With millions of Instagram followers, celebrity status in popular culture, and a flair for headline-grabbing controversy, members of the so-called Squad have become some of the most recognizable faces in Congress.
Whether that has translated to an effective presence in Congress is a more complicated matter.
The nine liberal members of the Squad have created an informal alliance dedicated to pushing far-left policies that, at times, have proved too radical for the rest of the Democratic conference.
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Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) created the Squad after their victories in the 2018 election.
Since then, Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), Summer Lee (D-PA), Greg Casar (D-TX), and Delia Ramirez (D-IL) have joined their ranks and helped to grow it into a highly visible influence within the Democratic conference.
That influence has not always led directly to legislative accomplishments, however.
No member of the Squad broke into the ranks of the top five most active House Democrats in the last Congress, according to data analyzed by Leadership Connect, nor did any Squad member top the list of most active members of the House Progressive Caucus, in which every Squad member is also included.
No bill sponsored by a member of the Squad passed both chambers to become law in the 117th Congress, according to that analysis.
In the 116th Congress, which ran from 2019 through 2020, lawmakers accomplished little overall.
The Pew Research Center described the 116th as “one of the least legislatively productive Congresses of the past five decades.”
Squad members were among the least effective lawmakers even within that group.
Omar, for example, ranked 214th out of 240 Democrats in the Center for Effective Lawmaking’s analysis of member effectiveness.
She sponsored only 33 bills, and none of them went on to see action in any committee.
Ocasio-Cortez scored even lower, ranking 230th out of 240 Democrats in the 116th Congress. She sponsored only 21 bills, according to the analysis, which disregards symbolic legislation like House resolutions.
Pressley ranked 175th out of 240, and Tlaib clocked in as the Squad’s most effective member at 92nd of 240 Democrats.
The remaining members — Bowman, Bush, Lee, Casar, and Ramirez — were sworn in after the analysis of the 116th concluded.
But getting their own bills over the finish line isn’t necessarily a reflection of Squad members’ influence, said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon.
“The Squad had a significant legislative impact in the last Congress that was not measured in names on bills sponsored or passed,” Bannon told the Washington Examiner. “One of the primary reasons the big red wave turned into the tiny big pink puddle was the passage of the significant laws during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.”
Bannon was referring to the GOP’s disappointing midterm performance, which analysts have attributed to everything from abortion to Donald Trump.
But some Democrats have claimed their advancement of key bills, the American Rescue Plan Act and the Inflation Reduction Act chief among them, gave the party something to run on that Republicans, in the congressional minority since 2020, lacked.
“These bills became strong laws because the Squad used its strength and leverage in the House Democratic Caucus to make the proposals more impactful and comprehensive than moderate Democrats wanted them to be,” Bannon said. “In a closely divided House, Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi [D-CA)] needed their key votes to pass legislation.”
“The Squad also kept Sen. Joe Manchin [D-WV] honest in his desire to water down Biden legislation,” Bannon added.
The battle between members of the Squad and Manchin dragged out for weeks in 2021 as the House and Senate, both controlled by Democrats at the time, wrestled with how to get a key piece of spending legislation past the centrist Senate holdout.
Squad members demanded that Pelosi stall a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Manchin and many members from both parties wanted to advance, until Manchin agreed to support a massive spending bill that was then called the Build Back Better Act.
Pelosi ultimately overruled the Squad and held a vote on the infrastructure bill first. Six members of the Squad, its entire membership at the time, voted against the infrastructure bill to protest the order of events.
As Squad members had warned, Manchin eventually abandoned talks over the Build Back Better Act, and the legislation resurfaced in 2022 as a smaller bill called the Inflation Reduction Act.
If the Squad’s influence is to be measured in the amount of time they spent holding forth on the House floor, few of the liberal lawmakers score highly in that regard, either.
Of the Squad members, Tlaib spent the most time speaking on the House floor in the 117th Congress, according to a C-SPAN tracker.
But she ranked 32nd in terms of the number of days she took to the floor, which clocked in at 56. The Squad’s highest-profile member, Ocasio-Cortez, ranked among the bottom of the entire House, with just 11 days on the floor recorded.
Ocasio-Cortez wields her platform in other ways.
She has 8.6 million followers on Instagram after just over two terms in office; House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), by contrast, has only 233,000.
She also enjoys a fundraising prowess that has allowed her, like other Squad members, to back progressive primary challengers in an effort to increase the number of like-minded lawmakers in the House.
Ocasio-Cortez’s political action committee, Courage to Change, raised more than $12 million during the 2022 cycle, according to OpenSecrets.
The PAC affiliated with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), one of the party’s longest-serving House members and, until last month, the Democratic majority leader, raised just $3.9 million in the same cycle.
But the fundraising from Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Squad members, who formed a joint fundraising committee after 2020, has not allowed them to play kingmaker in Democratic primaries just yet.
Ocasio-Cortez backed several progressive candidates in high-profile primary battles that lost last election cycle, including endorsing a liberal state senator who failed to beat former Rep. Sean Maloney for the Democratic nomination in a New York House district that Maloney went on to lose and personally campaigning for a progressive lawyer in a Texas House primary who lost to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D).
Cuellar kept the border district in Democratic hands despite fears of a Republican sweep.
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Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez waded into the New York lieutenant governor primary last year, and their chosen candidate lost to the incumbent Democrat.
However, the Squad may have succeeded in helping one of its newest members get to Congress: Tlaib, Pressley, Omar, Bush, Bowman, and Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Lee in the Pennsylvania House primary that she won against a centrist Democrat last year.
Lee joined her backers in the Squad upon taking office.
