Even though Election Day is over a month away, I can tell you with total certainty who will win all but a handful of the 435 races to be elected to the U.S. House.
I don’t have any unique talent for electoral forecasting. I just took a few moments to look at the results of the 2022 midterms, where a staggering 84% of House races were won by more than 10 points. These districts are so disproportionately populated by Democrats or Republicans that the majority party could nominate a rottweiler as their candidate and still win.
In those districts, the real action occurs in the majority party’s primary, where turnout is almost always low. Only 22% of registered voters showed up to vote in the 2022 primary elections compared to 66% who voted in the 2020 general election. In these circumstances, an activist sliver of the electorate can easily win a modest plurality in a primary and dispatch its representative to Washington.
The current primary rules – which vary by state and are controlled by our incumbent political parties – often exclude independents from voting, actively encourage low turnout, and enable the election of extreme candidates with narrow agendas.
Most of all, the current primary system contributes to a pathologically polarized environment in Congress. Today, the Republican right and the Democratic left define the terms of debate, score points at the other party’s expense, and often fail to do the actual work of passing bills and budgets. The old virtues of compromise and cooperation across the aisle are increasingly seen as heresy or relics of a bygone age. I’m not the first to point out that America’s political system demonstrates scary parallels to Europe in the 1930s when failing governments that couldn’t meet people’s needs spurred the rise of demagogic and radical political movements, such as Naziism and communism.
In poll after poll, some three-quarters of Americans say they’d prefer government officials in Washington to “compromise to find solutions” compared to standing on principle, even if it means gridlock. And yet, we continue to elect people who choose gridlock.
To a shocking degree, the U.S. House of Representatives is not representative.
Take the examples of two congressional firebrands, one from the left and one from the right, who come from reliably Republican or Democratic districts and have disproportionately impacted their parties in the House.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left-wing representative from New York and member of “The Squad,” won her first Democratic primary election in 2018 with just 16,898 votes in a district with over 360,000 registered voters. That means less than 5% of voters in the district essentially decided the representation for everyone else. Or look at Florida’s 1st district, which features Matt Gaetz, the pugnacious right-wing representative and member of the Freedom Caucus. In his first Republican primary in 2016, he won 35,669 votes in a district with over half a million registered voters.
The implications of this aren’t hard to figure out. Rep. Ocasio Cortez and Gaetz don’t need to effectively serve most people in their district to stay in office. They just need to attend to the minority who vote in their primaries, and they’ll get sent back to Washington election after election.
If Americans want our Congress to be truly representative, we must implement significant reforms in how Congressional primaries are conducted.
But how should we start?
Many well-meaning reformers suggest that ending gerrymandering, the practice of incumbent parties and elected officials deliberately drawing congressional and state legislative district lines to cement their power, would be the best way to create more competitive and representative elections.
Gerrymandering has indeed helped both parties gain electoral advantages they would not have had with a politically blind or neutral mapping system. However, several studies have shown that the impact of gerrymandering is overstated. University of California political scientist Danielle Thomson says, “The academic consensus is that gerrymandering matters anywhere from a little bit to not at all.”
The data indicates that the nation’s counties, with lines not redrawn in decades or centuries, have undergone just as much polarization as congressional or state legislative districts. The “Big Sort” phenomenon – people choosing to live and work among like-minded neighbors – plays a much more significant role in creating solid red and blue districts.
Two primary reform ideas could help.
The first would be for Congress to pass the bipartisan “Let America Vote Act,” introduced in the House by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) in July. The Act would deny federal election funding to states that exclude any eligible voters from participating in taxpayer-funded elections. That means primaries. According to the bill’s sponsors, the existing rules deny 23.4 million registered independents or unaffiliated voters their right to vote in the 22 states with closed primaries. Conditioning federal election money on states to open up their primaries – as this bill does – is a nice nudge to the states. Still, Congress should go even further: All states should be required to let independent and unaffiliated voters participate in primaries, and voters should be able to decide which party primary they want to vote in right up until they walk into the voting booth on the day of the election.
Here is another idea: to ensure that more Democrats, Republicans, and independents all participate in primaries in more significant numbers, we should establish a national congressional primary day. Currently, congressional primaries run from March to September of an election year. They are often intentionally scheduled in the dog days of summer when voters aren’t paying attention or are on vacation. The party die-hards and activists on both sides – who always vote – like it this way because that means they can be kingmakers in the primary.
If the primary day for House and Senate elections were consistent with the same date in every state in every election cycle – just like the general election is always on the first Tuesday in November – primaries would be better publicized, and voters would be more likely to remember to turn out and vote. We already know that when neighboring states hold primaries on the same day, voter turnout improves. You might ask if we could have a national primary day for House and Senate elections, why not the presidency? Well, rolling presidential primaries allow upstart or underfunded candidates to build momentum. In contrast, a national presidential primary would likely favor the most well-known and well-funded candidates. But that doesn’t mean our presidential primaries couldn’t benefit from a tweak, too. Former Senator Joe Lieberman, for example, once proposed a bipartisan bill to set up a new calendar of four regional primaries, another proposal that could bring in more voters who are otherwise shut out of the primary process.
Here’s a final idea that isn’t a reform but a call to action for my fellow Americans: Get out and vote – in both the primary and general elections. Voter turnout in America has been ticking up in recent years, yet it still lags well behind our developed country counterparts in Europe and Asia. Sure, our arcane primary election rules may discourage our participation, but we must care enough to show up nonetheless.
Much of today’s political polarization results from profound and legitimate differences of opinion among Americans. There is no quick cure-all for the rancor and division consuming our nation.
Still, primary reform is a powerful tool because it doesn’t stack the deck in favor of either party. It would encourage both parties to put forth candidates who appeal to a broader spectrum of the electorate. This can give voice to and empower voters looking forward to ending an era of confrontation in America and to increased cooperation among the leaders we send to Washington.