Former Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) passed away last July, but that hasn’t stopped Lee from somehow broadcasting messages to voters and constituents.
It’s a growing problem: Staff of dead lawmakers are continuing to post on their social media accounts, a disturbing trend that seems to be targeting a handful of deceased Democratic lawmakers.
After Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary last Tuesday, Lee “liked” an Instagram post congratulating him on his win.
But Jackson Lee died last July.
From random likes and new profile pictures to a posthumous endorsement, accounts for dead lawmakers have seemingly resurrected on social media in an unsettling trend.
Jackson Lee’s instance isn’t the only one.
Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who filled Lee’s Texas seat before his own death in March 2025, appeared to change his profile picture on X three weeks after he died.
“Happy #OpeningDay!” Turner’s personal account posted on MLB Opening Day, adding the hashtag “NewProfilePic” along with a photo of the late lawmaker holding a baseball.
Happy #OpeningDay!#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/hhRqBX1aYc
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) March 27, 2025
A community guidelines note affixed by X to the post noted that “Sylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025.”
The post shocked many X users, who commented on how unsettling it was to see the deceased lawmaker active on their feeds.
“Grim,” one user wrote, while another asked: “So no one on his team thinks this is weird?”
And then there’s the case of former Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who died in May.
His political social media accounts came back to life to notify followers that early voting had begun in the race to fill his vacant seat.
Before his passing, Connolly had endorsed his former chief of staff, James Walkinshaw, to replace him, having announced that he planned to step away from Congress after his esophageal cancer returned in April.
People on Connolly’s mailing list have reportedly continued receiving emails from the late representative’s campaign encouraging Virginians to vote for Walkinshaw in this past weekend’s special election… and directing donations to Walkinshaw’s campaign.
Brian Garcia, communications director for Walkinshaw’s campaign told Politico that the campaign does not direct the content posted from Connolly’s accounts.
“Supervisor Walkinshaw is proud to have earned the support of Congressman Connolly before he passed away and to now have the support of the Connolly family,” he said.
The bio for Connolly’s page notes that the lawmaker died in May, and says that posts on the page are made with Connolly’s family’s consent. Turner’s account also appears to be run by his family, with the account recently posting a video featuring his daughter promoting a Houston parade he championed.
How to handle the social media presence of politicians after they die is a fairly new phenomenon, and no oversight or rules exist for what to do when that happens.
According to reports, if a member of the House dies, for example, their office often remains open to fulfill constituent services, and sometimes continue posting to social media, albeit not typically under the lawmaker’s name.
Zack Brown, who was the communications director for Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) when he died in office in March 2022, said there is no official process for turning off control of lawmakers’ social media accounts if they die while still serving.
That leaves communications staff free to proceed to communitate to voters from these accounts.
Although there were content rules on what staff members were allowed toicate post to Young’s accounts — political, policy-related, and ideological posts were off-limits — there was no guidance on what to do with the accounts themselves.