JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This week on the show, we heard about big elections in Texas, Maine and California. In recent weeks, it was Louisiana, Georgia and Indiana. All of these, they are primary elections to pick who contests the general election in the fall. But in today's politics, in many places the primary is where the general election is all but decided, and that's shaping how Congress behaves. Political correspondent Ashley Lopez and congressional reporter Eric McDaniel are here in the studio to break this all down. Hi to both of you.
ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: Hey there.
ERIC MCDANIEL, BYLINE: Howdy.
SUMMERS: Ashley, I will start with you. Many voters, as we know, they don't start paying attention to the midterms until the fall. So why the focus on primaries?
LOPEZ: Well, because primary elections are deciding who ends up in Congress, not the general election in November that, yeah, most voters will participate in. I mean, this has been true for House seats for the past several election cycles, but there are a couple of trends this year that are changing the stakes and outcomes of primaries.
SUMMERS: And how so? What's different this year?
LOPEZ: I mean, one big thing is that the redistricting battle set off by President Trump last year, all these new maps have led to the smallest number of competitive congressional races in recent history. That means that in the overwhelming majority of seats - more than 90% - one party is already favored to win. So voters really only have the ability to determine who wins in primaries, which, you know, as we mentioned, far fewer voters actually participate in. The other factor is that there has been some changes to primary structure. States are choosing to exclude voters who aren't registered with a party from these races, which are called closed primaries. This is something that John Opdycke, who works for a group called Open Primaries, has been watching closely.
JOHN OPDYCKE: And now what we're seeing is that the parties have said, OK, we've gerrymandered the country into oblivion. There's not much more gerrymandering that we can do. Now we've got to start shutting down these open primaries. And the Democrats are doing it, and the Republicans are doing it.
LOPEZ: And the result of all of this is a system that basically ensures that smaller groups of more ideological voters are determining who gets into Congress well before the midterms later this fall.
SUMMERS: All right, Eric, over to you. That narrow choice, does it affect how Congress actually functions?
MCDANIEL: Sure, of course it does. I mean, people respond to incentives, right? So if you have to compete in general elections, you try and appeal to as many Americans as possible. If you just have to worry about the party primary, though, you just have to appeal to as many partisans as possible. And the lawmakers I talked to for this story told me that's bad for Congress. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican.
BRIAN FITZPATRICK: What is the manifestation on the House floor? It's awful. You have so many people that are co-opted from doing the right thing and supporting the right policy because of politics, because of closed primaries, because of the two-party system.
MCDANIEL: Now, you might say, well, Brian Fitzpatrick, he's just responding to his own incentives. He's in a swing district. He has to win a tough general election race. Of course he's going to talk about bipartisanship and compromise and wanting to be a political independent. But, of course, those are also the kinds of things most Americans want to see.
SUMMERS: What role does the president play here?
MCDANIEL: You know, I actually think this is the best way to show just how skewed things are. Trump is monumentally unpopular in the U.S. as a whole, but if you're just looking at Republican primary races, you'd have no idea. His picks keep winning. But one-party primaries aren't the only way the country can do things.
SUMMERS: All right. Give me an example.
MCDANIEL: Well, in Louisiana, it used to be that the Senate primary was all voters regardless of party voted on the same ballot. But they changed the rules for this year to make it a closed primary. You could only vote for the candidates representing the party you're registered for. And that seems to have played a big role in ending the career of incumbent Bill Cassidy. He's a Republican who voted to convict President Trump on impeachment charges back in 2021.
SUMMERS: OK, Eric. You mentioned Louisiana. Are there other states that let everyone weigh in? Ashley, does that exist in other states?
LOPEZ: Yeah, it does, but not in many. So in the voting world, these are known as nonpartisan primaries. They basically take party control away for the primaries and let all eligible voters have the ability to vote for any candidate regardless of party, all on the same ballot. And right now, California, Washington and Alaska have these kinds of primary systems. And advocates for nonpartisan primaries point out that closed primaries, or even partisan primaries more broadly, are leaving out the fastest growing part of the American electorate, which are independent and unaffiliated voters. Often, we think of these voters as, like, centrists, but really, like, all sorts of voters all over the political spectrum aren't aligning with either party right now. And in many states, they can't participate in the elections that arguably matter the most.
MCDANIEL: Ashley mentioned Alaska there, and that state actually used to have a closed system. Lisa Murkowski lost her Republican Senate primary back in 2010 to a hard-right challenger. And she had to win election as a write-in candidate, which is quite the feat. Then, when they changed the system for the 2022 primary to use the system Ashley was describing, Murkowski became the only Republican senator who backed Trump's impeachment to ever win reelection.
SUMMERS: Interesting. Could we see other states move to adopt more inclusive systems?
LOPEZ: I mean, it's possible, but efforts to create nonpartisan primaries in more states have actually proven to be, like, an uphill battle. In 2024, several states had ballot measures to create nonpartisan primaries, but voters voted them down across the country. I mean, the other way to change primary systems is through state legislatures, but as we've seen with redistricting, state lawmakers have been more than happy to do what it takes to protect their political parties, or at the very least, they just don't have the incentives right now to disarm in what is an increasingly polarized political environment.
SUMMERS: NPR's Ashley Lopez and Eric McDaniel, thanks to both of you.
MCDANIEL: Any time.
LOPEZ: Yeah, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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