OPINION: Maybe the Vitriol in Congress Isn’t as Bad as It Seems

If you have followed media coverage of Congress over the past few years, it’s been hard to escape two impressions: Not much gets done there, and members spend a lot of their time tearing into one another. We can argue about the first — certainly, recent [sessions of] Congress have been less productive than their predecessors — but now there’s hard evidence that the second impression is just plain wrong. The vast majority of members, it turns out, focus on substance and policy, not on personal attacks. That conclusion comes from an interesting and useful new online tool created by a group of academics at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. Their group, the Polarization Research Lab, recently went up with something called “America’s Political Pulse,” which you can find at: https://americaspoliticalpulse.com/. Basically, every day the site tracks, analyzes, and catalogs all public statements made by members of Congress, including Twitter/X posts, newsletters, press releases, and floor speeches. It then uses AI models that the group developed to classify those statements into five categories: personal attacks, policy discussion, constructive debate, accomplishments, and bipartisanship/compromise. With more than 1.6 million statements since September of 2022 in the database, the findings are intriguing. Most notably, during the current Congress 66 members, or 12 percent, have not insulted anyone once — at least, within the publicly available statements found by the Lab — while 350 of Congress’s 535 members, or 65 percent, have done so in less than 1 percent of their communications. That leaves 119 members who have engaged in personal attacks more than 1 percent of the time. That’s more than it should be, but it’s not the wholesale flame-throwing that much press coverage suggests. The director of the Polarization Research Lab, Dartmouth government Prof. Sean Westwood, summed up the findings this way: “What we’ve identified is that there are a lot of members of Congress who are showing up and doing their jobs and engaging in meaningful debate and they’re not getting the attention they deserve. What is instead happening is that firebrands are absorbing all the media attention. Our data show that Congress is not nearly as dysfunctional or polarized as people may think.” What may be most useful about the online tool is that it names names, so you can go see for yourself. It lists the top senators and House members who engage in policy discussion, constructive debate, and so on: Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, for instance, leads both chambers on policy discussion; Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee leads similarly on constructive debate; and Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia is tops for bipartisanship. It also lists the legislators within each party most prone to engaging in personal attacks, led by Republicans Lance Gooden of Texas and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; and by Democrats Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who died in August, and Eric Swalwell of California. You can search for any member and get a breakdown of what percentage of their communications fall into each category and where they stand compared to their peers. You can also dig into examples of comments parsed by the model and see if you agree with how they were characterized — and flag them for researchers if you disagree. It’s reassuring to know that attack-dog rhetoric isn’t as widespread as it might seem, but it’s still problematic. Every moment taken up by conflict — especially on the congressional floor or in committee — is time not spent on the very real challenges our country faces, or on advancing legislation aimed at addressing them. And every clickbait news story that focuses on attacks is a journalist bypassing an opportunity to improve Americans’ understanding of issues that affect their lives. What the tool does is make it possible for you, as a voter, to exert some small measure of influence on this picture. “The current media landscape paired with a small number of firebrands in Congress creates a harmful cocktail of nonstop news of incivility and dysfunction,” says UPenn communications Prof. Yphtach Lelkes. “Holding the individuals engaging in conflict accountable and elevating effective lawmakers is critical to slowing the tide of toxic polarization in America.” Nobody is better equipped to do this than an informed voter.

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Lee Hamilton, 93, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana. ​​​​