Ashley Lopez

There are more people who are registering as independents than part of either party.

So that is like a whole swath of voters who are just pretty much either ignored or not heavily factored in their lawmakers' thinking.

Sure.

So let's look at 2024.

So it was calculated that just 7 percent of voters elected essentially 87 percent of U.S.

House races.

So this is a very small sliver of people who vote who have actually had a meaningful outcome on who has power in Congress.

And so let's look at this year.

So we're coming into this year's midterm elections where the Cook Political Report says that just 18 out of 435 races are actual toss ups where either party could win.

And if even you were to expand that to like districts that maybe lean a little bit in one direction or the other, that's still just 36.

So we're looking at less than 10 percent of races where races are even a little bit competitive or fully competitive.

And compared to

Trump's first term, there were 48 of those kinds of seats.

So we are seeing a marked difference in the number of seats.

I mean, who has power in Congress is ultimately decided by a very small number of seats.

That kind of decline in the number of competitive seats is pretty meaningful.

Yeah.

And another added issue here is that primary voters, because of the way this is all structured, just don't look like the broader electorate that you would see in November.

Right.

They tend to be older, wider, more affluent and more partisan, more ideologically like aligned with the base of the party.