Surprise! You’re In Congress Now

Zack Mullock spent the past nine months campaigning for a U.S. House seat, but never actually pictured himself in Washington as a newly elected member of Congress. Yes, the mayor of Cape May, on the southern tip of New Jersey, believed in his long-shot congressional campaign. But the Democrat never really stopped to think about what would happen if he won. And why would he have? As of late October, political prognosticators still rated the seat he was running for, New Jersey’s Second Congressional District, as safely Republican.

After Mullock eked out a shock victory against Representative Jeff Van Drew on November 3, there was a lot to do. For one thing, he had to Google how much members of Congress make ($174,000 a year—more than 10 times what he was paid to serve as mayor). Mullock, a 41-year-old father of three, also had to scramble his travel plans. He had scheduled a vacation for immediately after the election to mark the end of an exhausting stretch for his family. Then someone informed him that he needed to show up at freshman orientation instead. “The first thing I had to tell my kids was, ‘We’re not going to Florida, guys. I’m sorry,’” Mullock told us. Forty-eight hours later, he was on the road to D.C.

When we ran into Mullock this past Tuesday outside the Capitol, he had just come from a last-minute shopping trip to Uniqlo, a few blocks away at Union Station. He’d bought a bunch of button-down shirts and crammed them into his messenger bag before running back to pose for a photo with the Blue Dogs, a group of moderate Democrats. He arrived just in time to stand on the outer edge of the crowd, which was clustered around a white 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser that belongs to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the caucus’s co-chairs.

Orientation for incoming members of Congress is a little like the first day of school. Cliques form quickly, helped along by geographical allegiances and ideological affinities. New members—young firebrands and 60-somethings making a major career pivot—jockey over where to sit. Looking the part—which could mean a crisp suit or a trucker hat and cowboy boots, depending on where you’re from—can’t hurt.

“It really hadn’t sunk in until I first walked onto the House floor,” J. D. Ford, an Indiana state senator who ousted a Republican who’d won by nearly 19 points two years ago, told us. Every new member we spoke with was adamant that they had thought they could win, even if few other people within the Democratic Party establishment had agreed. Many, though, had not allowed themselves the luxury of picturing what a victory would bring, because most of them had organized their life around a single date: November 3, Election Day. But so far 15 Democrats have flipped House seats in districts that President Trump carried by double digits just two years earlier. Suddenly it was November 4, and their victories had been confirmed, against all odds. Their first task was to figure out how to get to D.C. for orientation—a few days of glitzy receptions, serious meetings, and mundane onboarding tasks. (Even members of Congress need to figure out their health plan.)

“I knew that we could win. I didn’t know that we would win,” said Paul Barringer, who flipped a North Carolina district that President Trump had won in 2024 by nearly 17 points. Barringer, who lives on a tree farm in Sanford, told us he was exercising in the dark on Election Night when he heard whooping coming from near his house. He thought it was coyotes. In reality, it was his family and friends running out to tell him he’d won. About 150 miles to the northwest, Chuck Hubbard was walking back to his car close to 1 a.m. when the doors of the watch party he’d left burst open and his supporters streamed out, shouting that he was ahead of longtime Republican Representative Virginia Foxx by just 99 votes. The race for a seat that had once been thought to be firmly in Foxx’s hands is not yet called, but Hubbard now leads by 335 votes. He showed up in Washington just in case he wins. “Isn’t it strange for someone who’s 64 years old to be going to freshman orientation?” Hubbard asked us.

There were other surprise winners from North Carolina, where aggressive Republican gerrymandering backfired and became a textbook “dummymander”—when districts drawn to favor the GOP unexpectedly fall into Democratic hands. Cyril Jefferson bested Representative Addison McDowell in a district that was so heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans in 2023 that a Democrat didn’t even bother running the following year. The Cook Political Report rated the race “Solid Republican”—meaning it was not considered competitive—and Jefferson was outraised 6 to 1. He won by a solid two-point margin. The 34-year-old mayor of High Point said he got into the race not because he thought he could win, but because he felt it was what his district needed. “You see a district like that, you never want to assume, Oh, we can win this,” Jefferson told us. He said he’d repeatedly contacted national Democrats while campaigning but didn’t garner much support. “After I won, they all reached out and said, Hey, we were wrong.”

Others won with virtually no money. LaKesha Womack brought in just $59,000 through mid-October, while her Republican opponent raised more than $2 million. She spent most of her time out in her district, which includes part of Charlotte. Womack faces a wrinkle in acclimating to the new job: Before taking office in January, she will be in court, making her first appearance next month on a felony charge that she allegedly failed to return a rented Toyota Corolla in 2019. (Womack told us she could not comment on the pending case, but suggested the timing was suspicious. She was served a criminal summons at an October campaign rally, seven years after the alleged incident; Womack has previously said she did not know a charge had been filed against her, because she was homeless at the time.)

[Read: The unlikeliest Democratic win of all]

Like first-year college students, freshmen members of Congress have to set up a whole new life for themselves. One of the first tasks is navigating D.C.’s rental market. “Everyone from across the aisle had told me it’s not a good idea to live in your office, something I didn’t even know people did,” said Katy Padilla Stout, who won a seat in Texas’s Twenty-Third Congressional District, which Trump won in 2024 by 15 points. Angela Gonzales-Torres, a California Democrat, has tasked her partner with the apartment hunt because she has too much to do, a list that includes hiring more than a dozen staffers, attending IT trainings (those exist in Congress too), and going to caucus meetings. “I don’t know if I’m excited to have two different landlords or apartments to keep up,” the 31-year-old Gonzales-Torres told us in a phone call as she waited for the bus to orientation. She placed second in California’s nonpartisan primary for a Los Angeles–area House seat in June, so her victory—against a member of her own party, who has a history of fending off challenges from his left—was unexpected. After chatting with a group of Democrats who are at the end of their first term and who share an apartment, she is now considering living with roommates in D.C.

For the more than 75 new Democrats who will be sworn in on the floor of the U.S. House in January, this moment—the rush to staff offices, the chaos of learning to get around Washington, and the idealism and excitement of thinking about how to govern before the messy reality of partisan politics kicks in—is a high point after a year of campaigning. But for Fred Wellman, it might not be the most important thing he does this year. Wellman, who won a Missouri district that hasn’t been represented by a Democrat in more than 30 years, is getting married during the week of Christmas. When he got engaged to Heather Schaefer in 2024, Wellman, who is 61, wasn’t even thinking about running for Congress. That decision came more than a year later. The wedding would have to wait until after the election.

“I just thought, Let’s just go through the rough-and-tumble of the campaign and let her have her privacy. And then once it’s over, we’ll figure it out,” Wellman told us in a congressional office building on Tuesday. He had stepped out of the committee room where the new Democrats were getting to know one another, and Representative Emanuel Cleaver, an 11-term lawmaker from Kansas City, had just introduced Wellman to the Democratic Caucus. “Well, it’s over, and we won. So now we’re gonna go ahead and seal the deal,” Wellman said.

The new members—both those who expected to be here and those who are still pinching themselves—said they’re eager to get to work. Wellman wants to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth investigated. Hubbard, the North Carolina Democrat leading by 335 votes, said Democrats are ready to “start correcting some things.” But first, they all need to find a place to sleep. And buy some new clothes.

*Illustration sources: Aaron Schwartz / Getty; Allison Robbert / AP; Andrew Harnik / Getty; Annabelle Gordon / Reuters; Daniel Heuer / Bloomberg / Getty.