There is a number politicians like to quote about themselves: their voting attendance. Ashley Hinson's looks fine.

The reason it looks fine is that the number almost nobody publishes is the one where the work actually gets done.

According to congressional records, Hinson has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since she joined the House in 2021 — about 196 in all. A few line up with bouts of COVID in January 2022 and April 2026. The vast majority are unexplained.

Committee votes are usually left out of a member's public attendance record. So a representative can skip 163 of them and still show up in the data as reliably present.

What she missed

Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. That is the committee that decides what the federal government funds. Here is a sample of the votes she wasn't there for.

May 2025 — funding for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The committee manager explained that the increase was meant to handle the surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material and the strain it was putting on law enforcement. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received over a million reports of sexually explicit AI images of minors in 2025, many of them built from photos of real children.

September 2025 — three votes on violence against women in one day. One to increase funding to enforce the Violence Against Women Act. One to increase funding for transitional housing grants for domestic abuse victims. One to fund a community-based violence intervention program. She missed all three. Domestic violence deaths in Iowa rose between 2021 and 2024.

Funding for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Skipped.

Health care. A 2023 vote on the doctor shortage in the Veterans Affairs system. A 2025 vote to increase funding for senior nutrition programs. A 2025 vote to fund a program that trains physicians to work in rural areas — in a state where rural hospitals are the whole argument.

2026 — data center transparency. An amendment that would have required data centers to publicly disclose construction plans and directed the Energy Department to analyze what they do to utility bills. Iowa now has 116 data centers, and several Iowa communities have passed moratoriums to stop more from being built. Hinson's position, as she told KGAN this month, is that data center rules "are best decided at the local level" — which is a curious thing to say about an amendment whose entire purpose was to give local communities the information to decide.

The fundraiser

The clearest one is from this summer.

On June 24, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee voted on 11 amendments to the 2027 Defense Appropriations bill — the bill that funds the Pentagon. Hinson missed seven of them.

The amendments covered how the Defense Department spends its money, the proposed drawdown of American troops stationed in Europe, and changes to which military officers are eligible for promotion.

An email from Grand Valley Consulting, a firm that advises Republican candidates, shows Hinson had a fundraising lunch scheduled that same day with West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. Tickets ran from $1,000 to $2,500.

The progressive outlet MidasTouch posted video of Hinson walking into the event while the voting was still going on.

What she has made time for

Hinson is running for the Senate seat Joni Ernst is vacating. She has not held a single town hall with constituents this year. She has held plenty of campaign events.

She has also had time for other things. Within an hour of Josh Turek winning the Democratic Senate primary, her campaign was out with an attack ad making three claims he has never supported. At the Plymouth County Fair, she had time to defend Medicaid work requirements and suggest people here illegally were getting benefits — something federal law already bars.

The pattern isn't that Hinson is lazy. She is working extremely hard. She is working on getting a promotion.

Why committee votes are the ones that matter

If you only watch floor votes, you miss most of Congress.

By the time a spending bill reaches the House floor, the decisions have been made. The amendment that would have added money for the child exploitation task force either got adopted in committee or it didn't. The domestic violence housing grants either survived markup or they were gone. A member who shows up for the final floor vote and skips the markup has arrived after everything was settled.

That is where 163 of Hinson's absences are. It is also the part of the job voters have the least visibility into, which is exactly why an above-average attendance figure can sit on a campaign website next to a record like this one.

A recent Emerson College poll has Hinson leading Turek by three points. Iowans have until November to ask her one question, which she has so far had no forum to answer: where was she?

Source

Ashley Hinson missed almost 200 votes in Congress — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: Nick Rohlman / The Gazette via AP.