Politics
The Death of Competition in American Elections
President Trump’s return to Washington has tested the bounds of presidential power and set off alarms among Democrats, historians and legal scholars who are warning that the country’s democratic order is under threat.
But a close review of the 2024 election shows just how undemocratic the country’s legislative bodies already are.
After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year.
Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.
Increasingly, members of Congress are not even facing primary challenges. About a third of the current members of the House ran unopposed in their primary. All but 12 of those districts were “safe” seats, meaning 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their election.
The absence of primaries is even more striking in state legislatures. More than three-quarters of those primary races in 2024 were uncontested, according to voting data from The Associated Press.
Lawmakers who do face primaries are often left beholden to a small number of ideologically aligned, fiercely partisan voters — a group all too willing to drag elected representatives to the fringes and to punish them for compromise with the other side.
“Most members of both parties, liberal and conservative, they’re more worried about losing their primary than losing the general election,” said Haley Barbour, a onetime aide to President Ronald Reagan and a former chair of the Republican National Committee.
Competition has been on the decline in elections for both Congress and state legislatures over the past century, according to academic studies. But the meager number of competitive elections in 2024 points to a problem that is far from being fixed, and may be growing worse.
This reality has helped Mr. Trump expand his ranks of loyal lawmakers in Congress and crush nearly all dissent in his party. In recent months, he and his allies have repeatedly wielded the threat of primary challenges to keep Republican lawmakers toeing the Trump line on issues like federal funding and the president’s cabinet nominations.
But the fear of a primary challenge can also twist local politics, where state power brokers and well-funded interest groups can push lawmakers to take broadly unpopular positions.
For example, in Idaho, where just four out of 105 state legislative races were competitive in November, lawmakers declined for six years to consider expanding access to Medicaid. When the issue finally got on the ballot in 2018, six in 10 voters endorsed it.
The lack of competition in elections has contributed to Americans’ cratering trust in government. A recent Times/Ipsos poll found that 88 percent of adults believed the political system was broken and that 72 percent saw the government as mostly for elites. Just 25 percent viewed government as mostly working for the good of the country.
“They’ve lost track of their voters,” Rory Duncan, 65, a Republican and a retired military veteran from Washington County, Md., said of his local government. “They’ve gerrymandered everything. We used to have a Republican, but they’ve gerrymandered it so much that there’s no way a Republican can get elected.”
‘More extreme candidates are winning’
Far fewer Americans vote in primaries than in general elections. Last year, roughly 30 million voters cast a primary ballot in a congressional election (that figure does not include Louisiana, which has a unique primary method). The total turnout in the general election was more than 156 million.
Uncontested and low-turnout primaries plague both red and blue states. In Georgia, a battleground controlled largely by Republicans, 10 of the state’s 14 members of the U.S. House 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 still gives politicians a huge advantage come election season. But incumbents are increasingly tempting targets for primary challenges because those races are largely ignored — making it easier to mount an outsider campaign that targets a few faithful voters.
Of the 59 House members who have lost re-election contests since 2020, nearly half — 28 — were defeated in primaries. In state legislatures, more incumbent lawmakers lost re-election in the primaries than in the general election last year, according to the political database Ballotpedia.
“One thing incumbents worry about is that it’s pretty easy for someone who doesn’t like you to pull together a super PAC and get money,” said Robert G. Boatright, an elections scholar at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., who in 2013 literally wrote the book on congressional primaries.
Two decades ago, Mr. Boatright said, incumbents lost primaries because of scandal, age or national issues that overrode local loyalties. Today, they are felled by ideological opponents or issue-oriented interest groups often backed by wealthy patrons or legions of small donors with few ties to the races they are financing.
For much of the 2010s, one of the most powerful forces in Texas politics was a group called Empower Texans, the political project of a handful of oil-and-gas billionaires. The group’s political action committee poured millions into replacing more moderate Texas Republican politicians with social conservatives, generally by backing insurgents in primary races.
Though the group’s track record was spotty, Texas politics today is dominated by right-wing leaders, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who were early beneficiaries of its millions.
On the left, groups like Justice Democrats have had an outsize impact by almost exclusively backing more progressive working-class candidates against more traditional Democrats in a relative handful of carefully chosen primary contests. The group’s first slate of candidates in 2018, funded largely with small contributions from donors nationwide, included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who ousted a 10-term incumbent in that year’s primary and who has since become one of the most prominent House Democrats.
While the Justice Democrats believe they are pushing the party’s centrist policies to the left, extremism is not simply a matter of liberals versus conservatives, according to the group’s communications director, Usamah Andrabi. “Our primaries are not left versus right. They’re bottom versus top,” he said. “If we have to scare corporate politicians into fighting for working people, then they should be scared.”
Nevertheless, Steven Rogers, an expert on state politics at Saint Louis University, in Missouri, said politicians who edged closer to the political fringes were less likely to face primary challenges.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that over time, more extreme candidates are winning at both state legislative and congressional levels,” he said.
A mirage of meaningfulness
Even contested primary elections can sometimes be a mirage, offering little threat to an incumbent or to the candidate in a state’s dominant party.
Michael Podhorzer, a strategist and the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., recently analyzed election data to determine how many state legislative primaries last year were competitive and “meaningful” — decided by 10 percentage points or fewer, and with the winner prevailing in the general election.
He found that in the 35 states that held elections for both state legislative chambers last year, just 287 of more than 4,600 primaries met that definition.
That leaves many voters without real representation: The districts that did not have meaningful primaries or general elections last year have roughly 158 million citizens, Mr. Podhorzer said, while those with meaningful primaries have only about 10 million.
Experts are quick to point out that beyond gerrymandering, the political “sorting” of like-minded voters moving into the same communities has exacerbated the lack of competition.
Linda Sacripanti, 58, a Democrat who lives in the deep-red northern panhandle of West Virginia, has experienced both of these political realities.
Participating in primary elections, she says, simply means that “I have some choice in which Democrat is going to lose.”
But for roughly 20 years, Ms. Sacripanti, who works in sales, lived in North Carolina, near Charlotte. She recalled voting for Jeff Jackson in Democratic state legislative primaries, when Mr. Jackson represented a deeply blue district in the State Senate. He parlayed that into a run for Congress in 2022, winning a similarly blue seat by 18 points.
“Charlotte itself is pretty, pretty blue, so my vote had even more weight during the primaries,” Ms. Sacripanti said. “So I do think that it mattered.”
In early 2024, Republicans in North Carolina won a legal challenge that allowed them to redraw the congressional and state legislative maps, wiping away Mr. Jackson’s district and effectively forcing him to resign (he is now the state’s attorney general). Last year, only 10 of the state’s 170 legislative seats had a meaningful primary, including just a single State Senate seat out of 50, according to data from Mr. Podhorzer.
“It was just, ‘Change up the districts and get him the heck out of there,’” Ms. Sacripanti said. “When you look up ‘gerrymander’ in the dictionary, it goes right to North Carolina.”
Politics
White House unleashes on Raskin for clinging to ‘deranged’ Jack Smith ‘lies’ in latest Trump docs flare-up
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A new clash erupted Wednesday over records from the dismissed Trump classified documents case after Rep. Jamie Raskin accused the Department of Justice of improperly turning over sensitive material to Congress, drawing sharp rebukes from the White House and DOJ.
“Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital when asked about Raskin’s claims.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter on March 24 to Attorney General Pam Bondi alleging that the DOJ may have inadvertently sent his panel previously undisclosed materials showing Trump retained sensitive classified documents tied to his business interests and may have exposed them to others after his first administration.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the classified documents case for years, including when FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago in 2022 for materials he allegedly retained following his exit from the Oval Office, and when then-special counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment against him in 2023 accusing him of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing efforts to recover it.
JACK SMITH FACES PUBLIC GRILLING ON CAPITOL HILL ABOUT TRUMP PROSECUTIONS
Rep. Jamie Raskin takes a question from a reporter as he introduces legislation at the U.S. Capitol Building on May 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Raskin accused the DOJ of violating a court order requiring parts of the classified documents case to remain under seal, including Smith’s final report, which Democrats have long demanded the DOJ hand over to Congress.
Raskin’s letter quickly drew pushback from the White House, which called it “pathetic” and pointed out that Smith was forced to drop his case against Trump when he won the 2024 election.
Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who presided over the case, had tossed it out in July 2024 after finding Smith’s appointment by Attorney General Merrick Garland was unconstitutional. Smith was appealing her decision but withdrew his appeal after Trump’s victory, citing a DOJ policy that discourages prosecuting sitting presidents.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory,” Jackson continued in her statement.
A DOJ spokesperson said Raskin was “blinded by hatred” of Trump and that the DOJ has been the “most transparent in history.” The spokesperson said the accusations leveled by Raskin were “baseless” and also refuted Raskin’s claims that the DOJ violated a court order by releasing the material to Raskin’s committee.
“Judge Cannon’s protective order was not violated, and none of the documents produced by DOJ violated 6e [grand jury rules] as none of them disclosed matters occurring before a grand jury,” the spokesperson said. “The documents marked ‘6e’ contained redactions of any 6e material. As an attorney and law professor, one must assume Raskin understands this, and thus, reveals this letter is nothing more than a cheap political stunt almost as if taking cues from members of the corrupt Jack Smith prosecution team.”
House Judiciary Committee Republicans said in a statement Raskin’s letter was another example of “manufactured outrage from the left.”
“Once again, Democrats are more focused on targeting President Trump than working with Republicans to put America first,” a committee spokesperson said.
JACK SMITH DENIES POLITICS PLAYED ANY ROLE IN TRUMP PROSECUTIONS AT HOUSE HEARING
Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s case in an interview. (REUTERS)
In his letter, Raskin alleged that the materials his committee received from DOJ showed that some classified documents in Trump’s possession were so sensitive that only six government officials had access to them and that Trump may have retained materials connected to his business dealings to enrich himself. The Maryland Democrat also cited a memorandum indicating Trump “may have shown” a classified map to individuals while on a private plane.
Raskin also accused the DOJ of cherry-picking information about the case to release to Congress while continuing to withhold other information, including the second volume of Smith’s final special counsel report. Cannon had ordered that portion of Smith’s report to remain permanently sealed, though her order is being appealed.
DEMOCRATS RAMP UP CALLS TO RELEASE JACK SMITH’S SPECIAL COUNSEL REPORT ON TRUMP CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE
This image, contained in an indictment against Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Department via AP)
The sealed report has become a top focus for Democrats as no final reports produced by DOJ special counsels have been kept from the public before Smith’s. Democrats have claimed the report could shed new light on the case, while Republicans have argued the investigation was politically motivated, that the report is too prejudiced against Trump and that any disclosures at this stage must comply with Cannon’s order.
A spokesperson for committee Democrats accused the DOJ of doing “legal gymnastics” to prevent the release of Smith’s report, accusing the department of wanting to “advance his corrupt business interests.”
In August 2022, the FBI carried out a controversial search in which they seized 33 boxes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which included agents scouring Melania Trump’s wardrobe, Trump has previously said. Prosecutors defended the search in court, saying Trump withheld some boxes when they sought his voluntary compliance, leading them to resort to a search warrant.
The president denied any wrongdoing throughout the investigation and prosecution, calling it a “scam” pushed by the Biden administration.
Raskin in his letter demanded DOJ turn over a slate of documents related to the case and answer questions about who may have seen the classified materials.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has offered Iran a 15-point ceasefire plan aimed at temporarily halting the war in the Middle East, as the Pentagon simultaneously orders thousands of Marines, paratroopers and a warship to the region.
The plan presented to Iranian leadership Tuesday broadly included a 30-day ceasefire and sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for a laundry list of U.S. demands, according to the Associated Press and other outlets.
But Iran dismissed the proposal Wednesday, criticizing the White House’s terms as “excessive” and out of step with reality, according to Iranian state-run media.
Those terms included limitations on Tehran’s missile stockpiles, and the permanent end to its nuclear program, its support for regional militias including Hezbollah, and of its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, various outlets reported, citing Pakistani officials mediating the negotiations.
Several of those provisions have long been considered nonstarters for Iran, which sees its missile stockade and regional alliances as central to national security.
Iranian officials responded with defiance and skepticism.
“Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met,” an Iranian official told state media. “Not when Trump envisions its conclusion.”
The official outlined the Islamic Republic’s terms for ending the conflict, which included a halt to “aggression and assassinations,” an end to fighting on all fronts, enforceable guarantees that hostilities will not resume, compensation for war damages and a formal recognition of Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has stated that Iran is not interested in a ceasefire but rather a comprehensive “end of war” on all fronts, including the lifting of sanctions and guarantees to allow Iran to pursue peaceful nuclear enrichment for energy and medical applications.
Iranian officials told state media that they believed the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts were deceptive.
“You have reached a stage where you are negotiating with yourselves,” Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari said in a televised address Wednesday. “Do not call your defeat an agreement.
Since the start of the conflict, Iranian leaders have voiced suspicion of any diplomatic talks with the Trump administration, pointing to prewar diplomatic efforts as evidence they were “tricked.” The Islamic Republic says it made clear in those talks that it had no interest in developing nuclear weapons, but Trump launched his military campaign nonetheless.
A woman salutes while singing the national anthem as another holds a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei during a pro-government gathering in a square in western Tehran, Iran, Wednesday.
(Vahid Salemi / Associated Press)
There have been conflicting media reports over Tehran’s exact position. Statements from Iranian officials and state-linked outlets have left open the possibility that elements of the proposal are still under review, while some reports frame the response as an outright refusal.
The Iranian response also conflicts with President Trump’s insistence that negotiations were progressing.
“We have had very, very strong talks,” he said Sunday in Florida. “We have points, major points of agreement. I would say almost all points of agreement will at some point very, very soon meet.”
Compounding the issue, Israel — which continues to carry out routine bombing campaigns over Iran — has stayed out of the talks.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the peace deal in a phone call Tuesday. In a televised address, Netanyahu said that Trump “believes there is an opportunity” to realize U.S.-Israeli war objectives in an agreement “that will safeguard our vital interests.”
“At the same time, we continue to strike both in Iran and in Lebanon,” Netanyahu said. “We will safeguard our vital interests in any scenario.”
The negotiations are being facilitated by Pakistan, with support from Egypt and Turkey — countries that have pushed to contain a conflict that has killed more than 2,400 people, further destabilized the embattled region and disrupted global oil markets.
As Washington pursued a diplomatic end to the conflict, the Pentagon deployed an additional 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Mideast. An additional 5,000 Marines and thousands of sailors are already en route to the region, where 50,000 more Marines are currently stationed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters on Wednesday that the deployment “sends a signal to Iran that they need to get their act together,” but denied any coming escalations by the American side. Johnson instead said that he believes “Operation Epic Fury is almost done.”
Now in its fourth week, the operation began with a series of intensive airstrikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other high-ranking officials. Since then, the U.S. and Israel have carried out over 9,000 strikes targeting Iranian military infrastructure and nuclear program.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday that while the president’s diplomatic envoys seek a peace deal, his department of war will continue to “negotiate with bombs.”
“The president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon. The War Department agrees,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “Our job is to ensure that, and so we’re keeping our hand on that throttle.”
Dog salon workers take cover with the dogs in a bomb shelter as air raid sirens warn of incoming Iranian missile strikes in Ramat Gan, Israel, Wednesday.
(Oded Balilty / Associated Press)
Iranian retaliatory strikes have hit Gulf infrastructure and halted energy production and shipping in the region, spurring global fears of an enduring supply crunch. Meanwhile, Israel has expanded operations in Iran and sought to expand its borders into Lebanon.
Oil prices, which had surged above $120 per barrel earlier in the conflict, fell sharply this week on hopes that a ceasefire could ease supply woes.
In a statement Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres demanded an end to the fighting, which he said “has broken past limits even leaders thought imaginable.”
He specifically called on the U.S. and Israel to end the war, as “human suffering deepens, civilian casualties mount, and the global economic impact is increasingly devastating.”
Times staff writers Ana Ceballos, in Washington, D.C., and Nabih Bulos, in Beirut, contributed to this report.
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A progressive Chicago lawmaker issued an apology Tuesday after facing backlash for suggesting a slain college student was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.”
Last Thursday, Sheridan Gorman, 18, of Westchester County, New York, was gunned down while taking a walk with friends around 1:30 a.m. along Chicago’s lakefront.
Alderwoman Maria Hadden sparked outrage on social media after she suggested in an interview with Fox 32 Chicago that the Loyola University Chicago student was in the “wrong place at the wrong time” and that she may have “startled” the individual who shot and killed her.
The local Democrat’s comments were slammed as insensitive and also prompted a response from Gorman’s family, who referenced her remarks.
PRITZKER BREAKS SILENCE ON MIGRANT CHARGED IN STUDENT’S MURDER, BLAMES TRUMP FOR ‘POLITICIZING’ CASE
Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden was blasted online over her response to the killing of Sheridan Gorman. (End Wokeness via X/Sheridan G. Gorman via Instagram)
Hadden, a progressive ally of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, released a statement Tuesday saying her interview on Fox 32 had “gone viral on conservative media,” and that her comments were in response to a question comparing Gorman’s murder to a separate 2018 case.
“In an effort to make sense of a senseless situation, I said things that landed wrong with some people,” she said. “My comments were never intended to blame the victim or to imply that Sheridan should not have been out enjoying the park or that it was her fault that she was shot.
“In the interview, I tried my best to share what limited information I had with our community as fast as possible while helping to address the fears people had about the shooting,” Hadden continued. “I sincerely apologize for any additional pain that my comments may have caused.”
MASKED GUNMAN KILLS LOYOLA CHICAGO COLLEGE STUDENT IN SHOOTING NEAR CAMPUS; POLICE HUNT FOR SUSPECT
Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman was killed in Chicago on March 19, 2026. (Sheridan G. Gorman via Instagram))
She added, “The fact that some media outlets are intentionally creating sound bites to misconstrue my words during this tragedy is also unfortunate.”
Gorman’s family referenced Hadden’s remarks from the Fox 32 interview, saying the slain college student “deserved the future that was stolen from her.”
“What happened to Sheridan cannot be reduced to the idea of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is not an abstraction. This is the loss of a daughter. The loss of a sister. The loss of a future filled with milestones that will now never come. Our family is forever changed.”
CHICAGO LAWMAKER RIPPED OVER ‘DISGUSTING’ RESPONSE TO COLLEGE STUDENT KILLED BY ALLEGED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT
Sheridan Gorman, a New York native, was reportedly only a few months away from completing her freshman year at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. (Sheridan G. Gorman via Instagram)
The family added: “We cannot accept a world where moments like this become something people grow used to. We cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to violence. When we begin to accept these tragedies as inevitable, we all become vulnerable to them. Apathy is not harmless—it allows these moments to repeat.”
Jose Medina-Medina was arrested and charged with Gorman’s murder.
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Medina is an illegal immigrant who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration before being apprehended and released into the country.
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DHS said the 25-year-old Venezuelan national was previously arrested for shoplifting in Chicago.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
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