Fantasy Congress

» see fantasycongress.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The site went up on a Monday, 23 October 2006, two weeks before the midterm elections, built by four undergraduates at Claremont McKenna College in California: Andrew Lee, Ian Hafkenschiel, Arjun Lall and Ethan Andyshak. The idea was exactly as literal as the name. You joined a league with your friends, you drafted a roster of real senators and representatives, and your team scored on what those people actually did in Washington that week.

It took off at a speed nobody involved had planned for. By the time NBC wrote it up on 24 October, the day after launch, there were already around six thousand players, and later reports put the first week at fifteen thousand. NPR had the founders on air by the middle of November. The press angle wrote itself, because 2006 was the year fantasy football became something your colleagues talked about at work, and here were four students proposing that the same machinery be pointed at the Senate.

The stated ambition was civic. The founders said the game could make government more accountable, on the theory that a person who has drafted a congressman will notice whether that congressman turns up to vote. Later versions added a second game about predicting who would win an election, scored on money raised and share of the vote. By then the attention had drained away with the election that produced it, and what was left running was a good deal smaller.

~ the dossier ~

~ the scoring ~

Points came mainly from legislative success, which meant a bill that your member had sponsored or cosponsored getting further along the road toward a signature or a veto. Attendance counted too, since showing up for roll call votes earned something and missing them did not. There was also a Maverick Score, awarded for crossing party lines in close votes, which is the one design decision in the whole thing that still looks sharp twenty years later. Media mentions scored as well, so a member in the news was worth having on your roster.

This was a game about an institution, and it only worked if you already knew the institution well enough to find the jokes in it. I could follow an American election from here the way everybody could, but drafting a roster on the strength of who was likely to get an amendment through committee is a different depth of knowledge, and that depth is the entry fee. The scoreboard also ran on the legislative calendar, which is slow by design, so a week in Fantasy Congress could pass with nothing happening to anybody on your team.

~ the page that shrank ~

The archive dates the decline without needing a single article. Through 2007 the home page is captured constantly at twelve to thirteen kilobytes, the signature of a site that crawlers think is busy. In the spring of 2008 it is down around nine or ten. On 19 June 2008 it drops to just over six kilobytes and stays within a few hundred bytes of that figure for the next six months, which is what a site looks like after features come out of it. The last working pages, individual records for Senate amendments, are captured on 7 January 2009. By August 2013 every path on the domain answers 404.

~ the second one ~

In 2018 the address came back to life as a different Fantasy Congress, run by other people, with the same premise and a cleaner interface. The English Wikipedia article has never separated the two, which is why it still describes Fantasy Congress as active and gives 2018 as its launch date while the history section describes a game from 2006. Two products twelve years apart, filed as one.

The second one lasted longer than the first. The archive has it serving healthy pages through 12 June 2026, and then on 25 September 2026 the same address answers 404. That is recent enough that somebody may yet turn it back on, though nothing about the pattern suggests it.

Two separate groups of people, a decade apart, looked at the way Americans follow their football teams and had the same thought about Congress. Both of them built it and both of them found an audience for exactly one election season, which is as long as a scoreboard can hold your attention when the sport it tracks does not produce a weekly highlight reel.

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