The Death of Competition in American Elections
23rd February 2025
The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
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.
This is the sort of total horseshit that is constantly peddled by the Narrative Media these days.
Why is ‘competitive general elections’ the touchstone for ‘democracy’? DEMOCRACY, if you look in a decent dictionary or a decent encyclopedia, consists of people having representatives in the legislature who look out for their interests and pursue the sort of government activity that their constituents would pursue if they weren’t busy making a living. That’s why we have ‘representatives’, because everybody can’t spend their days arguing about politics and voting on every question. There is nothing in this understanding of ‘democracy’ that necessarily includes ‘competitive general elections’.
In fact, reality is quite the opposite. A ‘competitive general election’ means that either candidate can win. If either candidate can win, the one who wins DOES NOT REPRESENT THE INTERESTS of a SIGNIFICANT PART of the electorate. This is particularly true in modern politics, in which polarization has gone to the extreme that women are putting in their dating app profiles ‘no MAGA’ or ‘Woke only’. So this scurrilous rag wants us to believe that an election in which a great chunk of the voters ‘lose to Hitler’ is preferable to an election in which that losing demographic is minimized. Which of these sounds more ‘democratic’ to you?
The quiet part that never gets said out loud is that CLICKBAIT MEDIA NEED A HORSE RACE ELECTION to support their business model. If Joe (or Jane) Blow is sure to get elected, then they have nothing to write about and nobody pays any attention to them, just as nobody would bet on a game that pitted the Kansas City Chiefs against Franklin Roosevelt High School.
GERRYMANDERING IS NOT A BUG. GERRYMANDERING IS A FEATURE. The more like-minded voters you cram into a single district (providing that it doesn’t have an unbalanced number of voters compared to other districts), the more sure you are that those voters will get the representative that they prefer. That is not a distortion of ‘democracy’, but more closely approximates its perfection.
Newspapers and TV news shows and political journalists of every stripe want a tense, nail-biting contest that goes down to the wire, and preferably includes a hard-fought recount that winds up in the courts. This is how they make their money; this is how they aggregate the great glowing gobs of attention that is the lifeblood of every TV talking head and scribbler with a byline: ‘Look at me! Look at me! I’m important! I Am Making A Difference!'[tm].
Think it through, and pay no attention to the NPCs in front of the curtain.