American voters must want polarized, divisive, partisan representatives in office. After all, that’s who they keep electing, right? That’s how democracy works?
I see some version of this argument many times a day in debates about polarization, partisan gridlock, and whether moderation or ideological appeals are the best strategy. While technically true, the statement ignores how parties use primaries and gerrymandering to restrict voters' choices. The result is a hyper-partisan Congress that accomplishes less over time, with a 12 percent approval rating and the confidence of fewer than a third of Americans.
Parties fare little better; 43 percent of voters are dissatisfied with both parties, only 30 percent are satisfied with Republicans, and 23 percent with Democrats.
It’s easy to write these patterns off as a recent problem, but the trends that put us here go back much further.
In 1998, 40 percent of House districts could be considered “competitive,” defined as the district’s preferred presidential candidate winning by less than 10 points. By 2024, post-Census redistricting efforts to gerrymander more “safe” seats for one party or the other slashed that figure in half. It will be even lower in 2026 after unprecedented midterm gerrymandering. Somewhere south of 20 percent of voters will have any reasonable expectation that their congressional seat’s general election is actually competitive.
The other 80-something percent of districts will, in effect, elect their representatives in the primaries. While Republicans started the current gerrymandering race to the bottom, both parties have participated over time, bartering for safe congressional seats with squiggly lines and litigation costs after each of the last several Census counts.
This month, small proportions of voters in 15 states will go to the polls for congressional primaries. Party rules will prevent many from voting in the only competitive election their district will hold this year. Most voters will skip the process entirely.
We’ve heard a lot about record-breaking primary turnout in 2025 and 2026, but remember that record-breaking turnout for primaries is a low bar. Only 24 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the March Texas primary—but that broke all recent midterm primary turnout records. About 12 percent of registered voters turned out for each party, meaning that in a safe district, 12 percent will determine the representative for everyone.
In New Jersey’s safe Democratic 11th District, vacated by Mikie Sherrill when she won the gubernatorial race, 11 percent of voters turned out to vote in the special Democratic primary election to replace her in Congress. The winner received fewer than 20,000 votes in the 13-candidate race and went on to win the noncompetitive general election easily. That means around 3 percent of the district's 600,000 registered voters determined who represents all of them.
Of course, more voters could participate in primary elections than typically do. But structural and information barriers frequently discourage turnout.
The largest barrier is party registration. Of the 15 states with primaries in June, about half of the contests are closed to anyone not registered with a party. That means that if you’re a Republican living in a safe Democratic district, you have no voice in the primary that actually chooses the representative. Independents who decline to register with a party cannot vote in any primary in these “closed” systems.
If there is an incumbent in the safe seat, forget any real primary competition, anyway. Running for Congress generally requires at least tacit support from the party structure that controls most of the resources a candidate needs—and challenging incumbents usually means no resources unless the incumbent is uniquely problematic.
If a safe seat is open, as in Sherrill’s district, it can quickly devolve into a multi-candidate free-for-all in the primary of the party that controls the seat. That creates a high bar for voters to know enough to form a preference among several candidates with similar policy views, and campaigns and PACs focus only on educating people who have voted in primaries before.
Meanwhile, voters are less likely than ever to align with a party. The most common party affiliation in Gallup’s data is independent, which averaged 45 percent in 2025, although many of those will lean to a side if pushed. In states with party-preference voter registration, the number of new voters opting out of all parties is rising.
When representatives are functionally chosen by 3 percent of a district’s registered voters in a partisan primary, and large numbers of voters are dissatisfied and refuse to align with the parties, it is simply inaccurate to say that voters are getting the representation they asked for.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is an independent pollster and consultant.
