The 2018 election results mark a significant repudiation of years of inflammatory rhetoric from the President– but what will this new Congress, and particularly this new class of representatives, bring to Washington?

It’s hard to say since the start of the 116th Congress has been marred by a partial government shutdown over border security. With the shutdown now the longest in history, both sides are increasingly far apart. The President remains committed to getting $5.7 billion for border wall funding while Democratic leadership has repeatedly rejected that number.

November’s election saw record-high turnout, and post-election polling is clear: Voters want Congress to find solutions on issues important to them, not bicker over a prolonged shutdown.    

So, for the sake of the thought experiment, let’s assume the shutdown is soon resolved. What then will Congress turn to? We’d bet on immigration and health care.

In today’s political climate, agreement on immigration may seem impossible, but in 2013 back when bipartisanship was welcome, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation that gave undocumented immigrants a 13-year pathway to citizenship in exchange for additional border security, by a vote of 68-32. This was less than six years ago and included $8 billion for fencing along the southern border. Despite very different leadership in the White House, many of the same officials who voted for that bill’s passage and were deeply involved in the negotiations remain in the Senate today including: Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). If both sides are willing to compromise, a strong solution remains possible.

Another contentious issue on the campaign trail and during the 115th Congress was health care. After trying time and again, House Republicans passed a bill to repeal and replace much of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on May 5th, 2017, which then stalled in the Senate as it could not get 50 votes – the lowest threshold required under the legislative process of reconciliation.

Although there has been plenty of partisan fighting on health care, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Educations, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) were able to come to a bipartisan agreement on an attempt to shore up the individual insurance marketplace. Though abortion language and yet another Senate attempt to repeal the ACA ended up delaying the proposal, these top negotiators may be called upon again to work out a plan, especially if the recent ruling in the Texas courts findIing the ACA unconstitutional is upheld.

The bottom-line: While it’s hard to imagine now, in the heat of a partisan shutdown, there has been and is in fact a middle way forward on the issues that matter most to Americans.

Once the shutdown ends, hopefully negotiations will begin in good faith on both sides of the aisle to find this critical middle ground.