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Analysis and Commentary Oct. 26, 2026: What Comes After the Election? »

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What Comes After the Election?

Oct. 26, 2026 · by Amy West

The last day to cast a vote in this year’s elections for Congress is Tuesday November 3. Many people across the country live in states where they can vote with a mail ballot or at early voting locations, besides doing so on Election Day. As of October 23, over 23 million people have already cast ballots.

With just 11 days left until the election ends, the next thing to consider is: what does Congress do next?

First of all,  the current Congress, called the 119th Congress, will continue until January 3, 2027. So even if the election changes which party controls either chamber, those changes won’t go into effect for two more months when the election winners take office.

The interim period is called the “lame duck” session. “Lame Duck” just means whatever legislating time is left after an election but before the newly elected members take their seats. (According to the House of Representatives page linked above, this replaced the possibly better phrase “dead duck.”) While the current Congress can still act in the two months until January 3, legislators leaving office may not  have any incentive to do so 

So what will or might the current 119th Congress do in the two months after the election?

Caucus Rules / Chamber Rules / Leadership

As soon as the 120th Congress begins, in the House of Representatives, the party with the most seats (called ”the majority”) will need to select a Speaker of the House, pass a rules package governing the chamber’s procedures, and ratify their caucus’s leadership team.

The two party caucuses in the House along with the two in Senate will also adopt rules governing their own members, such as term limits for committee positions.

The deliberations within the party caucuses leading up to those votes are fully or partially opaque, but our colleagues at the American Governance Institute have a podcast episode all about what’s known / expected in this process this year. The party that wins the majority will also set the rules for the chamber as a whole, so expect that to also be a focus as each party looks to the next iteration of the House.

It is highly likely that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will remain the Democratic leader in the 120th Congress and, if they get the majority, then the Speaker. The Washington Post looks at how Jeffries might lead.

Things are less clear for the Republicans. Speaker Johnson has had a tough job managing the Republicans the last two years and it may be that he wants out, they want him out or some combination. That would mean the Republicans will be working on who their leadership is going forward: stay the course or make a change.

Bills during the lame duck session?

While the structure of the House’s rules for the next Congress is extremely important for how or even whether it can function, most of us not in Congress are probably wondering about what actual legislating might happen during the lame duck.

Short version: With the same legislators still serving, expect the deadlocks and recesses to continue. No one outside of the Republican party knows the plan and even the folks in the party don’t seem to sure based on this Washington Sun article.

Both chambers will have to work together to fund the government past the current end date of December 11 and find a compromise acceptable to both the most far right Republicans and at least 7 Senate Democrats in order to get it passed. In short, it’s the same dilemma that they’ve been wrestling with for the last two years. This will likely dominate the legislative agenda until it’s solved at the last minute.

Speaker Johnson might well send everyone home for recess rather than negotiate a compromise with Democrats (as he already has several times in the 119th Congress and as the rules of the 119th Congress allowed him to do; this is the kind of thing that makes the House Rules package so important).

The Senate’s likely focus in the lame duck session is equally difficult to predict. It’s more stable – only 1/3rd of Senators are up for re-election and there’s no wholesale adoption of new rules at the start of a new Congress – but the Senate generally doesn’t make nearly as much information about their plans public as the house does.

Shenanigans

We are already seeing some dubious moves by the Trump Administration with respect to the election. Last week, the Department of Justice filed a suit to reject the results of Alaska’s senate election but only if the Republican candidate loses, at President Trump’s direction. The time to rectify ballot issues is before the election, not after you find out who won.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security has been devoting resources to finding “non-citizen voters,” a tactic a judge said has to stop for now. (A decade into Trump’s conspiracy theory of large-scale non-citizen voting, the Trump Administration has failed to make any mass prosecutions for illegal voting.) There will probably be more efforts like this both before and after the election, especially if the results are close. 

See you in a few weeks when Congress returns and we see how things shake out post-election!

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Continue/Read Original Article: https://substack.govtrack.us/p/what-comes-after-the-election