With polls pointing to possible Democratic gains in Congress next month, a new analysis warns that companies which read a Democratic-controlled Congress as a Democratic-controlled Washington could badly misjudge the political landscape they face over the next two years.
The argument, laid out by writer Dustin Siggins in a Fox News opinion piece, centers on a lesson from the data center industry. Companies building data centers had secured permits from federal and state agencies and backing from elected officials at multiple levels of government. What they hadn’t done, according to the piece, was bring their corporate communications teams into that process. Local communities pushed back, and by Siggins’ account, that opposition helped slow 40% of data centers that were due to open this year, a figure drawn from Proven Media Solutions’ Insider Insights report published earlier in October.
Siggins points to history to make the broader case that a change in Congress does not mean a change in presidential power. After Republicans lost the House in 2006, President George W. Bush still ordered the troop surge in Iraq two months later and lifted the executive ban on offshore drilling in 2008. President Barack Obama issued an immigration order, struck the Iran nuclear deal and released Title IX guidance on gender identity after Republicans retook Congress in 2014. President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission kept filing lawsuits against corporations up until his final days in office.
The piece argues President Donald Trump’s own record after losing the House in 2018 shows he does not moderate under divided government. He presided over a 35-day government shutdown and then declared a national emergency to fund a border wall. Since the party holding the White House has only gained House seats in four midterm elections since 1900, even a modest Republican loss this November would not be unusual, Siggins writes, with the real story likely being the economy and higher prices at the pump and the grocery store.
Two cases where messaging collided with politics
The piece raises DEI policy as one flashpoint. Corporations had already scaled back some of the more contested diversity programs before Trump’s early 2025 executive orders pushed the issue back into the spotlight. Government contractors, Siggins writes, were hit hardest, scrubbing words like “equity” from websites in ways that helped with contracts but strained relations with employees who felt diversity commitments had been abandoned for profit.
Immigration enforcement is the other example. In January, the General Services Administration removed a Minneapolis-area hotel from federal lodging programs after a local franchise refused rooms to ICE agents. Weeks later, protesters occupied the lobby of a Hilton hotel in Manhattan over the opposite complaint. According to the piece, the hotel chains largely weathered both controversies by issuing brief statements and then staying quiet — an approach Siggins argues would be much harder to sustain if Congress gets involved directly, through hearings or investigations.
The recommendation in the piece is for corporate communications and government affairs teams to build a single plan after the election results are known — one that identifies where a company is exposed, where it holds leverage, and which current allies might turn into critics. The argument is that government affairs staff understand the regulators and agency officials who will matter regardless of who controls Congress, while communications staff understand how customers, employees and local communities will react, and that a message built for only one of those audiences risks being read, and judged, by both.
