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.”
GOP scrambles to replace Sen. Lindsey Graham
Former Kevin McCarthy communications director Mark Bednar discusses the urgent political scramble to replace Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. He emphasizes President Donald Trump and Gov. McMaster’s need to quickly coordinate an interim appointment and rally around a strong Republican candidate for the impending special election. Potential candidates include Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Rep. Russell Fry, with warnings against infighting.
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President Donald Trump teased who he may like to see as a long-term replacement for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., as a special election to lock in a candidate for the seat fast approaches.
Private and public jockeying is already underway to snag Trump’s coveted endorsement in the special election, which is slated for Aug. 11, with two lawmakers already expressing interest in launching a campaign.
And as members of the South Carolina GOP congressional delegation and beyond line up for the race, the president hinted that he may already have a favorite: Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C.
GRAHAM ALLY RIPS ‘THIRSTY’ REPUBLICANS JOCKEYING TO REPLACE LATE SENATOR
Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on the way back to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 4, 2026. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
“I think Russell Fry, a young congressman, is outstanding, and that could happen. I could see that happening,” Trump told Newsmax on Monday night. “I think he’s a very, very talented person.”
Trump backed Fry in his first bid for Congress in 2022, where he toppled former Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., in the primary. Rice was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill.
‘THE HALLS OF THE SENATE ALREADY FEEL EMPTY’: TEARFUL THUNE HONORS LINDSEY GRAHAM AS SISTER TAKES HIS SEAT
“He took the place of somebody that was — I mean, he’s doing much better than the person that preceded him,” Trump said. “He’s been very popular in the state, so I think a name like Russell Fry is somebody you can watch out for and there are probably some others.”
Trump’s comments on Fry come after Politico reported that the lawmaker has been communicating with the White House about a run and was viewed as a top contender for the president’s stamp of approval. Fox News Digital did not immediately hear back from the White House or Fry on whether he’s being eyed for the special election.
LINDSEY GRAHAM’S SISTER APPOINTED TO SENATE AS GOP RUSHES TO PROTECT FRAGILE MAJORITY
Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C., arrives for a House Republican Conference caucus meeting at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington on May 13, 2026. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
In the meantime, Trump threw his support behind Graham’s sister, Sen.-designate Darline Graham, to take over the lawmaker’s seat for the remainder of his term. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her on Monday, and she’ll be sworn in to the role Tuesday afternoon.
Trump said that he believed Graham would be there “only on an interim basis.”
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Meanwhile, Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., are eyeing the race, too. Norman has gone so far as to ask Trump for his endorsement.
Both Mace and Norman failed to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in South Carolina, which ultimately went to South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who toppled Trump-backed South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pam Evette.
Politics
Commentary: Two Lorenzos from Mexico. One fulfilled his American dream. ICE killed the other
They were Mexican immigrants, both named Lorenzo.
They came to this country without papers as teenagers. Lack of legal status didn’t stop them from building beautiful lives — a wife, a home, a loving dog. A blue-collar job that paid the bills, weekend carne asadas with friends and family, children who followed their father’s example of hard work.
The Lorenzos enjoyed the fruits of their labor in their adopted land, even as they battled to become American citizens while politicians demonized immigrants as invaders and worse.
Lorenzo Arellano arrived in the United States in 1968 and didn’t get his citizenship until nearly 30 years later. Back then, the path to naturalization was far easier.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived in the early 1990s, when those opportunities were becoming severely limited.
Lorenzo Arellano is my father, a happily retired truck driver living in Anaheim.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, who ran his own construction crew, was on his way to a job with his brother and two other men when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him dead on July 7 in Houston.
When I see a photo of Salgado Araujo beaming in front of a cake with the number 52 on it at the well-kept home he built with his own hands, I’m reminded that we’ll be celebrating my father’s 75th birthday next month. When I see video of Salgado Araujo’s feet twitching on the ground with two ICE agents next to him as he bleeds out and moans for help, I weep.
Only geography, age and Donald Trump separated the Lorenzos. Even their children — he had three boys, while my father had two boys and two girls — are similar. The Salgado Araujos, like the Arellanos, are college-educated. The eldest son, Ronaldo, is a teacher like my sisters. He wears glasses like me and is now telling the story of his father to the nation, as I have for decades.
I write about my Papi as the puckish personification of immigrant America.
Ronaldo is eulogizing his dad way too soon.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said proudly at a news conference the day after his father’s death — words I’ve always said about my Papi. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE’” — words I hope to never utter but can sadly see as a possibility given la migra’s unapologetic shoot-first approach and indiscriminate targeting of anyone brown.
Salgado Araujo’s killing came as part of the Trump administration’s newest deportation surge — the New York Times reported that the feds have arrested nearly 2,000 people a day since the end of June. The rate is higher than ICE’s campaign of terror last summer, yet it hasn’t drawn the same attention, fulfilling the promise of newish Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that la migra would operate far more quietly and efficiently than under his reckless predecessor, Kristi Noem.
Those quiet times are over.
Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, dries his tears while talking at a news conference on July 8 in Houston. His father was shot and killed by ICE agents the day before.
(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)
Vigils are popping up across the country in Salgado Araujo’s name. Stories about his life and death have replaced those about Mexico’s World Cup run on my social media timelines. They are heartbreaking, infuriating and a baleful reminder for Mexican Americans that these last five weeks of soccer, as joyful as they were, didn’t change our precarious status in this country under President Trump.
“He deserved to live a quiet life as a husband, a father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” Ronaldo said at the news conference through tears as his younger brother, Lorenzo Jr., comforted him. That their father never will — that the Department of Homeland Security is now smearing his name by claiming he “weaponized” his van by trying to run over an agent, even though video evidence proves no such thing — is the latest indictment against the Trump administration’s cruelty toward the undocumented.
Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the target of ICE’s operation. His family said he had applied for a work permit and was on his way toward finally obtaining legal status.
We should heed Ronaldo’s words about his father. As people protest and seek justice, we should also hail the life of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo the way we one day will hail the life of Lorenzo Arellano — as Mexicans who made it, challenges be damned. And we should continue to fight for immigrants who remain in legal limbo, afraid for their lives more than ever.
I called my father to ask how he felt about a tocayo — someone with the same first name — losing his life to la migra.
“I put myself in his place and lament that ese [that] Lorenzo couldn’t get the citizenship that I could,” Papi said in Spanish.
He remembered how immigration agents “did it with respect” when they caught him living in this country illegally in the 1970s and 1980s.
“They asked you for your papers, and if you didn’t have them, they put handcuffs on you, you got deported and that was that. None of these beatings or shootings that are happening now under Trump,” he said. The worst it ever got was when he said he was going to Los Angeles, and an agent snapped that he was going to L.A. but now had to return to Mexico.
Papi asked me what justification ICE has offered for killing Salgado Araujo.
“I hope they put those people who killed him in prison for many years,” he said with disgust. “Will they?”
I replied that probably wasn’t going to happen. ICE has shot and killed 11 people during Trump’s second term, both citizens and noncitizens, and scores more have died in immigration detention. No agents have faced charges for any of these deaths. The agents involved in Salgado Araujo’s killing didn’t even have dashboard cameras or body cameras, a convenient oversight that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed on “multiple government shutdowns.”
“Pues, Dios sabe que todo se paga en la vida,” my dad responded. Well, God knows you reap what you sow.
Ronaldo Salgado and Lorenzo Jr., sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, hold a photograph of their father during a news conference July 8 in Houston.
(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)
Nothing can bring Lorenzo Salgado Araujo back to his loved ones. But I hope they find solace in his namesake, St. Lawrence. Tradition has it that Roman authorities roasted the Spanish deacon to death after Emperor Valerian demanded that he turn over the treasures of the Church. Instead, Lawrence presented the emperor with the city’s poor and maligned, insisting that he confront the oppression he had forced on them.
May we remember Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as a modern-day martyr, killed because our government refused to give him and so many others a chance at living in this country without fear.
May his name resonate through the ages as embodying the promise and tragedy of the American dream.
Politics
Hegseth announces joint task force with DOJ to prosecute leaks to journalists ‘with the full force of the law’
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Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Monday announced the creation of a joint task force with the Department of Justice to identify and prosecute officials who leak “sensitive information” to the media.
Hegseth said the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) may request and receive all information, support and records across the department regarding news media leak investigations.
“To combat the dangers that leaks pose, effectively immediately, I have delegated tasking authority to the war department’s office of general counsel, empowering OGC to request and receive all information, records and support across the department concerning media leak investigations,” he said in a video shared on X.
“Leaked information risks lives, these new tools and processes will greatly assist us in protecting our joint force,” Hegseth continued. “The security of our nation cannot be a bargaining chip for those who seek momentary headlines, access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, and those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUBPOENAS NY TIMES JOURNALISTS IN GRAND JURY LEAK PROBE TIED TO AIR FORCE ONE REPORT
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Monday announced a joint task force with the Department of Justice to identify and prosecute leakers. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
The secretary also thanked Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche for his support, adding that he was “proud that our departments are working together closer than we have ever before.”
Hegseth’s announcement comes just days after the DOJ issued subpoenas to four reporters at The New York Times, attempting to force them to testify before a federal grand jury after the newspaper reported on the security concerns involving the plane gifted to President Donald Trump by Qatar that he flew on to Turkey for a recent NATO summit.
The subpoenas were widely criticized by The New York Times, journalists at various news outlets and press freedom groups, arguing that the Trump administration is attempting to intimidate reporters conducting legitimate news-gathering about the government.
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The announcement comes just days after the DOJ issued subpoenas to four reporters at The New York Times. (Kevin Wolf/AP)
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” an attorney for the newspaper, David McCraw, said in a statement.
“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” McCraw added. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
Since taking over as head of the Pentagon last year, Hegseth has sought to crack down on leaks to the media.
Last year, the department opened investigations into those accused of leaking classified information to the press and threatened to conduct polygraphs to identify leakers.
The secretary thanked Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche for his support. (Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)
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Hegseth has also attempted to impose restrictions on reporters covering the Pentagon. He had forced them to sign a pledge stating that they would not solicit any unauthorized material, even if the information was unclassified. Most Pentagon reporters turned in their press badges rather than accept the department’s restrictions on news-gathering.
That policy is facing lawsuits, and a judge last month granted a preliminary injunction, ruling that the department’s requirement that journalists be accompanied by an official chaperone at all times violated the First Amendment in response to a case brought by The New York Times.
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