Analysis · October 21, 2026

New arrivals: grading members who joined partway through

Eight members of Congress took office in 2026, after their predecessors left. How seats get filled mid-term, and why their report cards carry a partial-term label.

Not every member of Congress starts on the first day of the term. Members die, resign, take other jobs or are appointed to other offices, and their seats are filled partway through. In the 119th Congress, eight current members took office in 2026, two in the Senate and six in the House. Their report cards carry a partial term label, and this article explains why and how to read them.

How vacancies are filled

The Constitution treats the two chambers differently. A House seat can only be filled by election. When a representative leaves, the state's governor calls a special election, and the seat stays empty until it is held. Depending on the state's laws and the timing, that can take anywhere from a couple of months to most of a year, and sometimes a seat is left empty when the vacancy comes close to the next regular election.

Senate vacancies work differently. The Seventeenth Amendment lets state legislatures allow the governor to appoint a temporary senator until a special election is held, and most states do. Some states require the appointee to be from the same party as the senator who left; a few require a special election instead of an appointment. Appointed senators can take office within days or weeks, so Senate seats are rarely empty for long.

The eight new members

Attendance: mostly strong

On attendance, the new members have a good record. Five of the eight have not missed a single roll call since they took office: Armstrong (191 votes), Fuller (205), Mejia (189), Blair (29) and Wahab (22). Menefee has missed 9 of 265, which is still above 96%.

The two members with an F both have lower attendance over short periods. Gallagher has missed 6 of 98 House votes and Graham 5 of 62 Senate votes. With so few eligible votes, each absence has a big effect on the attendance rate: a member who misses 6 of 98 has an attendance rate under 94%, which earns an attendance score of about 59. A member who served the full Congress would need to miss about 41 votes to land in the same place.

Bills: the hard part

Bill scores are where the partial term matters most. Every member's bill activity is ranked against the whole chamber, and most of the chamber has had nearly two years to introduce and cosponsor bills. A member who arrived in September has had a few weeks.

The numbers show it. Wahab, sworn in on September 2, has sponsored no bills and cosponsored 3. Blair has sponsored 4 and cosponsored 29. Even Menefee, who has served since February, has sponsored 4 bills and cosponsored 100, well under the House median of about 22 and 257. Because these members sit near the bottom of the chamber on both bill measures, their bill scores are close to the minimum of 50, and that holds their grades in the C and D range even with perfect attendance.

Congress Report Card doesn't adjust bill counts for time served. Scaling up a few weeks of activity to a full Congress would be guesswork, and it would let a member's grade swing wildly based on one or two bills. Instead, the site labels these report cards as partial terms and leaves the raw numbers in place, so readers can judge them with that in mind.

What "partial term" means on the site

A member gets the partial-term label when they have been in office for fewer than half of their chamber's roll-call votes. The label appears next to the grade on the home page and on the member's report card, and the member page explains that the bill totals cover a shorter period. Delegates from DC and the territories are not labeled as partial, because their smaller number of votes reflects their voting rights, not their time in office.

The label is not a penalty. It is a warning to read the grade differently. A partial-term C− often means "has done everything they could in the time available," not "below average."

Looking ahead

The six new House members' seats are on the ballot in November along with every other House seat. Those who win will start the 120th Congress on equal footing with everyone else, with a full term in which to build their records. Their partial-term labels will disappear when the new Congress begins and the grades start fresh.

For the rules behind every score, see the methodology. To see whether your own delegation includes a new member, open your state page.

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.