My Midterm Elections Crystal Ball

I surrendered my daily congressional lobbying responsibilities at The Council a couple years ago, so I’m a bit rusty regarding the goings-on from Capitol Hill.

I used to pride myself on knowing something about all 535 members of Congress. Now when I see a member of Congress wearing the telltale lapel pin, about a quarter of the time I don’t even know who they are and don’t much care. But with the 2026 midterm elections shaping up, I can share a few observations about how changes in Congress might impact the commercial insurance brokerage industry.

First, the conventional wisdom from inside the Beltway. History indicates that midterms are bad for the party in power, and they can be especially bad when a president from that party is underwater on favorability. At this writing, President Donald Trump is viewed negatively by more than six in 10 voters. That smells like a rout.

Not so fast, says House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.). At a small political gathering recently, his message essentially was this: More than half of Americans aren’t tuned in at all to congressional races and won’t be until fall. Republicans have a significant cash advantage. Inflation has been cut in half, real incomes are up, and the tax cuts from the One, Big, Beautiful Bill are just now being realized. Things will be fine.

Emmer might be right, but I’ll stick to the chattering-class consensus: chances are high that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) will be the next speaker of the House. Jeffries has been good to The Council—he takes meetings with our leaders, our teams have close ties, and we’ve supported him since his first election to the House 13 years ago.

Democrats, much more than Republicans, stick to seniority in assigning committee leadership. Thus, we can anticipate that if the House flips, the three committees most important to the industry— Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Financial Services—will be chaired again, respectively, by Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone (N.J.), Richard Neal (Mass.), and Maxine Waters (Calif.). They are mostly just fine on our brokerage agenda. (Pallone, to cite just one example, has backed legislation on pharmacy benefit manager reform.)

What are Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate? The party faces deep divisions with the emergence of progressive socialists, but since Trump was reelected, their base has been highly motivated and they’ve been on a roll in elections. It’s been 32 years since Democrats won statewide in Texas, yet they think this is the year for Senate nominee James Talarico. I say Texas Democrats are Charlie Brown and Lucy’s holding the football. Meanwhile, Dems always believe they can knock off Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, but predictions of her political demise are forever exaggerated. They think Gov. Roy Cooper could win retiring Sen. Thom Tillis’s seat in North Carolina. Maybe. But they’d have to run the field on all these races to assume the Senate majority.

A divided Congress with Trump in the Oval Office will unquestionably create significant political gridlock, which is not always a bad thing. Where things could go sideways is if Trump advances his populist agenda by collaborating with progressives on economic policies where their goals overlap. Proposals to cap credit card interest rates are an example that free-market conservatives abhor, and it’s not difficult to see this spilling over to other sectors of the financial services community. The implications of this on us are unclear.

Trump’s populism toward our sector was on full display earlier this year when he said he would be “getting rid of insurance brokers and corporate middlemen” to reduce healthcare costs. “My plan ends the giant kickbacks to insurance brokers and corporate middlemen.”

We take Trump seriously but not always literally. His “Great Healthcare Plan” for lowering costs doesn’t stand much chance in any circumstance of congressional political control. It’s based on shifting subsidies to individual healthcare accounts and away from the existing distribution system. Given double-digit increases in employer-sponsored health plan expenses and no significant bending of the healthcare cost curve in sight, we too worry about the long-term stability of employer plans. I worry a lot about employers abandoning generous health benefits unless costs are brought under control. I worry less that congressional action will forcibly displace them.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R), previously a healthcare CEO and state health and human services secretary, told me once it’s always popular to say get rid of the middleman to cut costs. But when it comes time for healthcare reform, he said, policymakers inevitably make things more complicated, which only enhances the role of the broker in navigating coverage.

In the One, Big, Beautiful Bill last year, The Council achieved all of our parochial objectives except for one—reining in the third-party litigation finance industry that is increasingly the cause of social inflation. We came close to achieving a major tax on third-party litigators, but close doesn’t matter—it’s either in the bill or it isn’t. If Democrats retake control of either or both chambers of Congress, our goals here, at least at the federal level, will remain elusive. Democratic Party fealty to the trial bar is near-universal, and increasingly some Republicans also surrender to its influence.

On a positive note, with the exception of Homeland Security, Congress successfully completed 11 of its 12 appropriations bills to fund the government through the remainder of fiscal year 2026. The votes were bipartisan, and the “Four Corners” (the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees) worked exceptionally well together. Despite the histrionics and discord and political dysfunction in Washington, I predict a bright future for the appropriations process.

Maybe others in Congress can follow the model. Probably not, but hope springs eternal.