Harvey McGuinness
2026
Toward A Digital Twin of U.S. Congress
Hayden Helm | Tianyi Chen | Harvey McGuinness | Paige Lee | Brandon Duderstadt | Carey Priebe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hayden Helm | Tianyi Chen | Harvey McGuinness | Paige Lee | Brandon Duderstadt | Carey Priebe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
In this paper we provide evidence that our virtual model of U.S. congresspersons based on a collection of language models moves towards satisfying the definition of a digital twin. In particular, we introduce and provide high-level descriptions of a daily-updated dataset that contains every Tweet from every U.S. congressperson during their respective terms. We demonstrate that a modern language model equipped with congressperson-specific subsets of this data producing Tweets that are largely indistinguishable from actual Tweets posted by their physical counterparts. We illustrate how generated Tweets can be used to predict roll-call vote behaviors and to quantify the likelihood of congresspersons crossing party lines, thereby assisting stakeholders in allocating resources and potentially impacting real-world legislative dynamics. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations and important extensions of our analysis.