Who elects these clowns, anyway?
Why does this keep happening? Why does the House keep finding itself in a situation in which a handful of clownish nihilists are calling the shots for their supposed leaders — and risking the economic stability of the country while they are at it?
There are a couple of familiar forces that put the “chaos caucus” in charge: the Republicans’ razor-thin majority; the fact that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is beholden to the tiny minority for the gavel that it took 15 ballots for him to claim — and thus to the extremism that has come to define the Republican Party in the Trump era.
So it is appropriate to ask: To whom are these agents of havoc actually accountable?
A surprisingly small sliver of voters, it turns out.
These days, only 82 of the 435 House districts across the country are competitive enough that both parties start out with a decent shot at winning, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman.
That is only half the number of swing districts that existed in 1999, and it has effectively eliminated much of the incentive that the two parties once had to find middle ground on contentious issues. Members of Congress know that playing to instincts and impulses of their populist bases are their surest tickets to reelection, and that they will have little protection if they don’t.
You can blame aggressive gerrymandering, which plays a big role. But Wasserman and others say the greater driver of this realignment is a self-sorting of the electorate into likeminded communities, where Democratic voters are concentrated in cities that have turned deeper blue while Republicans are spread out across exurbs and rural areas that have become more reliably red.
Whatever the reason, the reality is that the vast majority of congressional elections are decided in the primaries. And that, as it turns out, puts outsize power in the hands of a tiny minority of highly engaged and intense partisans who bother to show up and vote in those often overlooked contests.
In midterm elections, fewer than 1 in 5 eligible voters cast their ballots in party primaries, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. The rest of the country sits home, and has to live with the consequences. And that means a tiny — and utterly unrepresentative — slice of Americans is deciding who gets a seat in the U.S. House.
The dysfunction that this creates has been thrown into stark relief in a new study by Unite America, a nonpartisan election reform advocacy organization. It has taken a look at eight Republican House members who have been among the most determined obstructionists: Andy Biggs (Ariz.); Elijah Crane (Ariz.); Lauren Boebert (Colo.); Matt Gaetz (Fla.); Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.); Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.); Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Bob Good (Va.). (Good is not included in the chart above; he was chosen in 2022 in a party convention, where he received a mere 1,488 votes, compared with his opponent’s 271.)
All breezed through the November election last year, with the exception of Boebert, who won by only 546 votes in a surprisingly strong challenge by Democrat Adam Frisch, who is running against her again in 2024.
What Unite America found
TUMULTY,