The confetti has been swept up, the concession calls have been made, and Washington has already gone back to its favorite pastime, which is handicapping the next fight before anyone has recovered from the last one. Before the town moves on, it’s worth pausing on something that almost never happens in American politics. Right now the public mood, the political incentives, and the calendar are all pointing in the same direction at the same time. Moments like this tend to close quickly, so it’s worth spelling out what this one is and what we intend to do with it.
A country that showed up
About 124 million Americans cast ballots on November 3, up from roughly 112 million in the last midterm, according to preliminary estimates from the University of Florida Election Lab, the turnout tracker run by political scientist Michael McDonald. That works out to roughly 49 percent of eligible voters, the second-highest midterm turnout rate since 1914, behind only 2018. For years we have been told that Americans have tuned out and given up on the whole enterprise. Then, ten days ago, they stood in line and voted at one of the highest rates seen in a century.
So what brought them out? Part of the answer is that people are fed up in a very particular way. In September, Gallup reported that 89 percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread in our government, the highest figure in the twenty years Gallup has asked. That includes 91 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of independents, and 83 percent of Republicans. Gallup asks the same question around the world, and since 2023 only four of the 132 countries it tracks have posted a higher number than the United States did this year. Those four are Lebanon, Peru, Ghana, and Nigeria, which is not the company most Americans picture when they think of this country.
Pew Research Center found much the same thing in the spring. When Pew asked Americans to rate the country’s problems, “the role of money in politics” came out on top, with 74 percent calling it a very big problem. It beat health care costs, inflation, and the deficit, and the partisan gap was unusually small, with 70 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats in agreement. This is a country that can’t settle on what to call the Gulf off the coast of Florida, and yet on this question it speaks in nearly one voice.
Congress needs its tools back
The Constitution gives Congress two jobs that presidents of every party would rather it skip. One is keeping watch over the executive branch, and the other is deciding how the public’s money gets spent. James Madison, the Virginian who did as much as anyone to draft the Constitution, called the power of the purse “the most complete and effectual weapon” the people’s representatives have. Lately that weapon has spent a lot of time in the drawer.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress, has opened dozens of investigations into money that agencies were told to spend and didn’t. It has repeatedly found that the law was broken, in cases involving Head Start, school repair grants, electric vehicle chargers, and health research. It has also cleared agencies when the facts called for it, which is exactly what you want from a referee.
Then, at the end of September, the White House budget office sent Congress an $810 million “pocket rescission.” That is a request to cancel spending Congress already approved, timed so late in the fiscal year that the money expires before lawmakers can act on it. If the name sounds like a magic trick performed on your wallet, that is more or less how it works. GAO concluded the move was illegal. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, called it the latest attempt “to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.” When the person in charge of writing the government’s checks says someone is tearing them up, it’s worth listening.
We have been here before. When President Nixon refused to spend billions of dollars Congress had appropriated, lawmakers answered with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That law has done good work for half a century, and it is due for an update, with clearer language, a firm end to pocket rescissions, and enforcement tools that hold up no matter who sits in the Oval Office. Every president would like a Congress that nods along and signs where it’s told. The Framers had other plans, and they built those plans to bind presidents of both parties. A Republican who shrugs at this today will want these guardrails the next time a Democrat holds the pen, and a Democrat should feel the same way in reverse. That shared self-interest is the strongest argument for acting now.
Dark money has a bipartisan guest list
Plenty of candidates ran against secret money this year, and some said so from the stage on election night. In Atlanta, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia thanked the volunteers who helped him “face down the dark money Super PACs.” In Texas, James Talarico, newly elected to the Senate, called his win a message to “every billionaire megadonor.”
Anyone tempted to treat this as one party’s grievance, though, should take a look at the guest list. The New York Times counted roughly $1 billion in dark money, meaning political spending by groups that hide their donors, flowing through this year’s elections, and called that a low-end estimate. Some of the biggest players were the nonprofits tied to the congressional leaders of both parties. Through mid-October, those leadership-aligned nonprofits had sent nearly $400 million to the super PACs the same leaders control. Meanwhile the single biggest spender of the cycle, Elon Musk, put roughly $474 million into the midterms by the Times’s count, and it bought him almost nothing. Money can buy an enormous amount of airtime, and this year voters showed they still know how to change the channel.
Past reform efforts have stalled along party lines. The DISCLOSE Act, which would require groups spending big on elections to name their major donors, has been introduced in every Congress since 2010 and has never become law. That history tells us where the work has to start, which is with building support inside both parties well before anyone gives a floor speech.
We are not going to win over every member of Congress, and lasting reform has never required that. It requires a coalition broad enough, across individuals and leaders in both parties, that the change survives the next shift in power. Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the nonpartisan legal group that has spent more than two decades working on election law, plans to press the new Congress for strong disclosure rules. CLC’s founder and president, Trevor Potter, once chaired that very commission as a Republican appointee of President George H.W. Bush, a reminder that this cause has deep roots on both sides of the aisle. CLC is carrying this work in Congress, and Bright America will partner with them in communities across the country where we’ve been hosting large events.
Power comes from people
Outside spending can take over a news cycle and fill every commercial break on cable. It still can’t compete with a conversation between two neighbors over a fence, and that was the other big story of this election. Minnesota set a record for midterm turnout, with more than 64 percent of eligible voters casting ballots by the state’s unofficial count, near the top of the country. That happened because election workers, volunteers, churches, and community organizations did the unglamorous daily work of getting people registered, informed, and to the polls. After the isolation of the COVID years, that kind of civic muscle looks like it is coming back.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who toured the young United States in the 1830s, spotted this habit nearly two centuries ago. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” he wrote. He meant it as a compliment, and it still is one.
Bright America believes in building that kind of community power. We work alongside community leaders and business leaders who want to see change and are looking for partners with the staying power to bring it about.
Two paths
From here, the country can take one of two roads. The first leads back to the familiar back and forth, where each side waits for its turn at the wheel and hopes the next illiberal movement falls just short. The second leads toward a stronger civic life protected by new guardrails, built while both parties still remember why they need them.
We choose the second.
The window is open. But as any Washington veteran will tell you, windows in this town have a way of slamming shut, usually right around the time someone starts measuring for curtains.
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