The Demise of Rivalry in U.S. Elections

The return of President Trump to Washington has stretched the limits of presidential authority and raised concerns among Democrats, historians, and legal experts, who caution that the nation’s democratic framework is in jeopardy.

However, a thorough examination of the 2024 election reveals just how undemocratic the nation’s legislative institutions have become.

Due to years of gerrymandering and increased political division, a vast majority of Congress members and state legislators did not contend in competitive general elections last year.

Rather, they were largely elected through low-turnout, inconsequential primary contests. According to an analysis by The New York Times of over 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary races held last year, only a minuscule number of voters participated in those elections. On average, merely 57,000 individuals voted in U.S. House primaries for candidates who eventually won the general election — a trivial portion of the over 700,000 Americans that each of those victors now represents.

Moreover, many members of Congress are increasingly not even contending with primary challenges. Approximately one-third of the current House members ran unopposed in their primary elections. Except for 12 districts, all were considered “safe” seats, indicating that 124 House members essentially faced no opposition in their elections.

The lack of competitive primaries is even more pronounced in state legislatures. More than three-quarters of those primary races in 2024 were uncontested, as revealed by voting data from The Associated Press.

Legislators who do encounter primaries often find themselves accountable to a narrow base of ideologically driven, highly partisan voters — a demographic eager to push elected officials towards the extremes and to penalize them for any compromise with opponents.

“Most members of both parties, whether liberal or conservative, are more concerned about losing their primary than they are about losing the general election,” remarked Haley Barbour, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan and a past chair of the Republican National Committee.

There has been a steady decline in competition within elections for both Congress and state legislatures over the past century, as per academic studies. Yet the limited number of competitive elections in 2024 indicates an unresolved problem that may be worsening.

This situation has enabled Mr. Trump to bolster his contingent of loyal lawmakers in Congress and eliminate nearly all dissent within his party. In recent months, he and his supporters have consistently used the threat of primary challenges to ensure Republican lawmakers adhere to the Trump agenda on matters such as federal funding and the cabinet nominations of the president.

However, the anxiety surrounding primary challenges can also distort local politics, where state power brokers and influential interest groups can pressure lawmakers into adopting broadly unpopular stances.

For instance, in Idaho, where only four out of 105 state legislative races were competitive last November, lawmakers refrained from addressing Medicaid expansion for six years. When the issue was finally placed on the ballot in 2018, six out of ten voters supported it.

The scarcity of competition in elections has further eroded Americans’ trust in government. A recent Times/Ipsos poll revealed that 88 percent of adults believed the political system is broken, and 72 percent perceived the government as primarily serving elites. Only 25 percent viewed the government as mostly acting for the benefit of the country.

“They’ve lost touch with their constituents,” said Rory Duncan, a retired military veteran and Republican from Washington County, Md., speaking of his local government. “They’ve gerrymandered everything. We once had a Republican, but they’ve gerrymandered it so extensively that there’s no possibility for a Republican to get elected.”

Fewer Americans participate in primaries than in general elections. Last year, about 30 million voters cast a primary ballot in a congressional election (this figure excludes Louisiana, which employs a unique primary system). The total turnout for the general election exceeded 156 million.

Uncontested and low-turnout primaries affect both red and blue states. In Georgia, a battleground largely led by Republicans, 10 of the state’s 14 U.S. House members did not face a primary challenge. In deep-blue New York, 21 of the state’s 26 House members ran unopposed in their primary.

Incumbency provides politicians with a considerable advantage during election cycles. However, incumbents are becoming increasingly vulnerable to primary challenges because these races largely go unnoticed — facilitating the establishment of an outsider campaign that aims at a few dedicated voters.

Since 2020, of the 59 House members who have lost their re-election bids, nearly half — 28 — were defeated in primaries. Additionally, more incumbent lawmakers in state legislatures lost their re-elections in the primaries than in the general elections last year, according to Ballotpedia, a political database.

“One concern for incumbents is that it’s relatively simple for someone who opposes you to gather support for a super PAC and secure funding,” stated Robert G. Boatright, an election scholar at Clark University, who authored a book on congressional primaries in 2013.

Twenty years ago, Mr. Boatright noted, incumbents lost primaries due to scandal, age, or national issues overshadowing local ties. Today, they are often defeated by ideological challengers or issue-based interest groups, frequently backed by wealthy benefactors or numerous small donors with limited connections to the contests they are financing.

Throughout much of the 2010s, Empower Texans, a political endeavor funded by a few oil-and-gas billionaires, was a significant force in Texas politics. The group’s political action committee invested millions in efforts to replace moderate Republican politicians with social conservatives by backing challengers in primary elections.

Although the group’s success was inconsistent, Texas politics today is largely dominated by right-wing leaders such as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, early beneficiaries of their financial backing.

On the left, organizations like Justice Democrats have influenced the political landscape by primarily supporting more progressive, working-class candidates against traditional Democrats in a select number of carefully chosen primary races. The group’s initial slate of candidates in 2018, predominantly funded by small donations from nationwide supporters, included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who ousted a long-standing incumbent in that year’s primary and has since become a notable figure among House Democrats.

While the Justice Democrats assert that they are driving the party’s centrist policies towards the left, extremism is not solely a conflict of liberals versus conservatives, according to Usamah Andrabi, the group’s communications director. “Our primaries do not represent left versus right; they embody bottom versus top,” he stated. “If we must pressure corporate politicians to advocate for working individuals, then they should feel that pressure.”

Nonetheless, Steven Rogers, a state politics expert at Saint Louis University, Missouri, indicated that politicians closer to the political extremes are less prone to facing primary challenges.

“It’s becoming increasingly evident that over time, more extreme candidates are emerging victorious at both the state legislative and congressional levels,” he remarked.

A mirage of meaningfulness

Even competitive primary elections can sometimes be an illusion, posing little real threat to an incumbent or to the candidate from the dominant party in a state.

Michael Podhorzer, a strategist and former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., recently assessed election data to determine how many state legislative primaries last year were both competitive and “meaningful” — defined as races decided by 10 percentage points or fewer, with the winner prevailing in the general election.

His findings indicated that, in the 35 states that held elections for both state legislative chambers last year, only 287 out of more than 4,600 primaries met this definition.

This leaves many voters without genuine representation: The districts without meaningful primaries or general elections last year are home to approximately 158 million citizens, while those with meaningful primaries encompass only about 10 million.

Experts highlight that beyond gerrymandering, the political “sorting” of like-minded voters congregating into similar communities has worsened the lack of competition.

Linda Sacripanti, 58, a Democrat residing in the deep-red northern panhandle of West Virginia, has encountered both of these political phenomena.

When it comes to participating in primary elections, she expresses that it simply means “I have some influence on which Democrat is going to lose.”

But for about two decades, Ms. Sacripanti, who works in sales, lived in North Carolina, near Charlotte. She recalled casting her vote for Jeff Jackson in Democratic state legislative primaries when he was representing a solidly blue district in the State Senate. He parlayed that into a congressional run in 2022, winning a similarly blue seat by 18 points.

“Charlotte itself is quite blue, so my vote carried even more weight during the primaries,” said Ms. Sacripanti. “So I do believe it mattered.”

In the early months of 2024, Republicans in North Carolina succeeded in a legal challenge enabling them to redraw the congressional and state legislative maps, eliminating Mr. Jackson’s district and effectively compelling him to resign (he now serves as the state attorney general). Last year, only 10 of the state’s 170 legislative seats featured a meaningful primary, including just a single State Senate seat out of 50, as per Mr. Podhorzer’s data.

“It was simply a matter of redrawing the districts to get him out of there,” Ms. Sacripanti noted. “When you look up ‘gerrymander’ in the dictionary, it directs you right to North Carolina.”