Why bipartisanship is disappearing from Congress
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What trend is reducing bipartisanship in Congress?
0:00–1:01
2
How did redistricting impact electoral competitiveness?
1:01–2:24
3
Why are fewer districts competitive in elections?
2:24–3:45
4
What is the primary problem affecting lawmakers' incentives?
3:45–4:51
5
How do primary voters influence legislative decisions?
4:51–6:20
6
What role does Senator Katie Britt play in bipartisanship?
6:20–7:36
7
How are lawmakers adapting to the current political climate?
7:36–9:01
8
What potential reforms could address the primary problem?
9:01–18:08