The return of President Trump to Washington has tested the limits From the presidential power and trigger alarms among the Democrats, historians and academics who warn that the democratic order of the country is threatened.
But an in -depth examination of the 2024 elections shows how the country’s legislative organizations are already undemocratic.
After decades of Gerrymandering and political polarization, a large majority of members of the Congress and States Legislatures has not been confronted in the competitive general elections Last year.
Instead, they were effectively elected through low -yield primary competitions or otherwise devoid of meaning. Many voting voters voted in these races, according to an analysis of the New York Times of more than 9,000 elections to the Congress and States that were held last year. On average, only 57,000 people voted for politicians in the primaries of the American chamber who won the general elections – a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans that each of these winners now represents.
Increasingly, the members of the Congress are not even faced with main challenges. About a third of the current members of the Chamber were without opposition in their primary. All the districts except 12 of these districts were “safe” seats, which means that 124 members of the chamber were essentially no challenge in their election.
The absence of primaries is even more striking in the legislatures of the States. More than three quarters of these primary races in 2024 were not disputed, according to the voting data of the Associated Press.
Legislators who face primaries have often been liable to a small number of ideologically aligned and fiercely supported voters – a group too willing to drag the elected officials on the fringes and punish them to compromise with the other side.
“Most of the members of the two parties, liberals and conservatives, are more fearing to lose their primary than to lose the general elections,” said Haley Barbour, online assistant Ronald Reagan and former president of the National Republican Committee.
Competition was down elections for congress and states legislatures during the last century, according to academic studies. But the meager number of competitive elections in 2024 indicates a problem which is far from repaired and can worsen.
This reality helped Trump extend his ranks of legislators loyal to the congress and to crush almost any dissent from his party. In recent months, he and his allies have repeatedly exercised The threat of primary challenges to ensure that republican legislators to follow the Trump line on issues such as federal funding and the appointment of the firm.
However, the fear of a main challenge can also twist local policy, where state power brokers and well -funded interest groups can push legislators to take largely unpopular positions.
For example, in Idaho, where only four of the 105 state legislative breeds were competitive in November, legislators refused for six years to consider developing access to Medicaid. When the problem finally put the ballot in 2018, Six out of 10 voters approved it.
The lack of competition during the elections contributed to the confidence of the Americans in the government. A Recent time survey / Ipsos found that 88% of adults thought that the political system was broken and that 72% considered the government as mainly for the elites. Only 25% considered the government to work mainly for the good of the country.
“They have lost track of their voters,” said Rory Duncan, 65, republican and retired military veteran of the County of Washington. “They locked everything. We used to have a republican, but they made him so Gerrymander that there is no way that a republican could be elected. »»
“ The more extreme candidates win ”
Much fewer Americans vote in primaries than in the general elections. Last year, around 30 million voters voted for a primary election during an election to the congress (this figure does not include Louisiana, which has a single primary method). The total participation rate in the general elections was more than 156 million.
The non -disputed and low reversal primaries afflict red and blue states. In Georgia, a battlefield largely controlled by the Republicans, 10 of the 14 members of the American Chamber of the State are not faced with a main challenge. In New York Blue deep, 21 of the 26 members of the State Chamber took place without opposition in their primary.
The fall always gives politicians a huge advantage in the electoral season. But holders are increasingly tempting targets for primary challenges because these breeds are largely ignored – which facilitates the assembly of an outsider campaign which targets some loyal voters.
Of the 59 members of the Chamber who have lost re -election competitions since 2020, almost half – 28 years – were defeated in primaries. In states legislatures, more outgoing legislators have lost a re -election in primaries than in the general elections of last year, according to Political database data reports.
“One thing that operators are worried is that it is easy enough for someone who doesn’t like you to get a great heat pump and get money,” said Robert G. BoatrightAn electoral scholarship holder at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., Which in 2013 literally wrote the book On the primaries of the Congress.
Two decades ago, Mr. Boatright said that holders lost primaries due to scandal, age or national problems that have invaded local loyalty. Today, they are killed by ideological opponents or interest groups focused on problems often supported by rich patrons or legions of small donors with few links with the breeds they finance.
For a large part of the 2010s, one of the most powerful forces of Texas policy was a group called Empower Texans, the political project of a handful of billionaires of oil and gas. The group’s political action committee paid millions of people in the replacement of Texas Republican Politicians more moderate by social conservatives, generally by supporting insurgents in primary races.
Although the history of the group has been unequal, Texas policy is now dominated by right-wing leaders, such as Lieutenant-Governor Dan Patrick, who was a precocious beneficiary of his millions.
On the left, groups like the Democratic judge had an oversized impact by almost exclusively supporting the more progressive working class candidates against more traditional democrats in a relative handful of carefully chosen primary competitions. The first list of group candidates in 2018, largely funded with small contributions from donors on a national level, included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who ousted a holder with 10 mandates in this year’s primary and this year and who has since become one of the most eminent chamber Democrats.
While the Democrats of the judge believe that they are pushing the centrist party policies to the left, extremism is not simply a question of liberals against the conservatives, according to the group’s communications director, Usamah Andrabi. “Our primaries are not on the left against right. They are below against the top, “he said. “If we have to scare companies from companies to fight for workers, then they should be afraid.”
Nevertheless, Steven Rogers, an expert in state policy at Saint-Louis University, Missouri, said that politicians who were closer to political fringes were less likely to face main challenges.
“It is becoming more and more clear than over time, more extreme candidates gain in legislative levels and the state congress,” he said.
A mirage of meaning
Even the contested primary elections can sometimes be a mirage, offering little threat to a holder or to the candidate in the dominant party of a state.
Michael Podhorzer, strategist and former political director of AFL -CIO, recently analyzed the electoral data to determine how many legislative elements of the State last year were competitive and “significant” – decided by 10 percentage points or Less, and with the winner in force in hiking in the general elections.
He noted that in the 35 states which held elections for the two legislative chambers of the State last year, only 287 of more than 4,600 primaries respected this definition.
This leaves many voters without real representation: the districts which had no primary or significant general elections last year have around 158 million citizens, said Mr. Podhorzer, while those who have significant primaries n ‘have only 10 million about 10 million.
Experts quickly emphasize that beyond the Gerrymandering, the political “sorting” of voters sharing the same ideas that move in the same communities exacerbated the lack of competition.
Linda Sacarcanti, 58, a democrat who lives in the north of northern Virginia-Western, knew these two political realities.
Participating in the primary elections, she says, simply means that “I have a certain choice in which the Democrat will lose”.
But for about 20 years, Ms. Sacercanti, who worked in sales, lived in North Carolina, near Charlotte. She recalled that she had voted for Jeff Jackson in the legislative primaries of the democratic state, when Mr. Jackson represented a deeply blue district in the State Senate. He transformed this into a race for the congress in 2022, winning a similar blue seat of 18 points.
“”Charlotte herself is pretty, fairly blue, so my vote was even more weight during the primaries, “said Ms. Saceri. “So I think it was counting.”
At the beginning of 2024, the Republicans of North Carolina won a legal challenge which enabled them to redraw the legislative cards of the Congress and the State, by wiping the district of Mr. Jackson and by forcing it to resign (he is now the attorney general of the state). Last year, only 10 of the 170 legislative seats in the State had a significant primary, including a single seat in the State Senate, according to data from Mr. Podhorzer.
“It was right,” change the districts and get it out “,” said Ms. Sacercanti. “When you are looking for” Gerrymander “in the dictionary, it goes directly to North Carolina.”