House Democrats from the state missed more votes than their Republican counterparts in the last full congressional term.

By Peter Cameron and Wanwa Omot, THE BADGER PROJECT

Wisconsin’s only two House Democrats missed many more votes than their Republican counterparts in the 2023-2024 congressional session, the last two years of President Joe Biden’s Administration.

The data and analysis come from GovTrack, a private organization that monitors Congress and the White House.

Members of Congress often spend the week in Washington D.C., attending committee meetings and other official business in the capital, then fly home for a long weekend to visit events in their district.

In the last complete congressional term of 2023-2024, U.S. Rep Gwen Moore, a Democrat from Milwaukee, had the highest absentee rate, at 6.4%, according to data from GovTrack. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Madison, was next at 4.4%. That puts Moore in the top 15% of most missed votes in the 435-member House, and Pocan just inside the top 25%.

The current congressional term will finish at the end of this year.

Votes cast by the minority party, which in that term was the Democrats, are often much less consequential than those in the majority.

As Republicans held the House majority in the 2023-2024 Congress, their attendance and votes were generally much more important, as they controlled the body, therefore deciding which bills got votes. And the GOP started 2023 with a narrow, 9-seat majority, making each of their member’s votes even more crucial.

By comparison, Moore missed only 1.5% of votes and Pocan only 1.4% in the 2021-2022 Congress, when Democrats used their own minuscule majority of nine seats to pass a flurry of legislation in President Joe Biden’s first two years.

In that term, Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, missed the most votes in the Wisconsin caucus, at 4.3%. Tiffany is leaving the House this year to run for governor. He missed 2.4% of votes in the 2023-2024 Congress.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, had a near-perfect attendance rate in 2023-2024 and the lowest missed vote rate of all Wisconsin’s congressional members, at 0.4%.

Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Scott Fitzgerald had the lowest missed vote rates of all eight House members from the state, at 0.6 and 0.7%, respectively.

Nationally, the U.S. House representative with the highest absentee rate in 2023-2024 was Amata Coleman Radewagen at more than 61%. But that number comes with many caveats. Radewagen is from American Samoa, a territory rather than a state, so she is a delegate who cannot vote. And American Samoa is more than 7,000 miles away from Washington D.C., a route which takes 20-30 hours to travel by plane. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona who was fighting cancer and died in 2025, had the highest absentee rate of any voting House member in 2023-2024, at more than 40%. Next was Rep. James Moylan, Republican of Guam, at about 36%. Guam is also a territory, about 8,000 miles away from the capital, so Moylan is a non-voting member as well. Rep. Dwight Evans, a Democrat from Philadelphia, came next, missing more than 30% of the votes in the last full congressional term. He is retiring at the end of 2026.

Percentage of missed votes by members of Congress from Wisconsin in 2021-2022

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.