Vote Independence
Congress remains sharply divided along party lines, but a small group of lawmakers in both chambers continue to break from their party's majority on a meaningful share of votes, offering a data-driven counterpoint to the broader trend of polarization. New voting data compiled by Legis1 as of June 24, 2026, tracks congressional voting independence among members of the 119th Congress, identifying which senators and representatives most frequently cast votes against the majority of their own party.
The data, drawn from party line votes cast during the current Congress, calculates what's known as a "bucking rate," the percentage of votes a member casts against the position taken by most members of their own party. The metric offers one way to measure cross-party voting patterns and gauge which lawmakers are most willing to break from party leadership on a given piece of legislation.
Senate Independence Rankings
In the Senate, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, posts the highest bucking rate of any member of the chamber, at 28.9 percent. That means nearly three in 10 of her recorded votes this Congress have broken from the majority position of her own party.
Collins is followed closely by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, at 27.3 percent, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, at 24.8 percent. All three rank among the Senate's most consistent cross-party voters, according to the voting data, and all three are Republicans, a detail that stands out given the chamber's current partisan alignment.
Susan Collins' voting record has long drawn attention for its departures from GOP leadership positions, and her official Senate website promotes her standing as what it describes as the Senate's "most bipartisan member." That characterization is credited on her website to research from the Lugar Center and Georgetown University, an academic and policy partnership that has published rankings of bipartisan behavior in Congress. The designation reflects an assessment made by outside researchers rather than a formal congressional title, but it has become a recurring feature of how Collins presents her legislative record to constituents.
Murkowski and Paul have each built reputations, over multiple Congresses, as senators willing to diverge from party leadership on select issues, and their rankings in the current bucking-rate data are consistent with that pattern. The Legis1 data does not break down which specific votes drove each senator's rate, but the overall figures suggest that even in a Senate defined by tight party-line margins, a subset of members continues to cast votes that defy easy partisan categorization.
House Shows Wider Cross-Party Voting
The House of Representatives shows an even broader range of cross-party voting than the Senate, according to the data. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, leads the chamber with a bucking rate of 31.6 percent, the highest of any member in either chamber tracked in the dataset. He's followed by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, at 28.8 percent, and Rep. Donald Davis, D-North Carolina, at 27.2 percent.
Cuellar's ranking stems in part from his vote in January 2026, when he and six other Democrats joined House Republicans to approve a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill and avert a government shutdown. The vote drew criticism from within his own party, but Cuellar defended his position by pointing to oversight provisions and spending guardrails he said he helped negotiate into the final legislation.
"Passing this bipartisan compromise ensures these investments and oversight measures take effect. The alternative would have delivered none of them," Cuellar said in a Jan. 22 press release. The statement reflects Cuellar's own characterization of his vote and the trade-offs he says it involved, rather than an independent assessment of the bill's provisions.
Massie's presence near the top of the House rankings tracks with his long-standing reputation as a Republican willing to vote against his party's leadership on fiscal and procedural matters. Davis, a Democrat representing a competitive North Carolina district, rounds out the top three, reflecting how members from politically mixed districts sometimes register higher bucking rates than colleagues in more safely partisan seats.
What the Numbers Do, and Don't, Show
The bucking-rate figures offer a narrow but concrete way to measure how often individual lawmakers depart from their party's dominant position on recorded votes. They don't capture the substance or stakes of any single vote, nor do they indicate whether a lawmaker's break from party leadership reflects ideological conviction, district-level political pressure, or negotiated policy wins like the ones Cuellar cited.
Still, the rankings underscore that cross-party voting hasn't disappeared entirely from a Congress often described as historically polarized. Whether the trend holds through the remainder of the 119th Congress will depend on the mix of legislation that reaches the floor, and on whether members like Collins, Murkowski, Paul, Cuellar, Massie and Davis continue to find occasions to break from their respective party majorities.
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