Zohran Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary. It’s given Democrats something to get excited about, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons. Mamdani is insane—he wants to defund the police, hates Israel, wants the government to run the grocery stores, and vows to disrupt immigration enforcement measures. The city will be destroyed under this man, but his victory post on social media got liked by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX). The problem: she’s dead.
The phenomenon of deceased lawmakers continuing to post from the grave is a peculiar incident, which Politico decided to investigate because it’s not the first time this has happened. When a lawmaker dies in office, the communications team is in a grey area as to what happens next—I’m not kidding:
But Jackson Lee isn’t the only deceased lawmaker whose presence continues to be felt online.
Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who filled Lee’s Texas seat for a brief two months before his own passing 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. A community guidelines note affixed by X to the post noted that “Sylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025.”
The post appeared to shock many X users, who commented on how uncanny 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?”
Former Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who died in May, has also continued to make waves from beyond the grave, as his political social media accounts chugged 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.
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How to handle the social media presence of politicians when they die is a fairly new phenomenon. If a member of the House dies, for example, their office often remains open to fulfill constituent services — and sometimes continues posting to social media, albeit not typically under the lawmaker’s name. And there’s even less clarity around lawmakers’ social media accounts that they use for campaigning, as opposed to official work.
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 handing off control of lawmakers’ social media accounts if they die while still serving. That leaves communications staff in an awkward bind on how to proceed with languishing accounts, he said.
Although there were content rules on what staff members were allowed to 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.
“When a member of Congress dies, nobody seems to care about getting the log-ins from you, or assuming control of the Facebook page,” Brown said. “I still, if I wanted to, could go post to Facebook as Congressman Young — I could still tweet today as Congressman Young. And nobody from archives or records or from House administration, or anybody, seems to give a shit.”
Well, that’s interesting, but in a not-so-good kind of way.