Supreme Court supercharges the death of competitive districts
Increasingly, elections are decided in the party primary.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
12 Comments
Partisan primaries selecting the most extreme candidates is EXACTLY how you get a Supreme Court that handed us this ruling in the first place. The cycle is self-reinforcing and it was designed to be.
Tremendous point, tremendous, but you're forgetting something and it's big, it's really big, these aren't "extreme" candidates, these are WINNERS, the best candidates, picked by the people, real people not the fancy establishment types who sit in their little rooms and decide who's allowed to run, and I know this because I've talked to people, great people, incredible people, they come up to me with tears in their eyes and they say Big Rick, Big Rick, the rigged primary system is what kept the real conservatives OUT for forty years, forty years folks, and now the Supreme Court, which by the way is the greatest court we've had maybe ever, is just letting the people decide, which is called democracy, you may have heard of it, very popular concept, tremendous concept, and if the left doesn't like the results that's not the court's fault that's called LOSING and they do a lot of it, they really do, believe me.
That reads like a Trump speech dropped into a comment box. Speak plainly or don't expect a real conversation.
But the actual point buried in there: no, letting states gerrymander themselves into one-party districts is not "letting the people decide." It's letting the party in power draw the map so the people's choices are already made for them before a single vote is cast. Local races in my area used to be genuinely competitive. You'd get two reasonable candidates and voters had real leverage. Now the nominee is decided in a primary with 12% turnout because the general is unwinnable for the other side by design.
That's not democracy. That's rigged maps with extra steps. And the court signing off on it helps incumbents of BOTH parties, not just conservatives.
There's truth in what you're saying about the cycle, but I'd push back a little. The problem isn't just the primaries, it's that both parties have let their loudest, angriest voters drive the whole thing. I'm a Republican and I can admit some of our nominees lately have been embarrassing. But the solution isn't unelected judges redrawing maps either. I just want candidates who can actually govern instead of just perform outrage for the base.
the court basically said "we can't stop you from gerrymandering, we just can't see the intent" and called it neutrality. meanwhile state legislatures are already redrawing maps that were literally just drawn. this isn't a ruling, it's permission.
SCOTUS just handed the extremists a permanent power grab and people are acting surprised. This is what happens when you put Federalist Society plants on the bench for life. Safe seats mean only the MAGA base picks your rep, and the MAGA base does not want governance, they want a cult leader.
yeah but gerrymandering's been a problem way longer than the last few years, both sides have been doing it forever.
so we're pretending the scale and precision of it hasn't changed dramatically with computers and voter data, or that both parties are equally invested in it right now?
One anonymous source does not a story make, but let's say this ruling actually sticks: primaries become the real election and you've got a system where the 15% of voters who actually show up pick everyone else's rep. That's not democracy, that's oligarchy with better optics.
Both parties have spent decades engineering this outcome. Republicans drew maps to lock in red districts, Democrats did the same where they had the chance, and now the Court has blessed the whole arrangement. The result is a system where the only election that matters is a primary, where 8% of voters pick the winner, and where moderation is a liability. You don't get compromise in the general election because nobody survives a primary by promising compromise. Don't blame just one side for building a machine both sides fed.
This is what the systematic dismantling of democratic infrastructure looks like in real time. When general elections are functionally irrelevant because the district is already a foregone conclusion, you've replaced representative democracy with factional rule. And the Court just gave that system its blessing.
The policy consequences are enormous. Members of Congress stop governing for their constituents and start governing for primary voters, which is a much smaller, much more ideologically sorted group. Every incentive pushes toward the extreme. Compromise becomes a career-ending move. And we wonder why nothing gets done on housing, healthcare, climate, anything that requires actual negotiation.
This didn't happen by accident. It was engineered. Republicans in state legislatures spent decades drawing maps specifically to make general elections irrelevant, and now the Court has decided that's not their problem to fix. Meanwhile, the people most harmed are the ones in packed minority districts who get "representation" that's cosmetically diverse but substantively powerless, or voters in cracked communities who get absorbed into hostile districts and effectively silenced.
The irony is that the founders specifically feared faction above almost everything else. What we've built is a machine for producing faction. And the institution that was supposed to be a check on that just said, carry on.
Both parties gerrymander. Full stop. Maryland, Illinois, New York, they're not exactly paragons of competitive districts. The difference is Republicans have been better at it in more states, which makes it a Republican problem in the headlines and a bipartisan problem in reality.
The Court punting on this is frustrating, genuinely. But the solution you're implying is federal courts redrawing state maps, which is its own kind of undemocratic. Independent redistricting commissions are the actual fix, and some states have adopted them, often through ballot initiatives that bypassed the legislatures entirely. That's the move. Not waiting for nine unelected judges to ride in and solve it.
You're also not wrong that primary incentives push toward the extreme. That's real. But the extremism problem isn't purely a map problem, it's also a small-donor fundraising problem, a media ecosystem problem, a social media problem. Competitive districts didn't stop primary challenges from the flanks. Ask a lot of moderate Republicans who lost to MAGA primaries in districts they previously won easily.
The "founders feared faction" line is a bit rich coming from a side that's spent years trying to get courts to do what legislatures won't. Using federal judicial power to override state legislative choices is also faction, just a different kind with robes.
This ruling is probably bad policy. But the framing that it's exclusively a Republican engineered catastrophe while Democrats just sit there playing fair doesn't survive contact with an Illinois congressional map.