Why does this keep happening? Why does the House keep finding itself in a situation in which a handful of clownish nihilists are calling the shots for their supposed leaders — and risking the economic stability of the country while they are at it?
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There are a couple of familiar forces that put the “chaos caucus” in charge: the Republicans’ razor-thin majority; the fact that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is beholden to the tiny minority for the gavel that it took 15 ballots for him to claim — and thus to the extremism that has come to define the Republican Party in the Trump era.
The small group of House Republicans who might force a government shutdown
So it is appropriate to ask: To whom are these agents of havoc actually accountable?
A surprisingly small sliver of voters, it turns out.
These days, only 82 of the 435 House districts across the country are competitive enough that both parties start out with a decent shot at winning, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman.
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That is only half the number of swing districts that existed in 1999, and it has effectively eliminated much of the incentive that the two parties once had to find middle ground on contentious issues. Members of Congress know that playing to instincts and impulses of their populist bases are their surest tickets to reelection, and that they will have little protection if they don’t.
You can blame aggressive gerrymandering, which plays a big role. But Wasserman and others say the greater driver of this realignment is a self-sorting of the electorate into like-minded communities, where Democratic voters are concentrated in cities that have turned deeper blue while Republicans are spread out across exurbs and rural areas that have become more reliably red.
Whatever the reason, the reality is that the vast majority of congressional elections are decided in the primaries. And that, as it turns out, puts outsize power in the hands of a tiny minority of highly engaged and intense partisans who bother to show up and vote in those often overlooked contests.
In midterm elections, fewer than 1 in 5 eligible voters cast their ballots in party primaries, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. The rest of the country sits home, and has to live with the consequences. And that means a tiny — and utterly unrepresentative — slice of Americans is deciding who gets a seat in the U.S. House.
The dysfunction that this creates has been thrown into stark relief in a new study by Unite America, a nonpartisan election reform advocacy organization. It has taken a look at eight Republican House members who have been among the most determined obstructionists: Andy Biggs (Ariz.); Elijah Crane (Ariz.); Lauren Boebert (Colo.); Matt Gaetz (Fla.); Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.); Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.); Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Bob Good (Va.). (Good is not included in the chart above; he was chosen in 2022 in a party convention, where he received a mere 1,488 votes, compared with his opponent’s 271.)
All breezed through the November election last year, with the exception of Boebert, who won by only 546 votes in a surprisingly strong challenge by Democrat Adam Frisch, who is running against her again in 2024.
What Unite America found is how small a number of people voted in the GOP primaries, where the real choice to send these people to Washington was made. The average, according to its calculations, was only 68,000 voters, or 12 percent of the number who were eligible. We don’t have a House that represents voters because most voters don’t participate.
There are ways to fix this. One is to open up the primaries so that anyone, or at a minimum people who register with no party affiliation, can vote in them. The current system, in which 30 states hold primaries in which only registered party members can vote, effectively disenfranchises 140 million voters in the elections that count, according to Unite America.
Four states have gone further. Alaska, California, Louisiana and Washington have either eliminated primaries in federal elections or replaced them with nonpartisan ones, in which the top finishers make it to the November ballot.
What difference can it make? It is probably not a coincidence that of the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the only two who managed to be reelected were Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and David G. Valadao (Calif.) — both from states where their fates were not in the hands of the extremists and election deniers who dominated last year’s Republican primaries.
But tinkering with the system can go only so far, so long as voters themselves are too apathetic to recognize how politics actually works in a polarized country and to take their own responsibilities seriously. It starts with understanding that, increasingly, the elections that matter don’t take place in November.
Make sense of the news fast with Opinions' daily newsletterThere are a couple of familiar forces that put the “chaos caucus” in charge: the Republicans’ razor-thin majority; the fact that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is beholden to the tiny minority for the gavel that it took 15 ballots for him to claim — and thus to the extremism that has come to define the Republican Party in the Trump era.
The small group of House Republicans who might force a government shutdown
So it is appropriate to ask: To whom are these agents of havoc actually accountable?
A surprisingly small sliver of voters, it turns out.
These days, only 82 of the 435 House districts across the country are competitive enough that both parties start out with a decent shot at winning, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman.
ADVERTISING
That is only half the number of swing districts that existed in 1999, and it has effectively eliminated much of the incentive that the two parties once had to find middle ground on contentious issues. Members of Congress know that playing to instincts and impulses of their populist bases are their surest tickets to reelection, and that they will have little protection if they don’t.
You can blame aggressive gerrymandering, which plays a big role. But Wasserman and others say the greater driver of this realignment is a self-sorting of the electorate into like-minded communities, where Democratic voters are concentrated in cities that have turned deeper blue while Republicans are spread out across exurbs and rural areas that have become more reliably red.
Whatever the reason, the reality is that the vast majority of congressional elections are decided in the primaries. And that, as it turns out, puts outsize power in the hands of a tiny minority of highly engaged and intense partisans who bother to show up and vote in those often overlooked contests.
In midterm elections, fewer than 1 in 5 eligible voters cast their ballots in party primaries, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. The rest of the country sits home, and has to live with the consequences. And that means a tiny — and utterly unrepresentative — slice of Americans is deciding who gets a seat in the U.S. House.
The dysfunction that this creates has been thrown into stark relief in a new study by Unite America, a nonpartisan election reform advocacy organization. It has taken a look at eight Republican House members who have been among the most determined obstructionists: Andy Biggs (Ariz.); Elijah Crane (Ariz.); Lauren Boebert (Colo.); Matt Gaetz (Fla.); Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.); Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.); Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Bob Good (Va.). (Good is not included in the chart above; he was chosen in 2022 in a party convention, where he received a mere 1,488 votes, compared with his opponent’s 271.)
All breezed through the November election last year, with the exception of Boebert, who won by only 546 votes in a surprisingly strong challenge by Democrat Adam Frisch, who is running against her again in 2024.
What Unite America found is how small a number of people voted in the GOP primaries, where the real choice to send these people to Washington was made. The average, according to its calculations, was only 68,000 voters, or 12 percent of the number who were eligible. We don’t have a House that represents voters because most voters don’t participate.
There are ways to fix this. One is to open up the primaries so that anyone, or at a minimum people who register with no party affiliation, can vote in them. The current system, in which 30 states hold primaries in which only registered party members can vote, effectively disenfranchises 140 million voters in the elections that count, according to Unite America.
Four states have gone further. Alaska, California, Louisiana and Washington have either eliminated primaries in federal elections or replaced them with nonpartisan ones, in which the top finishers make it to the November ballot.
What difference can it make? It is probably not a coincidence that of the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the only two who managed to be reelected were Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and David G. Valadao (Calif.) — both from states where their fates were not in the hands of the extremists and election deniers who dominated last year’s Republican primaries.
But tinkering with the system can go only so far, so long as voters themselves are too apathetic to recognize how politics actually works in a polarized country and to take their own responsibilities seriously. It starts with understanding that, increasingly, the elections that matter don’t take place in November.
