Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Sen. Lisa Murkowski's support for voting rights legislation.
The new year brought with it a change in leadership at one of nation’s leading cross-partisan political reform organizations, as RepresentUs announced Tuesday that co-founder Joshua Graham Lynn has been elevated to CEO.
Ten years ago, Lynn and Josh Silver co-founded RepresentUs to advocate for systemic changes to the American political system. Silver had been serving as CEO, but is stepping aside to serve as executive chairman.
Lynn and his peers across the democracy reform movement have an ambitious agenda focused on voting rights, gerrymandering, election integrity and campaign finance.
“In 2012, in the wake of Citizens United, we — Josh Silver and I — recognized the urgent need to start addressing systemic reform ... and we recognized the need for an organization not focused on Democrats or Republicans but focused on bridging the ideological divide,” said Lynn.
In the ensuing decade, RepresentUs has been among the leading advocates for causes like open primaries, ranked-choice voting and ethics changes, claiming success in more than 125 instances around the country.
Lynn, who had served as president of the organization, has a background in marketing and creative services. RepresentUs, which counts numerous big-name actors and musicians among its cultural advisers, has gained national exposure through its short films and ads featuring the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Omar Epps, Ed Helms, Michael Douglas, Mark Ruffalo, and Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom.
RepresentUs and other organizations working on election and voting reform are currently supporting efforts to push a pair of bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, through the Senate. The bills have been passed by the House of Representatives but have been blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate.
“This fight is not over. There’s plenty of opportunity,” said Lynn. “We need to keep the volume turned up and keep being strategic. If we continue to be smart and use the right messengers for the right constituents — the right members of the Senate — we can move forward.”
Lynn likened the fight for federal voting reforms to “The Sixth Sense.. He believes that once the bills pass, it will be obvious that they were needed.
“Once you see it, you go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn't see it before,’” he said.
The RepresentUs leadership believes that the transition will go smoothly, thanks to the partnership between Silver and Lynn.
“Joshua Lynn has been an essential element in nearly every facet of RepresentUs’ success and has a smart vision for the future. Silver will be continuing to advise as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition,” the pair wrote in a letter.
Lynn further explained how their collaboration has been key to the organization’s success: “Josh and I have been working very closely in lockstep for the last 10 years. It’s been a great partnership. We challenge each other but it’s been very aligned.”
Lynn and the team have their work cut out for them going forward. There is an urgent need to build on their past nonpartisan victories, he said, because “what we saw in 2020 was not the end but the top of a slippery slope toward the fall of democracy.”
“We basically need to build a nonpartisan countervailing force to those who are countermanding democracy, the followers of the Big Lie,” he said.
To that end, Represent Us will look to fill strategic gaps and boost advocacy efforts where they are needed most. He pointed to the work RepresentUs has done in West Virginia to influence Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin had opposed the Democrats’ first wide-ranging election reform bill, the For the People Act, but worked with colleagues to draft a somewhat more limited version that became the Freedom to Vote Act that he hoped would attract Republican support, but so far none have signed on. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican senator to provide support for the John Lewis voting rights bill.
But Manchin and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema remain opposed to changing the filibuster rules to enable passage of the bill.
Lynn noted that ReprentUs made a heavy push in West Virginia around the Freedom to Vote Act, organizing communities of faith and military veterans, among others, to urge Manchin forward. He has high hopes that similar work — building what he says will “effectively be the largests grassroots, nonpartisan pro-democracy movement in the country” — will form the roadmap for success in 2022, 2024 and beyond.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.