Congressional candidates’ silence on cannabis reform

By John Hudak

Cannabis reform is growing in popularity among voters, activists and state legislators; Cannabis is now legal in 38 states and DC for medical use and in 19 states and DC for adult use. Despite this progress in state-level reforms and in the broader debate across the country, Congress has failed to pass a major piece of legislation on the issue, and many voters and activists are wondering why.

One argument is that federal officials — in the executive branch and in Congress — just don’t care enough about the issue to address it. To explore this question, I included coding on cannabis reform in the Brookings Primaries Project in 2022. The Brookings Primaries Project examines the publicly expressed views — through websites and social media presence — of all candidates running in the US Congressional primary. We coded each candidate on a four-point scale: whether they supported cannabis legalization or decriminalization, whether they only supported medical legalization, whether their position was complex or indecipherable, and whether they failed to mention the issue at all .

The results provide three general takeaways. First, the main candidates for Congress do not consider the issue important enough to include on their website or social media. Secondly, on average, at least, it does not harm candidates who deal with the topic if they take a public position. Third, there are stark differences between Democratic congressional primary candidates and Republican congressional primary candidates.

These results generally reflect a reality that opinion polls confirm. While cannabis reform is popular with Americans (68% support in the latest Gallup poll), it is not a prominent issue with voters; Polls show that cannabis reform has never entered the top 20 most important issues for voters. This endorsement, but lack of emphasis, has a persuasive effect on congressmen and congressional candidates: it gives them the freedom not to engage with the issue.

In total, we coded 2360 candidates running for Congress in both the Democratic and Republican primary. As Table 1 shows, the vast majority of candidates (81.4%) did not mention cannabis reform at all on their websites and social media. Contrary to the idea that cannabis reform’s popularity should urge lawmakers to make clear statements in support of the reform, 86.4% of candidates either made no mention, took an unclear position, or explicitly opposed cannabis reform.

TABLE 1: CANNABIS CAMPAIGN POSITIONS AMONG 2022 CONGRESS PRIMARY CANDIDATES