For most people, the recent midterms were about the things that keep us up at night: the cost of groceries, the price of gas, the anxiety of trying to get ahead when every bill seems a little higher than it was last year. The headlines were full of big national fights, and right-to-repair never made the top of the ticker. But if you looked closely, something significant was happening beneath the surface. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were quietly running on a promise that felt almost radical in its simplicity: if you buy something, you should be able to fix it yourself, or take it to any repair shop you trust, without needing the manufacturer’s permission. In Iowa, senator-elect Josh Turek built his platform around that idea, not as a niche tech policy but as a kitchen-table issue, especially for farmers who have spent years watching their combines and tractors get locked down by software. In Minnesota, presumptive state representative Jake Johnson did the same, talking about equipment that breaks down at the worst possible moment and then sits idle because a small sensor needs a digital reset only a dealer can perform. Neither candidate was running as a single-issue fringe figure. They were talking to people who feel, with real justification, that the things they own don’t fully belong to them anymore. That message is starting to win elections, and it points to a larger truth about the way Americans relate to the objects in their lives.
The midterms also delivered a more direct reminder that this is not just a rural cause. In St. Paul, Minnesota, voters passed a measure ensuring renters’ right to repair with overwhelming support. The issue there wasn’t a tractor parked in a field; it was the simple, human dignity of living in a place where you are allowed to take care of the space you call home. For renters, that often means waiting on a landlord or a property manager to decide whether a clogged sink or a broken window is worth their time, and then waiting some more for someone to show up. The St. Paul measure gave tenants more power to make basic repairs themselves, to insist on a habitable home, and to hold property owners accountable when they let things fall apart. It was a reminder that the concept of repair is broader than the right-to-repair bill text that gets debated in state capitols. It’s about autonomy. It’s about not being trapped in a situation where someone else controls your ability to live with dignity. And it’s about the simple belief that people, not companies, should be the ones who decide how the things we use every day are maintained. That belief cuts across every demographic you can imagine. Farmers want to fix their tractors. Commuters want to fix their cars. Parents want to fix their kids’ tablets. Wheelchair users want to fix their wheelchairs, and not have to wait, immobilized, for a manufacturer’s technician to roll out and approve a repair. The right-to-repair movement has always been broad, but the political environment is finally catching up to it.
The reason for that is not mysterious. People are tired of feeling like they’re on the losing end of every transaction. You buy a piece of equipment, and then you discover that the company behind it has the real control. They can decide whether you’re allowed to change a battery. They can decide whether you need to pay a subscription fee for a feature that was advertised when you bought the device. They can refuse to share the diagnostic codes that would let a local independent shop do the work for a fraction of the price. None of this sits well with voters. As Nathan Proctor, senior director of PIRG’s right-to-repair campaign, put it, a political climate where people want policies that stand up for the little guy, help reduce unnecessary costs, and work in a bipartisan way is a very good environment for right-to-repair. That is exactly where we are right now. People are angry about the creeping feeling that everything is becoming a subscription service. You used to buy a product and own it, full stop. Now you buy a product and you’re really just renting a license to use it, and that license can be revoked, or modified, or tied to a cloud server that goes dark when the company decides to stop supporting a model. The result is planned obsolescence by other means. It’s a world where a perfectly good machine becomes e-waste because a software lock won’t let it turn on. And all of this is happening at a time when ordinary expenses are already squeezing household budgets. Tariffs have pushed up prices. Memory shortages have made electronics more expensive. A costly and deeply unpopular overseas conflict has driven up costs across the entire economy. People want to cut corners wherever they can, and the corners manufacturers have deliberately sealed off are among the most frustrating.
This is not just a matter of inconvenience. It is a political argument about who holds power in America, and it caught the attention of advocates beyond the usual repair circles. Kevin O’Reilly, executive director of Fulu, an advocacy group focused on consumer digital ownership and product rights, sees a direct line between the right-to-repair movement and the broader message voters sent in this election cycle. People want things to be more affordable, they want politics to be less polarized, and they want Congress to solve problems that actually affect them. The right-to-repair movement fits all three of those wants almost perfectly. It is not a partisan wedge issue. It does not require taking sides on the culture war. It simply says: when you spend your hard-earned money on something, you should be able to live with it, use it, maintain it, and fix it, without being treated like a criminal for wanting to keep it working. That is a profoundly human desire. Think about what it feels like to drop your phone for the fifth time and watch the screen crack. Think about the moment you take it to a repair shop and they tell you they can’t touch it because the manufacturer has locked the diagnostic software. Think about being told that your only option is to mail it to the company, wait two weeks, and pay nearly the price of a new device for a repair that would have taken an independent shop twenty minutes. That is the experience voters are rejecting. It is the experience of being trapped by design, of realizing that the word “ownership” has been hollowed out until it means almost nothing. And when enough people share that experience, they start to vote about it.
At the heart of the problem is a piece of legislation older than many of the devices it regulates: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Passed in 1998, it was originally meant to protect copyrighted material in the digital age, which is a legitimate goal. No one wants a world where movies and books and music can be pirated with impunity, and creators deserve to be paid for their work. But the law was written broadly enough that companies found a way to use it as a hammer against perfectly legitimate activity. Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent digital locks, and it does not make clear that circumventing a lock for repair is acceptable. The penalties are not just civil. They can include prison time. That legal threat has chilled independent repair technicians, hobbyists, and farmers who just want to keep their equipment running. The companies that make devices, from tractors to surgical equipment to smartphones, have used the DMCA to control who gets access to the software that makes the hardware function. If you need to reset a computer in your own tractor to calibrate a new steering sensor, the manufacturer can say no. If you want to fix a medical device that you own and rely on, you might find that the code required to perform the repair is a trade secret, and accessing it is a federal offense. That is not an exaggeration. It is the world that Section 1201 has created, and it is the reason advocates have spent years pleading for reform. The law has not kept pace with technology. It was written before smartphones, before modern tractors were basically computers on wheels, before the internet of things turned every household appliance into a potential node of control. It has become a tool for maintaining monopoly power over an object long after the sales receipt has been handed over.
For advocates, the reshuffled Congress represents the cleanest legislative target in decades. The new and returning members were elected in an environment where voters are fed up with the status quo, and right-to-repair is one of the few issues that genuinely unites people across party lines. A rural Republican farmer and an urban Democratic renter might not agree on much, but they can both agree that it is wrong to be locked out of a thing you own. That is not a hard argument to make at a town hall. It does not require a policy seminar. You just ask people: have you ever bought something and then realized you couldn’t fix it yourself? You will see every hand in the room go up. O’Reilly put it bluntly: if he were a new or returning member of Congress, he would see DMCA reform as a no-brainer. It is an issue where the public is on one side, and the only people on the other side are the corporations profiting from the lock-in. It is an issue where the economic argument is obvious, because repair doesn’t just save individuals money; it keeps usable goods out of landfills and reduces demand for scarce materials and energy. It is an issue where doing nothing is not acceptable, because the frustration is not going to go away. People will keep breaking their devices. Farmers will keep facing downtime exactly when they can’t afford it. Renters will keep living in spaces they can’t fix. And the resentment will keep building until someone in Washington decides to act. The question is not whether right-to-repair will become a major political issue in the coming years. It already has. The question is whether the people elected to represent those frustrated voters will have the courage to turn the movement into law, and to make sure that the next time you buy a thing, you actually own it. That is the promise behind the campaigns of the candidates who ran on repair, and it is the promise the next Congress has a genuine opportunity to fulfill.
