While the 115th Congress was more legislatively active than its recent predecessors, the proportion of substantive to ceremonial legislation was much the same.
No matter who they blamed for previous government shutdowns or how much they felt personally affected by them, most Americans have had negative opinions about them.
The government shutdown has squeezed the daily flood of data from federal agencies down to a trickle. Take a look at what data are and are not available.
Many of the millions of Americans voting in Tuesday's midterm elections will have to do so while working around the demands of their jobs – hitting their polling places before work, taking an extra-long lunch break or going afterward and hoping to make it before the polls close. As they stand in line, many of them may wonder why it is that the United States votes on a Tuesday, of all days.
Turnout in this year's primaries for Congress and most state governorships surged compared with the last midterms in 2014, particularly among Democrats. Nearly a fifth (19.6%) of registered voters – about 37 million – cast ballots in primary elections for the U.S. House of Representatives – a 56% increase over the 23.7 million who voted in 2014's House primaries. Turnout that year was 13.7% of registered voters.
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
Read a Q&A with Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew Research Center, on a new report that explores Americans' ability to distinguish factual news statements from opinions.
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member (435 in total) for every 747,000 or so Americans. That's by far the highest ratio of population to representatives of any industrialized democracy, and the highest it's ever been in U.S. history.