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.”
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is making it clear: he’s staying in the race for the Republican Senate nomination even if President Donald Trump endorses Paxton’s rival, longtime Sen. John Cornyn.
“I’m staying in this race,” Paxton said in an interview Wednesday evening. “I owe it to the people of Texas.”
Trump says he’ll soon take sides in the costly and combustible GOP primary showdown Cornyn and Paxton.
“I will be making my Endorsement soon,” the president wrote in a social media post hours after Cornyn and Paxton advanced to a May 26 runoff election.
The two heated rivals topped a crowded field of contenders in Tuesday’s primary, but since no one cleared the 50% threshold, the nomination race heads into overtime.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, second from left, President Donald Trump, center, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), second from right, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, right, take part in a briefing on energy at the Port of Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi, Texas, Feb, 27, 2026. (Mandel NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump added that he “will be asking the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE!”
A Republican operative in Trump’s political orbit told Fox News Digital it’s expected Cornyn will get the president’s endorsement. However, the president has been known to change his mind on candidates or even reverse endorsements.
A second source in Trump’s political orbit told Fox News that while there’s still jockeying to influence the president’s decision, given Cornyn’s better-than-expected performance in the primary, Trump is expected to back the senator and prevent a messy and expensive runoff.
CONTENTIOUS REPUBLICAN SENATE PRIMARY IN TEXAS HEADED INTO OVERTIME
Asked if he would end his Senate bid if Trump backed Cornyn, Paxton, a MAGA firebrand and longtime Trump supporter and ally, said no in an interview with Real America’s Voice.
“I’ve spent a year of my life campaigning against John Cornyn because John has not represented the people of Texas well,” Paxton argued. “He’s been against Trump in both of his elections, said he shouldn’t run last time. … The people of Texas, at least the Republicans, would like something different.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks during a primary election night watch party March 3, 2026, in Dallas. (Julio Cortez/The Associated Press )
And a source in Paxton’s political orbit emphasized to Fox News Digital that the Texas attorney general isn’t getting out of the race.
Cornyn or Paxton will face off in the general election against rising Democratic Party star state Rep. James Talarico, who topped progressive firebrand Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a vocal Trump critic, in the Democrats’ primary. Talarico is trying to become the first Democrat in nearly four decades to win a Senate election in right-leaning Texas.
‘OPEN BORDERS, TRUMP-HATING RADICAL’—REPUBLICANS QUICKLY POUNCE ON TALARICO
The 2026 Senate showdown in Texas is one of a handful across the country that could determine if Republicans hold their majority in the chamber in the midterm elections. The GOP currently controls the chamber 53–47.
The Cornyn campaign and aligned super PACs spent nearly $100 million to run ads attacking Paxton and Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt — who came in third — with the senator charging in the closing weeks of the primary campaign that Democrats would flip the seat in the general election if Paxton was the GOP’s nominee.
Cornyn, his allies and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm of the Senate GOP, repeatedly pointed to the slew of scandals and legal problems that have battered Paxton over the past decade, as well as his ongoing messy divorce.
“Over the next 12 weeks, Texas Republican primary voters will hear more about my record of delivering conservative victories in the United States Senate, and learn more about Ken’s indefensible personal behavior and failures in office,” Cornyn told reporters on Tuesday night.
“Just like the primary, we have a plan to win the runoff, and we are in the process of executing it,” Cornyn said. “Judgment day is coming for Ken Paxton.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, speaks during a campaign stop in The Woodlands, Texas, Feb. 28, 2026. (Annie Mulligan/AP Photo)
Paxton, a MAGA firebrand and longtime Trump supporter and ally who grabbed significant national attention by filing lawsuits against the Obama and Biden administrations, told supporters on primary night, “As we head into this runoff, we’re going to make the choice even clearer. While John Cornyn was cutting deals on gun control and amnesty, I was suing corrupt Joe Biden over 107 times.”
And he charged, “John Cornyn spent around $100 million trying to buy this seat. We’ve spent around $5 million.”
ROUND TWO OF CORNYN VS. PAXTON GETS UNDER WAY
Trump on Wednesday urged, “for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer. IT MUST STOP NOW!”
And pointing to Talarico, the president argued, “We have an easy to beat, Radical Left Opponent, and we have to TOTALLY FOCUS on putting him away, quickly and decisively.”
State Rep. James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks at a primary election watch party Tuesday, March 3, 2026, in Austin, Texas. (Eric Gay/AP Photo)
“Both John and Ken ran great races, but not good enough. Now, this one, must be PERFECT!” Trump warned.
Trump, whose clout over the GOP remains immense, stayed neutral in the Republican primary race. All three candidates, who sought the president’s endorsement, were in attendance Friday as Trump held an event in Corpus Christi, Texas.
“They’re in a little race together,” Trump said of Cornyn and Paxton. “You know that, right? A little bit of a race. It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people, too.”
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the lobbying campaign to clinch the endorsement for Cornyn hasn’t stopped, and if anything, is intensifying in the hours since primary night.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters that Cornyn had “a great night” against Paxton. The top Senate Republican has spent the last several months bending Trump’s ear at every opportunity to jump into the race and back the longtime incumbent.
“He’s positioned to win the runoff, and if the president endorses early, it saves everybody a lot of money, and a lot of, you know, just 10 weeks of another spirited campaign on our side that keeps us from spending time focusing on the Democrats,” Thune said.
Thune spoke with Cornyn on Wednesday morning, and believed that Talarico was the more formidable match-up for Republicans in November — one that Cornyn was better suited to win.
“The matchup that’s good for us is John Cornyn at the top of the ticket,” Thune said.
NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez told Fox News Digital, “John Cornyn remains the only candidate who guarantees state Rep. Talarico never becomes a United States senator and ensures the fight for President Trump’s Senate majority is waged in true battleground states, not Texas.”
And the Thune-aligned Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the top super PAC backing Senate Republicans, which spent millions on behalf of Cornyn in the primary campaign, made it clear in a statement early Wednesday that it will continue to support the senator in the runoff.
“SLF and its sister organizations were proud to support Senator Cornyn early, and we look forward to him securing the Republican nomination on May 26,” the group’s executive director, Alex Latcham, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, a GOP political operative in Trump’s orbit told Fox News Digital, “Talarico being the nominee makes President Trump’s endorsement of Cornyn more important than ever.”
While Trump stayed neutral, his top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, helped the Cornyn campaign. And veteran Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who served as co-campaign manager of Trump’s 2024 White House bid, consulted for a top Cornyn-aligned super PAC.
LaCivita, in a social media post Tuesday night aimed at Paxton and his top political consultant, wrote, “The second wave is going to be a (bi–h.)”
But on the Paxton side of the playing field, operatives and donors are confident they can unseat the senator.
Dan Eberhart, an oil drilling chief executive officer and prominent Republican donor and bundler who supports Paxton, told Fox News Digital, “This was Cornyn’s shot to fend off his challenger by getting over 50%, and he couldn’t do it. The runoff voters will be even less friendly territory for Cornyn.”
Pointing to former longtime Senate GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has often acted as a Trump foil, Eberhart said, “This race is about MAGA vs. McConnell.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks to supporters at a campaign event on primary eve, in Waco, Texas on March 2, 2026. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
Meanwhile, Lone Star Liberty, a pro-Paxton super PAC, circulated a memo ahead of Tuesday’s election that shrugged off threats that Cornyn would succeed in the runoff by continuing to hammer the attorney general over his litany of scandals, arguing there was nothing new to offer.
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“Cornyn’s talk of ‘unleashing’ new attacks in the runoff is bluster,” the memo states. “The truth is that from day one, his forces fired every bullet they had. There are no new attacks left — only more of the same, at ever-greater cost and with ever-diminishing returns.”
Fox News’ Rich Edson contributed to this report
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Paramount’s $111-billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery will put two of the most storied journalism brands — CNN and CBS News — under one roof.
The combination has been proposed before with the aim of consolidating news-gathering costs. Those plans fell apart largely over who would be in control.
But if the Paramount-WBD transaction is approved by regulators, CNN and CBS News will be forced into potentially rocky marriage where they will have to sort out leadership roles, personnel and editorial direction.
It’s still too early to determine what those moves will be and how widely they will be felt.
Last week CNN Chief Executive Mark Thompson told his troops to avoid “jumping to conclusions about the future.”
But what is certain is that every permutation will be scrutinized closely due to the fraught relationships both CNN and CBS News have with the Trump administration.
“There have been many conversations over the years about combining CBS News and CNN,” said Jon Klein, a digital media entrepreneur who previously held leadership roles at both organizations. “But this time, it’s different. The business case always made sense — but today you’ve got the overlay of the political agenda.”
Before Paramount prevailed in its bid for CNN’s parent, Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison’s father Larry Ellison reportedly discussed changes to the network with Trump. For years, Trump has made CNN the poster child of his “fake news” claims and impugned many of its journalists.
“What has David Ellison and Larry Ellison promised Donald Trump with regard to what they’re going to do with CNN?” said one former executive. “Before you even get through the hurdles of doing this, that’s the overriding question. Are they going to fire anchors Trump doesn’t like?”
There is also apprehension at CBS News, where David Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in October, with a mandate to have network’s coverage appeal to the political center.
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss with Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk at a town hall that aired Dec. 20.
(CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images)
Weiss — founder of the independent media company The Free Press — came into the role with no experience running a TV news organization, building her reputation as an opinion writer with contrarian views and a disdain for woke ideology.
The former New York Times opinion writer, who is staunchly pro-Israel, drew criticism over the weekend for putting a fire emoji over a comment criticizing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s condemnation of the U.S. military action in Iran — an unusual public reaction for the head of a major news organization.
Weiss wasted no time taking on the prestigious CBS news magazine “60 Minutes,” which has long been a stubbornly independent operation. She delayed a story on the harsh El Salvador prison used by the U.S. to house undocumented migrants saying it needed more reporting. The story’s correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi accused CBS News management of placating the White House, turning the decision into a public relations fiasco for the network.
Significant changes are coming to “60 Minutes” later this spring, with one or more of its correspondents possibly being replaced, according to people familiar with Weiss’ plans who were not authorized to comment. Weiss has also expressed interest in hiring right-leaning on-air talent for CBS News.
Some CBS News leadership is already heading for the exit. Shana Thomas, longtime “CBS Mornings” executive producer, told staff Thursday she is leaving at the end of the month. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and frankly, I’m tired y’all,” she wrote in a memo.
Weiss arrived after Paramount settled a Trump lawsuit with the dubious claim that a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to aid her 2024 presidential election campaign against him.
The willingness to settle the suit was largely seen as Paramount capitulating to Trump in order to get government approval of its merger with Skydance Media. The Ellisons’ tight relationship with Trump was also seen as an asset in their successful pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery.
The stew of issues bubbling through the transactions is why most of the rank and file at CNN rooted for Netflix to prevail in its bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. The Netflix bid for WBD did not include CNN or the company’s cable networks, which in the words of one insider would have made it “a stay of execution.”
Now CNN staffers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, are bracing for upheaval. When they look at CBS News navigating the changes under Weiss, they are reminded what they went through after Warner Bros. Discovery took over their network and tried to push the coverage to the center.
After a declaration by WBD Chief Executive David Zaslav that the network needed to be more accommodating to conservative voices — and the telecast of a rowdy Trump town hall — CNN experienced an exodus of viewers.
But the biggest fear that the merger brings is consolidation and the loss of jobs. CNN has 3,400 employees while CBS News is at around 1,000. Cost-cutting is expected to be aggressive across the combined Paramount-WBD, which will have a mountain of debt to service.
The parent companies of CBS and CNN have discussed merging or sharing news-gathering operations and on-air talent numerous times over several decades. In 2019, Viacom, the CBS News parent at the time, had a deal in place to pay CNN an annual license fee to provide international coverage.
Under that plan, CBS would have maintained a few of its signature overseas correspondents, while shuttering its bureaus around the world. But Viacom backed out of the deal.
CNN’s international coverage has long been its calling card and its likely the network will handle that reporting for CBS News once Paramount takes ownership.
Combining the news-gathering operation stateside will be trickier, as CBS News has employees and vendors that operate under contracts with the Writers Guild of America East, SAG-AFTRA and other unions. CNN is a non-union shop.
Resolving the union issue has been a snag in every previous discussion to combine CBS News and CNN over the years, according to several former executives at both outlets.
CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper in New York in 2016.
(Associated Press)
Another development worth watching is what role Anderson Cooper will play in the merged operation. Cooper signed a new deal with CNN last year, but turned down an offer to remain as a “60 Minutes” correspondent, a role he’s had since 2007.
CBS News has pursued Cooper several times over the years to be its evening news anchor. There was even a proposal in 2018 for him to helm “CBS Evening News” while keeping his nightly prime time program on CNN. That idea was shot down at CNN, where leadership believed he was unique to the network’s brand.
In a statement, Cooper cited a desire to spend more time with his two children as the reason for passing on another “60 Minutes” deal. However, associates have said his wariness over the direction of CBS News under Weiss made his decision easier.
Now Cooper is likely headed into the CNN-CBS News tent, which may make him feel a bit like Michael Corleone in “Godfather III” when he said “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
new video loaded: Senate Republicans Block Limits to Trump’s War Powers
transcript
transcript
Senate Republicans Block Limits to Trump’s War Powers
Senate Republicans voted against a Democratic bill that would have required President Trump to obtain congressional authorization to continue waging war against Iran.
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“The yeas are 47. The nays are 53. The motion to discharge is not approved.” “President Trump decided to attack Iran. That decision was profound, deliberate and correct. The president understands the weight of war.” “Why is Donald Trump hellbent on making history repeat itself? Why is he plunging America headfirst into a war that Americans do not want, and which he cannot even explain? The American people deserve a say, and that is what our resolution is about.”
By Shawn Paik
March 5, 2026
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