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Chapter 1: What trend is reducing bipartisanship in Congress?
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Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
I'm Sam Greenglass. I cover Congress.
And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.
And today on the show, a political trend that experts say is killing bipartisanship and making government work worse. Ashley, you have some reporting this week that shows that this trend was actually really heightened by the redistricting arm race that we saw last year. Can you explain all this?
Yeah. So basically what we found is that this redistricting fight that was started by Trump when he asked Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map so that there were more favorable seats for Republicans in the state. And then, you know, obviously that prompted other Republican states to do the same.
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Chapter 2: How did redistricting impact electoral competitiveness?
And Democrats countered with maps that favored their party in other states, including California. This has created a situation where really no party now has like a significant edge electorally coming into the midterms.
But what it did do was it created the situation where there are fewer competitive seats now, meaning there are more seats that will pretty much be settled by primary elections and not those general elections in November because those were drawn to quite explicitly favor one party over the other.
Got it. So like super red districts or super blue districts as opposed to the districts that actually have a chance of going either direction. Why does that actually matter?
Well, I mean, let's look at from the voter side, right? Like if you're like a blue voter in one of those red districts, like what incentive do you have? in November to go vote, like you just feel like a little bit like not represented, like there's no real person on your side who has any sort of fighting chance to represent you.
You pretty much only have some power in deciding who wins the primary. It means that you don't have like really a say in where power goes in Congress. And then on the legislative side, like if you're a lawmaker, you pretty much don't have to listen to the part of your electorate that doesn't vote in primary. So meaning not the ideological partisans in your party, the independent voters.
And independent voters are the largest growing electorate in the country.
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Chapter 3: Why are fewer districts competitive in elections?
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.
Yeah. And, you know, because of that, we see lawmakers have way less incentive to compromise when they get to Congress. I just watched this play out at the Capitol in the context of this effort to preserve those expiring Affordable Care Act health subsidies.
In the House, the handful of Republicans and Democrats who were most interested in working across the aisle to cut a deal to try and do something here, they came from the handful of competitive districts that do still exist, but it's really just not many. And so there often aren't enough people to cut these kinds of deals.
OK, so, yeah, this you have fewer competitive districts heading into this election cycle, and that creates what experts call the primary problem, which is that primary voters kind of have an outsized influence over the general feel of the American government right now. Can we zoom in on that a little bit more?
Actually, I know there are numbers about like the amount of voters that actually elect Congress. Do you have any up to date numbers on the extent of the primary problem?
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.
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Chapter 4: What is the primary problem affecting lawmakers' incentives?
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.
Right. I mean, Sam, you saw this firsthand when you were a local reporter in Georgia, right? This kind of decline of competitive districts happening in real time.
Yeah. I mean, I think it can be really helpful here to put a point on what this actually looks like in the real world.
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Chapter 5: How do primary voters influence legislative decisions?
So I lived in Atlanta and the metro Atlanta suburbs were growing a lot in the last decade, becoming more diverse. And Democrats were able to flip to suburban congressional districts, one in 2018 and another in 2020. And then after the 2020 census, Republicans gerrymandered these districts.
And you ended up with, instead of having two pretty competitive districts, you had one very blue one and one really red one. And I heard from so many voters who kind of, like Ashley was talking about earlier, regretted that they did not have a real general election choice. And then you can imagine how that will influence how the members that those districts voted
elect will end up voting in Congress and the types of policies they're going to pursue and the extent to which they're going to be willing to compromise and work across the aisle.
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. Like we're talking about the base of the party, really.
Lawmakers are thinking about that group of people more than they are these low propensity voters who tend to have like a economically different sort of situation. or be more racially or ethnically diverse or younger. So I think that also has an influence in how people govern.
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Chapter 6: What role does Senator Katie Britt play in bipartisanship?
I do feel like this is one of those things that just impacts every aspect of our politics. Well, I don't understand why we're not talking about every single day. I mean, even Sam, every single Congress story is impacted by the fact that the lawmakers voting on every policy are mostly in safe districts and mostly only accountable to their primary voters.
Why do you guys think this isn't a bigger deal?
Well, electoral reform is hard. It's complicated. I think like telling voters that something that is hard to fix is the root of all their problems. It's not a fun conversation to have all the time. And there have been efforts to get at the primary problem from like different angles.
During the Obama years, we saw a rise in the number of redistricting commissions that are aimed to be independent and not connected to politicians in any way, kind of taking the work of drawing districts away from politicians. And then there are efforts to open up primaries as well, meaning allowing those independent voters to have a say in primaries to give them a bigger role.
And those have been a mixed bag in 2024. A lot of the statewide efforts to do this did not pass. A lot of it is because parties message a lot around these issues and parties don't want this to change. They like that they have a lot of power here.
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Chapter 7: How are lawmakers adapting to the current political climate?
And it is really hard to get parties to relinquish that power in any meaningful way. And I think voters, when they hear that messaging, they either get confused or they are suspicious of the intent of changing something big in the way our politics work.
I do wonder, though, if this redistricting arms race will change this at all. I went to Indiana last fall where Trump's allies were pushing this off-cycle redistricting effort. And at the Capitol, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there protesting. I went to a couple holiday parades around town and...
people knew about the redistricting effort and were pretty well versed in what was going on, even people who don't follow politics really regularly. And so I wonder if this is waking people up to the point where maybe they're going to be more engaged in some of these debates going forward. One other thing that kind of is just sticking with me from this
whole effort over the last couple of months to gerrymander these districts. Ashley mentioned that in the end, this all might amount to not giving Democrats or Republicans much of a different advantage in control of the House. And I asked a University of Indianapolis political science professor, Laura Merrifield Wilson, about this. And what she said is something I keep thinking about.
What if enough states do this and it's actually a wash? The real loser here are voters in those congressional districts.
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Chapter 8: What potential reforms could address the primary problem?
Yeah. And advocates who work in this space. So Unite America, I talk about them a lot because they're very focused on the primary problem. Their executive director and founder, his name is Nick Troiano. He told me he's like, we're looking at a situation where we're walking into a midterm that is about to be the least competitive possible. of our lifetimes.
And he thinks that means we are also about to have the least accountable Congress of our lifetime. He goes as far as to say that voters will just have less influence in what their lawmakers are doing now.
Yeah, it's worth remembering that the sort of last time we saw a big push across the country to change some of this stuff was with all the independent redistricting. And that came out of a similar sort of high profile redistricting effort that Republicans led in 2010.
So really, and I think that got a lot of news and that got a lot of people paying attention to the idea of who draws the districts and the system. And so it'll be interesting to see whether this last year, you know, plays out similarly. OK, let's take a quick break and more in just a moment.
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And we're back. And Sam, while we are on the topic of the decline of bipartisanship in American politics, you recently profiled a pretty interesting person, Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama. What brought you to her as somebody to really focus on?
Yeah, so Katie Britt's first introduction to a national audience, I guess, happened two years ago when she gave the Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden's final State of the Union address. And, you know, this job is often called the worst assignment in politics. So it's kind of a daunting task for really any up and coming politician who takes it on.
But Britt's response kind of went viral in not a good way, necessarily. It got parodied on Saturday Night Live. And I think for people who maybe this was their first introduction to who this person was, saw her as this hyper-partisan firebrand. So when I got to Congress, I was really surprised to learn that this is actually really different from the profile that she's trying to cut.
in the Senate. And she has been in the center of a couple of recent efforts to try and come up with bipartisan compromises, deals across the aisle, including ending that record long government shutdown in the fall.
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