The 2026 midterm election cycle has hinged on a demand for reform, amid an unpopular war and an administration mired in ethics scandals. It’s not the first time that midterms have generated such substantive demands for change.
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Against the backdrop of the increasingly costly and unpopular Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the 1974 election produced one of the largest freshman classes in congressional history and stirred significant institutional change. Their road map for change provides us with important lessons on how to translate campaign promises into substantive reform in a dysfunctional institution resistant to change.
The first lesson: harnessing momentum. In a body where influence is currency, the incoming freshman class recognized that steps toward meaningful reform would require decentralizing Congress’ power structure. Between November 1974 and January 1975, new members of Congress provided key votes for opening up avenues for junior members. They weakened the “seniority” system guiding committee assignments by shifting that responsibility from the Ways and Means Committee to the Party Steering committee. That led to a legislative process where junior members could more easily rise through the ranks.
Lawmakers also increased the size of the powerful Ways and Means committee. That committee has long been responsible for drafting bills that raised money, including taxes and tariffs and programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Providing greater opportunities for new members to join gave them a powerful seat at the table. Serving on the committee also gave these new members an opportunity to address their economic campaign promises and to have a legislative impact for their constituents.
“We realized we were a large enough group to make a difference,” former New York Rep. Tom Downey told me, adding that support from more senior members of Congress helped to “mold” the class “into the effective tool they wanted to modify the seniority system.”
Former Connecticut Rep. Toby Moffett, a member of the 1974 class, agreed, recalling that some senior members vocalized how central the freshman class was to getting critical reforms across the finish line. “I remember once … in some hearing on government operations … [former New York Rep.] Bella Abzug pushed the button on her mic and she said, ‘Reinforcements have arrived,’” he said.
As a result of these structural changes and strategic networking, former members like Moffett, Steve Neal of North Carolina and Henry Waxman of California, rose from freshmen in 1974 to be committee chairs relatively quickly, as others gained seats on powerful committees and subcommittees.
Building alliances with more experienced members also mattered. Waxman leveraged his relationship with senior member Phil Burton, a representative from California, to get onto the Energy and Commerce committee, which he believed proved crucial to his impact on health policy, one of his major priorities. Relationships were also important for freshman members of the Republican minority. Former Ohio Rep. Willis “Bill” Gradison, built relationships on the Banking Committee and was dedicated to working with the majority in order to craft monetary policy.
Yet 1974’s freshmen were also careful to thread the needle between cooperating with senior leaders and standing up for their own positions. “This system still works on knowledge … You can’t be totally intransigent, but you don’t want leadership to think they can count on you automatically either,” Moffett said.
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Another equally important factor in the class’ success was coalition building. “Patience and a knack for finding allies (especially unlikely ones) are two of the most important qualities of being a legislator,” Waxman told me.
For example, when former California Rep. Leo Ryan was killed in the Jonestown massacre, it left the chairmanship of the Government Operations subcommittee vacant. Moffett described how he and other junior members like Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, Waxman, and Michigan Rep. John Conyers joined forces to back his campaign for the chairmanship against more senior members.
It worked. Under Moffett’s leadership, the committee took on oversight. In 1975, the newly minted subcommittee chairman helped to defeat President Gerald Ford’s request for additional military aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. Later, Moffett pressed President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to publicly disclose contaminated water sites when EPA chief Anne Gorsuch and Interior Secretary James Watt refused to hand over subpoenaed documents.
There are clear lessons here for current and future members. Today’s Congress is hyper centralized, with rank-and-file members becoming increasingly dependent on their relationships with senior members to see legislative priorities through. If 2026 is another wave election, that could create openings for new ideas and opportunities and incentives for new members to build coalitions and get Congress working again. It might even open the door to addressing major structural changes: expanding the size of the U.S. House, restoring much of the lost staff expertise in Congress, ethics reforms and establishing an upper age limit for Congress, among other key reforms.
It is not enough to just be elected to Congress. Members of the class of 2026 will have to apply lessons from their predecessors to achieve the change they are campaigning on.
Maya Kornberg is a senior research fellow in the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law and author most recently of Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 10).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
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