Politics

The Death of Competition in American Elections

Published

1 year ago

February 23, 2025

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.”

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Politics

Video: Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces

Published

5 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Video: Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces

new video loaded: Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces

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Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces

At a Pentagon news conference, top defense officials said that the U.S. military was sending more forces to the Middle East and expects to “take additional losses.” Earlier, President Trump said that the U.S. could continue striking Iran for the next four to five weeks.

: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat. Destroy the navy. No nukes. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take. Four weeks. Two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives we’ve set out to achieve.” “We expect to take additional losses. And as always, we will work to minimize U.S. losses. But as the secretary said, this is major combat operations.” Reporter: “Are there currently any American boots on the ground in Iran?” “No, but we’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do. I think — it’s one of those fallacies for a long time that this department or presidents or others should tell the American people. This — and our enemies by the way — here’s exactly what we’ll do. Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody, what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective?”
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At a Pentagon news conference, top defense officials said that the U.S. military was sending more forces to the Middle East and expects to “take additional losses.” Earlier, President Trump said that the U.S. could continue striking Iran for the next four to five weeks.

By Christina Kelso

March 2, 2026

Politics

Gas prices could jump as Middle East tensions threaten global oil supply

Published

6 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Gas prices could jump as Middle East tensions threaten global oil supply

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Americans could soon see higher gas prices as escalating tensions in the Middle East threaten a critical global oil chokepoint, raising fears of supply disruptions that could quickly reverberate across U.S. energy markets.

After joint U.S.–Israeli strikes, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, targeted Iranian sites over the weekend and killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, concerns quickly shifted to how Tehran might respond and whether oil infrastructure or tanker traffic could become collateral damage.

Any disruption to global crude supplies could translate into higher costs for American drivers at the pump.

“Every time we’ve had flare-ups in the Middle East like we’re seeing right now — and we’ve seen this kind of situation periodically over the last 50 years — it has caused significant disruption to energy markets,” economist Stephen Moore told Fox News Digital.

“I would expect we could see anywhere from 25 to 50 cents a gallon increase in gas prices in the short term,” he said.

Experts say Americans will likely pay more for gas due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. (Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Market data already shows prices moving higher.

Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said oil prices were up $5 per barrel, while wholesale gasoline prices had risen 11 cents per gallon.

He expects retail gas prices to begin climbing immediately, especially in areas where stations tend to adjust prices in sharp, periodic jumps.

The national average could hit $3 per gallon as soon as Monday, De Haan said, with some stations increasing prices by 10 to 30 cents this week and potentially more in markets that see larger price swings.

Moore warned that prices could climb further and remain elevated if vital transit routes or oil facilities are disrupted.

TRUMP PLEDGES TO ‘AVENGE’ FALLEN US SERVICE MEMBERS AS TENSIONS WITH IRAN INTENSIFY

The ongoing conflict in Iran is near a major energy corridor. (Contributor/Getty Images)

“Huge amounts of global oil travel through the Strait of Hormuz, so this could be incredibly disruptive, delaying delivery of oil and gas,” he said.

“The Iranians have already knocked out some oil facilities in the Middle East, and who knows what they’re up to next. When you have less supply, prices go up. The big question is whether this will be a temporary bump or something more prolonged.”

The ongoing conflict sits near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most strategically important energy corridors.

“This shipping route represents around 25% of global oil trade and 23% of liquefied natural gas trade,” explained Jaime Brito, executive director of refining and oil products at OPIS.

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping lane between Iran and Oman that has long been a flashpoint during regional crises, serves as a vital artery for global energy markets.

Roughly 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products — about one-fifth of global oil supply — transit the strait each day, underscoring how disruption there can quickly send shockwaves through international energy markets.

HORMUZ ERUPTS: ATTACKS, GPS JAMMING, HOUTHI THREATS ROCK STRAIT AMID US-ISRAELI STRIKES

A satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global energy supply, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. (Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025/Amanda Macias/Fox News Digital)

Highlighting the growing concern, Maersk, widely regarded as a bellwether for global ocean freight, said it will suspend all vessel crossings through the Strait of Hormuz until further notice and cautioned that services to Arabian Gulf ports may be delayed.

Still, not all price movements are immediate.

“Developments over the weekend in the Middle East should hypothetically take time to ripple into the global supply chain. An initial assessment would suggest no specific price impacts should be seen in the gasoline market across the world, including the U.S.,” Brito told Fox News Digital.

However, Brito said prices could climb quickly if markets expect trouble ahead, even before supplies are actually affected.

As a result, Brito said, developments in Iran may have already translated into higher gasoline, diesel and other fuel prices in parts of the U.S., depending on regional supply dynamics and individual company pricing strategies.

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Experts say the increase in gas prices will be largely determined by how long the conflict in the Middle East lasts. (John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

From a domestic standpoint, Brito added that gasoline prices follow a seasonal pattern, typically climbing during the summer travel months.

“March prices are not expected to be significantly high,” he said, noting that spring break travel could support demand in certain areas — but not at the level seen during peak summer driving season.

Ultimately, the direction of gasoline prices will depend less on seasonal demand and more on how the geopolitical situation unfolds in the days ahead.

Amanda covers the intersection of business and politics for Fox News Digital.

Politics

Iran’s supreme leader killed in U.S.-Israeli attack, Trump says

Published

7 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Iran’s supreme leader killed in U.S.-Israeli attack, Trump says

TEHRAN — The U.S. and Israel pummeled Iran early Saturday in an attack aimed at razing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions and thwarting its efforts to influence the Middle East though proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the attack, according to President Trump, who in a post on Truth Social wrote that “one of the most evil people in History, is dead. This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans.”

More than 200 people were killed in Iran and hundreds more injured, according to Iran’s Red Crescent.

The attacks spurred a furious Iranian retaliation, with multiple barrages striking Israel, a number of Gulf nations and Jordan; and fulfilled long-standing fears that a confrontation with Iran would plunge the entire region into war.

Reports of Khamenei’s death prompted diverse reactions worldwide: In portions of Tehran and Los Angeles, home to a large Persian population, people took to the streets to celebrate. In New York, protesters gathered at Times Square to denounce the attack.

The attack came eight weeks after U.S. forces deployed by Trump toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Trump said Saturday’s operation also presented a chance for regime change.

Addressing the Iranian people, Trump said, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Trump made the comments in an eight-minute prerecorded video. “This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said, adding, “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight.”

The Iranian government confirmed Khamenei’s death.

The attacks began with Israeli strikes Saturday morning — a workday in Iran — on Tehran, the capital, with residents speaking of attacks near Khamenei’s compound, the presidential palace, Iran’s National Security Council, the ministries of defense and intelligence, the Atomic Energy Organization and a military complex.

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In Tehran there were scenes of panic, with residents racing to stock up on supplies, leaving shelves bare in grocery stores across the city. Others, heeding warnings from authorities of further strikes, decided to leave the capital. Images on social media showed highways leading out of Tehran choked with traffic.

“It’s going to take 10 hours at least, but it doesn’t matter,” said Zainab, who was loading her car with whatever she could stuff inside for the drive to her sister’s home in Iran’s northeast.

By the end of the day, the streets of Tehran appeared all but abandoned, with residents hunkering down for a night punctuated by the sounds of blasts reverberating across the capital.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a vociferous advocate for attacking Iran — and who has spent years urging Washington to do so — said the campaign would continue “as long as needed.”

Trump, who long insisted Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, also addressed Iran’s efforts in the Middle East in his video message.

“We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world, and attack our forces,” he said. “And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Trump also said U.S. military forces “may have casualties,” adding, “That often happens in war.”

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, in a statement, said that “Iranians have never surrendered to aggression.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who was leading Iran’s delegation in Oman-brokered negotiations, said the war on Iran was “wholly unprovoked, illegal and illegitimate.”

“Our powerful armed forces are prepared for this day and will teach the aggressors the lesson they deserve,” he wrote on X.

Iranians protest on Saturday in Tehran against attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States.

Israel’s military said its attacks were the largest military flyover in its history, with some 200 warplanes dropping hundreds of munitions on about 500 objectives.

Outside of Tehran, explosions could be heard in other cities, including Isfahan, Karaj, Kermanshah, Qom and Urmia, according to Iranian state media. An attack on the city of Minab struck a girls’ school, killing at least 85 students and injuring dozens of others, state-run media said.

Iran’s Red Crescent later said 201 people were killed in attacks across the country, and that 24 out of Iran’s 32 provinces were hit. More than 700 people were injured.

Cellphone and internet communications were disrupted shortly after the attacks began but have since been restored.

Iran struck back across the Middle East, with barrages reported on U.S. bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Debris from one of those missiles killed one person in the UAE; another struck a hotel in Dubai. A Kuwaiti airport was hit, but no injuries were reported.

Iran also dispatched multiple waves of missiles to Israel, with residents in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon seeing vapor trails crisscrossing the skies above and the explosive sounds of interceptions.

The waves of ordnance spurred airspace closures across the region, with many airlines suspending service to affected countries and leaving tens of thousands of people stranded.

Araghchi informed his Iraqi counterpart, Fuad Hussein, on Saturday that Tehran will limit its response to U.S. military bases in the region, and that Iran was acting in self-defense.

But the attacks nevertheless infuriated Arab governments. Many came out with statements excoriating Iran for what they described as an unprovoked attack on their sovereignty.

Russia, whose ties with Iran have deepened in recent years, demanded Israel and the U.S. halt military operations. According to the Associated Press, U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said, “We insist on the immediate resumption of political and diplomatic settlement efforts … based on international law, mutual respect and a balance of interests.”

In a sign of the rapidly expanding impact of the war, messages purporting to be from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were sent to ships ordering them to stay away from the Strait of Hormuz with “immediate effect.”

Shutting the strait, a strategic passageway through which one-fifth of global oil supplies pass, would probably lead to an immediate spike in energy prices and disrupt other shipping.

The opening salvos of what promises to be a lengthy campaign come two days after the U.S. and Iran concluded a third round of Oman-brokered negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing tensions and stopping the prospect of war.

On Friday, Trump expressed displeasure with the pace of the talks, saying the Iranian side was not negotiating in “good faith” or giving in to U.S. demands. But Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi said a deal was “within reach.”

On Saturday, Albusaidi expressed dismay that “active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined.”

“Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer,” he said in a statement on X.

The American strikes on Iran drew immediate reaction on Capitol Hill as Democrats and a small bloc of Republicans accused the White House of sidelining Congress on actions they fear will trigger a broader conflict in the Middle East.

“By the president’s own words, ‘American heroes may be lost.’ That alone should have demanded the highest level of scrutiny, deliberation, and accountability, yet the president moved forward without seeking congressional authorization,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) called on lawmakers to back a measure he is co-sponsoring with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that would compel the administration to seek congressional approval before engaging in any further activity in Iran.

“The American people are tired of regime change wars that cost us billions of dollars and risk our lives,” Khanna said in a video posted on X.

As Democrats warned of constitutional overreach, other lawmakers rallied behind the president.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, said in a statement that Trump had taken “decisive action against the threat posed by the world’s leading proliferator of terrorism, the Iranian regime.”

“This is a pivotal and necessary operation to protect Americans and American interests,” Wicker said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio notified some members of Congress’ Gang of Eight, which are the top four leaders in the House and Senate and top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees, according to CBS News.

Bulos reported from El Obeid, Sudan, Ceballos from Washington, D.C., and special correspondent Mostaghim from Tehran.