Analysis · October 21, 2026

Democrats and Republicans compared: what the record shows

The two parties' grades are almost identical on average, but they get there differently. Majority Republicans pass more bills; minority Democrats cosponsor more.

Congress Report Card's grades are built so that a member's party has no direct effect on their grade. No vote is scored as right or wrong, and no issue position counts. But the parties do behave differently in ways the record captures: how often their members vote, how many bills they write and how many of those bills move. This article compares the two parties in the 119th Congress, where Republicans hold the majority in both chambers.

Overall grades are close

The House figures include the six delegates, three from each party. In the Senate, the two independents, Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Angus S. King, Jr. of Maine, are graded too but not shown in the table.

House Democrats average two points higher than House Republicans, and they have more A grades and fewer Fs. In the Senate the averages are within a point of each other. In both chambers, the gap between the parties is much smaller than the gap between individual members within each party. Party is a poor predictor of any one member's grade.

Attendance: nearly identical

The median House Democrat has voted on 98.2% of roll calls, and the median House Republican on 98.1%. In the Senate the figures are 98.0% for Democrats and 97.7% for Republicans. Both parties have members with perfect records and members with very poor ones. Of the twelve voting House members with the lowest attendance, seven are Republicans and five are Democrats. Among senators, the three with the lowest attendance are two Republicans and a Democrat.

Attendance is the single biggest factor in the grades, and on attendance the parties are effectively tied. That is the main reason their average grades are so close.

Bills written: the majority advantage

The clearest party difference is in how far members' bills get. Members of both parties introduce bills at similar rates: the median House Democrat has sponsored 21 bills and the median House Republican 23. But Republican bills move much more often:

This is the majority-party advantage, and it is a structural feature of Congress, not a judgment about the quality of anyone's bills. The majority party holds every committee chair, sets the floor schedule in both chambers and decides which bills get hearings and votes. Bills from the minority can still move, especially when they are bipartisan or narrow, but they move far less often.

The pattern has generally run the other way in Congresses where Democrats held the majority. Because the "bills written" score rewards bills that move, members of the majority party tend to earn higher scores on it. Congress Report Card ranks members against their whole chamber rather than within their party, because the grade is meant to describe what each member's legislative work produced. That choice is worth keeping in mind when comparing members across parties.

Bills supported: the minority makes up ground

Democrats cosponsor far more bills than Republicans. The median House Democrat has cosponsored 340 bills, compared with about 189 for the median House Republican. In the Senate the medians are 184 and 145. Some of that difference reflects party habits that existed before this Congress. Some of it likely reflects minority status: when your own bills are unlikely to move, signing on to colleagues' bills is one of the main ways to put your name behind legislation.

The higher cosponsorship scores offset the lower legislative scores for many Democrats. That balance is part of why House Democrats' average grade comes out slightly ahead even though Republicans' bills move more often.

Where the parties look alike

For all the attention paid to partisan conflict, the report cards show the two parties behaving similarly in most respects. Both parties' members show up for nearly all votes. Both introduce bills at similar rates. Both have highly active members who sponsor more than 100 bills and members who sponsor only a handful. Both have members with grades at every level from A to F.

Among the top-scoring House members, the list alternates between parties. Joe Neguse and Jimmy Panetta, both Democrats, have the two highest scores, followed by Democrat Eugene Simon Vindman and Republicans Brian K. Fitzpatrick, Don Bacon and Claudia Tenney. In the Senate, the top score belongs to Republican Rick Scott, and the next five go to four Democrats and one Republican.

What this comparison can't tell you

The report card doesn't measure how members vote, only whether they vote. A party-line vote and a bipartisan one count the same. It doesn't measure leadership, committee work or negotiation, and those roles are not evenly divided: the majority party holds the chairs, while the minority's work often happens in amendments, oversight letters and public debate that the data doesn't capture.

The grades are best used to compare members, not parties. If you want to see how your own members compare, open your state page, or use the party filter on the home page to see every member of either party sorted by grade. For the rules behind every score, see the methodology.

Figures are from the Congress Report Card data as of October 21, 2026. Grades change as Congress votes, so the numbers on member pages may have moved since. How grades are calculated.