Our failing political duopoly
Despite the opposition of George Washington and others, political parties took hold from the early days of our republic. We’ve had a two-party system for most of our history. This system usually worked well, particularly when it consisted of a center-left and a center-right party. However, the current version is failing. Both parties are ever more polarized, ideologically extreme, aloof from most Americans, and distainful of democratic values.
While the Republican and Democratic parties are increasingly hostile to each other, they have much in common when it comes to tactics. They share a single-minded focus on promoting themselves above all else, including the interests of the American public. They also share a taste for undemocratic methods to maintain a stranglehold on our politics.
The resurgence of gerrymandering
The revival of gerrymandering is a prime example of the parties’ shortcomings. Simply stated, gerrymandering enables politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. Political parties employ what have become highly sophisticated techniques to manipulate the composition of electoral districts to maximize the impact of their presumed voters and marginalize citizens they expect to oppose them.
In a rare positive political development, this grossly antidemocratic practice seemed to be losing ground in recent years. Some states assigned redistricting decisions to non-partisan independent commissions, as have most Western democracies. While the U.S. Supreme Court shamefully washed its hands of the issue of partisan gerrymandering as a non-justiciable “political question,”[1]Justice Kagan’s dissent is far more persuasive than the majority opinion. state courts continued to scrutinize and occasionally invalidate partisan gerrymanders.
Unfortunately, gerrymandering has returned with a vengeance. President Trump pushed red states to gerrymander aggressively in advance of the 2026 midterm elections—a stark departure from the normal practice of redrawing congressional districts only once a decade following the decennial census. Texas led the charge by producing a gerrymandered map that could flip five House seats to Republicans. California responded by overriding its independent redistricting commission in the hope of gerrymandering five additional Democratic seats. Virginia recently proposed bypassing its independent commission to gerrymander its House districts from 6-5 to 10-1 in favor of Democrats.
More states are poised to join the gerrymandering frenzy on one side or the other. It’s estimated that up to 15 states could potentially gerrymander in ways that would in the aggregate shift 16 congressional seats to Republicans and 14 to Democrats. For this net gain of two Republican seats, over a million American citizens across those 30 congressional districts could be effectively disenfranchised.
While some see gerrymandering as nothing more than politics as usual, it’s much worse than that. It’s a cynical assault on one of the most fundamental constitutional rights of citizens—the right to vote. It discounts the votes of citizens based on their disfavored political views. Gerrymandering as a form of race discrimination has long been recognized as unconstitutional. The harm is the same when votes are diluted based on voters’ political beliefs. Indeed, it’s often hard to tell whether gerrymanderers are motivated by racial or political animus. It shouldn’t matter; both are invidious and unworthy of our democracy.
How the gerrymander wars play out remains to be seen. A few courageous state legislators are resisting entreaties to gerrymander and there may be pushback from state courts. Sadly, however, what does seem clear is that both parties will gerrymander whenever they can get away with it. In a recent poll, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats expressed support for gerrymandering not just as a defense against the other party but also as an affirmative tactic to gain political advantage.
Other means of stifling electoral competition
Gerrymandering is hardly the only means by which the two major parties undermine democratic principles. Both seek to preserve their stranglehold by impeding independent voters and discouraging third parties, often with the help of state laws. Closed primaries allow only registered party members to choose candidates for the general election. At least one party conducts closed primaries in 23 states. This practice excludes millions of independent voters from what has become the decisive stage in most federal elections. (See below)
Winner-take-all election rules, where the candidate with the most votes wins even with only a plurality of votes, apply in all congressional elections and in presidential elections in all but two states. They strongly encourage voters to choose one of the major party candidates rather than “waste” their vote on a third-party candidate with little chance of winning.
Candidates outside the two major parties also face substantial legal and financial hurdles to getting their names on the ballot, fundraising disadvantages versus the major parties, and challenges to gaining equal media coverage including participation in debates.
The parties sometimes suppress competition from within as well as from the outside. Democrats did both during the 2024 presidential election, fighting against a third-party campaign by No Labels and blunting challenges to Joe Biden from fellow Democrats. They eventually crowned Kamala Harris as their nominee with no formal competition at all.
The consequences for our democracy and governance
Gerrymandering and other antidemocratic practices by the two parties along with demographic residence patterns render most congressional seats noncompetitive. The Cook Political Report rates only 18 of 435 House seats as tossups and only another 42 as potentially competitive in the 2026 midterm elections. Of the 35 Senate seats at stake in 2026, only four are rated tossups and only another six as potentially competitive.
Noncompetitive elections harm our democracy by breeding cynicism and apathy. Minority voters in a gerrymandered non-competitive district may lose their incentive to vote and simply drop out. Even voters who align with the district’s majority party may view their votes as immaterial and refrain from voting.
They also exacerbate many problems plaguing the workings of our government. The only real competition in one-sided districts takes place in the primaries. Primary elections are dominated by each party’s base voters, who are more partisan and ideologically extreme than general election voters. Candidates win primaries by appealing to those base voters and they remain in office by continuing to play to the base to avoid being “primaried” in the future.
In reality, these members of Congress represent their base voters rather than their constituencies as a whole and operate as loyal members of Team Red or Team Blue rather than open-minded legislators focused on the public interest. They have no incentive to work across the aisle or to compromise their team’s ideological tenets and every reason not to.
The once-popular notion that effective politics is the art of compromise has no place in this environment. Instead, gridlock generally prevails in times of divided government and highly partisan steamrolling is the rule when (as now) a single party controls the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Either tends to foster poor governance.
The two parties are detached from the people
Our political duopoly might be more tolerable if the two parties between them reflected the interests and perspectives of most Americans. However, this is far from true today. Unlike either party, most Americans hold moderate, pragmatic views; in fact, there is broad public consensus on many issues that polarize the parties. Most Americans also much prefer collaboration, compromise, and problem-solving to ideological posturing.[2]See, e.g., here, here, and here.
It’s thus no wonder that both parties are estranged from much of the public and held in low esteem. According to Gallup, a record high 45 percent of Americans identify as independents—almost twice the percentage that aligns with either party (27% each). They also strongly disapprove of both the Republican (58-40% negative) and Democratic (61-37% negative) parties. Even presidential candidates from both parties have grown more unpopular over the years, increasingly viewed as offering voters a poor choice.
The parties won’t fix themselves
Either party could achieve great success by moving closer to the values of most Americans. Yet such change from within is unlikely. The Republican party is little more than the cult of Trump with no agenda beyond subservience to his every whim. It’s hard to know what will become of it once he leaves office. The Democratic party is searching for an identity but seems unable to shake the grip of its ideologically extreme advocacy groups and performative, out of touch liberal elites.[3]See here and here.
The best, perhaps only, means of change is for ordinary Americans to shake off their (understandable) frustration and engage more actively in politics, particularly at the primary election stage, either to force the two parties closer to the center or to support independent candidates or third parties who better represent their values.