hageman of Wyoming appear to be well on their way to winning Senate nominations — and general elections — in solid red states. Polls show Rep. Byron Donalds is on track to be Florida’s next governor, and Trump-endorsed Rep. Barry Moore is well-positioned to win an Alabama Senate seat if he can emerge from a competitive Republican runoff.

But Democratic Reps. Angie Craig of Minnesota and Haley Stevens of Michigan have struggled to break out in their respective Senate primaries. If he can emerge from a crowded primary field, GOP Rep. John James faces a tough general election in the Michigan governor race, as does Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican running for governor in Wisconsin.

All of them will have to convince voters that their years of service in Washington are worth rewarding.

“I was a mayor for eight years, I was a state legislator for 10 years, I’ve been in Congress for 12 years, and I feel like that’s important,” Carter said. “I think experience and that service is invaluable [but] I think it kind of worked against me in a lot of ways … just being in politics for so long.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: The GOP confronts its lost summer

Published

5 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Congress is settling in for a do-nothing summer.

House leaders lost control of their chamber with just eight legislative days before a planned five-week summer recess. And President Donald Trump’s demands for action on a stalled elections bill — along with his series of mercurial power moves — have left Senate Republicans frustrated and morose as major legislation piles up.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are confronting the reality that ticking items off their pre-midterm to-do list is looking increasingly unattainable.

Wednesday’s events only made that clearer:

— RECON 3.0: Key rank-and-file House members and chairs huddled in Johnson’s office Wednesday to plot a path forward on a long shot policy bill under the party-line reconciliation process.

Those who attended — including Rep. August Pfluger, an avowed cheerleader for the bill — acknowledged hope is fading fast. Members are mired in fights over how to pay for the package, and their goal of advancing a budget blueprint for the bill this week is dashed.

“After this recess, if it doesn’t happen in the first couple of days, then I think it’s in real trouble,” Pfluger, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

— EMERGENCY IRAN FUNDING: Trump has asked Congress to direct billions of dollars to cover the war with Iran — but support for the emergency funding is in serious doubt.

Key Republicans left a classified briefing from senior Pentagon officials Wednesday frustrated by unanswered questions. They want to know how the requested $67 billion would be spent — and whether servicemember paychecks and munitions stockpiles might be at imminent risk.

“We need more information,” said Rep. Ken Calvert, the top House Republican responsible for shepherding the supplemental bill, which also includes farm assistance, disaster and Ebola aid.

— IMMIGRATION: As hard-liners continue to gum up the GOP agenda over the SAVE America Act, some are similarly incensed over Johnson’s failure to act on an immigration measure he promised weeks ago to take up.

Johnson held a call Wednesday with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and other members to try to find a path forward but didn’t make much progress, according to five people granted anonymity to discuss the details.

Some centrist Republicans don’t want to vote on it before the midterms, they said, and farm-state members are demanding GOP leaders add guestworker visa provisions — something immigration hard-liners sharply oppose.

And while only a handful of potential developments appear capable of pulling the GOP majorities out of their summer torpor, the contemporary Congress tends to act only when deadlines force it to. That has made the early part of this summer especially languid on Capitol Hill.

It didn’t help, some members noted this week, that lawmakers were sent home early rather than hash out their differences in person.

“We shouldn’t be leaving town,” Rep. Ralph Norman said. “We ought to be working, and we’re not doing it.”

What else we’re watching:

— THE GOP’S DIRTY LITTLE SAVE AMERICA SECRET: House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act, shutting down the floor in protest. But their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for his election security bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump wants. Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded be added to the legislation.

— TRUMP’S CLAYTON REVIVAL: Trump threw Senate Republicans a rare bone Wednesday — telling reporters that Jay Clayton would have a hearing for his director of national intelligence nomination in two weeks. The president’s remarks were welcome (but in several corners, surprising) news for GOP leaders, who had watched in frustration as Trump scuttled both Clayton’s nomination hearing and passage of a key surveillance tool renewal last month.

Meredith Lee Hill, Mia McCarthy, John Sakellariadis and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Congress

Congress is settling in for a do-nothing summer

Published

3 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Republican congressional agenda is melting in the summer heat.

Intraparty fights, tight margins, election-year pressures and an indifferent president have grounded the pre-midterm legislative plans of GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, with just a handful of days left to do anything about it.

House leaders, in particular, appear to have lost control of their chamber with just eight session days before a planned five-week summer recess. They discarded two of those days this week, sending members home early for Independence Day after a member rebellion left them unable to move major bills.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s demands for action on a stalled GOP elections bill and a series of mercurial power moves have left Senate Republicans frustrated and morose as major legislation piles up — including the annual defense policy bill, fiscal 2027 spending measures, an extension of government spy powers, the farm bill and more.

“Who needs Democrats when you have your own party derailing the Trump agenda?” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) lamented Tuesday as members unexpectedly scattered for the upcoming holiday.

Absent strong leadership or presidential intervention, the contemporary Congress tends to act only when deadlines force it to, and that has made the early part of this summer especially languid on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers blew past a supposed June deadline for the surveillance program’s renewal, with spy agencies able to rely on existing wiretaps into early next year. The Pentagon bill doesn’t have to get done until the end of the year, and government funding expires Sept. 30, when it is likely to be extended beyond the November election — along with the farm bill.

Still, frustrations are mounting among the lawmakers who toil at the committee level to prepare bills for a dysfunctional House floor.

“We lost four bills that we might have been able to get across the floor,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said Tuesday. “We’re losing time, and time is a very precious commodity.”

The one major piece of legislation passed in recent weeks, a bipartisan housing bill, remains unsigned by Trump, who recently called it a “big yawn.” And the GOP’s chances of passing a new policy bill under the party-line reconciliation process are looking increasingly remote.

House GOP leaders hoped a Trump administration request for defense funding would jump-start plans for that longshot bill, which could carry other Republican priorities ahead of the midterms. Instead, members are mired in fights over how to pay for the package, and hopes of moving forward with a budget blueprint for the bill ahead of the July 4 recess collapsed last month.

Key rank-and-file members and some House chairs huddled in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office Wednesday to plot a way forward on a reconciliation package, but another meeting with Budget Committee Republicans was canceled after GOP leaders sent lawmakers home early.

Those who stayed — including Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), an avowed cheerleader for the party-line bill— acknowledged hope is fading fast.

“After this recess, if it doesn’t happen in the first couple of days, then I think it’s in real trouble,” Pfluger, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

Only a handful of potential developments appear capable of pulling the GOP majorities out of their summer torpor.

In the Senate, members are on guard for a potential Supreme Court confirmation fight — especially after National Public Radio mistakenly published a false report about Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement.

Otherwise the chamber is set to debate its version of the defense policy bill and process a handful of Trump nominations later this month before starting its summer recess. Other bills, including those dealing with college sports and cryptocurrency regulations, could also come to the floor.

Republicans in both chambers believe they could be forced to act on an emergency Pentagon funding request that the White House transmitted to Capitol Hill last week to cover the expense of the war with Iran. Farm assistance, disaster aid and other bipartisan priorities could ride along on that bill.

But the military funding request is facing serious doubts as GOP lawmakers bristle at a lack of information from the Trump administration on how the requested $67 billion would be spent — and whether servicemember paychecks and munitions stockpiles might be at imminent risk. Key Republicans left a classified briefing from senior Pentagon officials at the Capitol Wednesday frustrated at the unanswered questions.

“We recognize that the department needs more money fast,” said Rep. Ken Calvert of California, the top Republican responsible for shepherding the supplemental bill through the House. “We’ve got to figure out exactly how much that is, and we’ve got to do that as fast as possible.”

Asked as he left the briefing when exactly the Pentagon needs the money, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said, “Now.”

“This is really, really, really crucial,” he said.

But even if the administration coughs up the details appropriators like Calvert and Diaz-Balart are demanding, there is no sign the hard-liners holding the House floor hostage are willing to end their blockade — to say nothing about a potential Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

The 13 Republicans who tanked a procedural vote Tuesday had a variety of grievances. Some wanted to pressure the Senate to take up the elections bill, the SAVE America Act. Others wanted to protest Johnson’s failure to act on a border security measure, as they claim he promised to do weeks ago.

“When leadership is making promises and not following through and then you don’t do anything about it, then it’d be, shame on me,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

But the proposed border bill is entangled in other intra-GOP conflicts, according to five people granted anonymity to describe internal conversations. House GOP leaders and leadership staff huddled in a series of closed-door meetings Wednesday over the various issues, with still no solution to reopening the floor.

Johnson held a call Wednesday with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other members to try to find a path forward without making much progress, according to the five people.

It didn’t help, some members noted this week, that members were sent home early rather than hash out their differences in person.

“We shouldn’t be leaving town,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said. “We ought to be working, and we’re not doing it.”

Calen Razor and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

Congress

The GOP’s dirty little secret about the SAVE America Act

Published

3 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act — the GOP elections bill that President Donald Trump has called his “No. 1 priority” in Congress — and shut down the floor in protest.

Their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for the bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump is pushing.

Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.

Instead, Johnson and other House leaders have stuck with an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements but otherwise lets states run their elections as they see fit.

“I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he said when asked by a Blue Light News reporter if a Trump-style approach to mail voting could come to the floor.

“We all do” want to follow Trump’s lead on the issue, Johnson added. “But the mail-in ballot, he’s acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”

When a band of conservative hard-liners pushed over the past week to add the election bill to the annual Pentagon policy bill, Johnson moved to attach the version of the bill that narrowly passed the House in February, not a broader version that includes the additional provisions Trump has demanded. The latest version Trump wants has never passed the House — which is part of the problem.

The added provisions Trump wants include a blanket prohibition on transgender people playing women’s sports, a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and the mail voting crackdown — which could effectively end the no-excuse policies both blue and red states employ to send ballots out widely.

Trump has said he would allow exceptions for military members, the disabled and other small groups but he has shown no sign he is willing to abandon the push entirely — saying just this week that the mail voting restrictions must be included. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week the “no mail ballots” provision was “maybe the most important of all, because it’s so corrupt.” He added he was willing to allow “strong exceptions” for military members and other limited cases.

But the lack of widespread GOP support for upending the voting systems in states like Arizona, Florida and Alaska is an open secret on Capitol Hill, where many Republicans credit mailed ballots with helping them win tight races.

“Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) said in an interview. “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”

The Supreme Court last week struck down Trump’s attempts to regulate mail voting by executive order — by restricting the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward.

Amodei said he was “happy” to hear of the ruling: “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that”

Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.) is an outspoken supporter of the SAVE America Act and has introduced a bill that could allow Republicans to incorporate portions of the elections overhaul in a party-line budget reconciliation bill. But she said a near-total ban on mail-in voting would pose problems for states like hers, where some counties have a single polling place.

“We’re a rural state,” she said. “I understand the concerns about mail-in voting … but I think the solution that I’m in favor of is restricting it and creating these commonsense reforms for it.”

Johnson acknowledged those concerns in his comments Tuesday, saying residents of rural states such as Alaska sometimes find it “very difficult to get to a ballot box, and so they use mail-in ballots very effectively, and I think securely, and that’s something that has to be contended with.”

“There are other states that do it well, and without a problem,” Johnson said. “Our concerns are with the handful, five or six blue states, who abuse this, and California is the avatar for this, because it is so ridiculous.”

In the Senate, where even the narrower House-passed version of the bill has languished due to GOP divisions and a Democratic filibuster, there is also an understanding that the expanded bill Trump wants is DOA.

During a lunch with Trump last week, Sen. Rick Scott told colleagues that while the expanded version of the election bill — including the mail-in ballot provisions — were good policies, there wasn’t consensus for them within the Senate GOP, according to a copy of the Florida Republican’s notes reviewed by Blue Light News.

Instead, Scott pointed to other tactics as a more realistic way forward, such as attempting to launch an extended debate on the slimmed-down bill that does not include Trump’s latest demands.

Calen Razor, Jordain Carney and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.