Thank you to Jeff Steinman at Phone2Action for this excellent suggestion of year to year activity levels for a topic for analysis
As a starting place for our analysis, let us recall legislative activity is cyclic. Here’s monthly activity for the last several years:
These counts include all 50 states, Congress, and the DC City Council. You can see when you aggregate the whole country together you get a distinct two year cycle. You can also start to see 2020 looks a little different. Let’s compare 2020 to 2018 on a daily scale to take a closer look. First, the number of bills introduced each day:
Note I shifted the days slightly to get weekends to match up so the dates are only approximate on this chart and the following two charts. You can see that activity was similar overall, though 2020 got off to a slightly slower start the total bills were about the same up until March, and which point things start to diverge, first with a marked increase in activity and then almost no activity as the legislatures suspended. It will be interesting to see at the end of the year. Right now the total count of bills introduced this year is just over 75k vs about 80k by this time in 2018.
The impact on daily activity, measured by the count of actions taking place each day, is even more dramatic:
Here again we see a slight increase in activity leading up to March, followed by a dramatic fall, which was hard not to notice while it was going on. The spike of activity as state resumed their sessions is not surprising. I expect activity to stay at an elevated level through June and possibly sporadically over the summer.
And now finally let’s take a look at the total count of votes held every day:
Here you can see an even larger spike before the shutdown and almost a complete stop to business being done in April. Voting activity will likely also stay at a higher level than usual through June and then into the summer as the states reconvene over budget, voting, and other urgent pandemic and economic related issues.
We’ve compiled some resources here to help you keep up with all these changes. Personally, in addition to everything else, this break in our normal legislative rhythm has been quite disorienting.