In a recent podcast interview with Ruy Teixeira, Ezra Klein stated that “American politics is — I don’t want to say a perfectly competitive market, to be very neoliberal about it. But there are many opportunities for different kinds of candidates to run.”
Yikes. US politics is better described as a duopoly rather than competitive. If there were really so many opportunities for different kinds of candidates to run, would the 2024 Presidential election really be on track to be a rematch of 2020 between Biden and Trump? And especially when both candidates poll as deeply unpopular? Here are just a few of the statistics that capture how much lack of competition there is in US politics:
- The vast majority of House seats are not competitive. Fix Our House’s analysis of the 2022 midterms found that 90% of House districts were un-competitive. And this is not a one-off. The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage analyzing the 2014 midterms similarly found that over 90% of House seats were not competitive at that time. This is a persistent feature of House races.
- Most Senate races are not competitive. According to the current Cook Political Report ratings for 2024 Senate Races, of the 34 seats up for election, only 7 (21%) are competitive (rated as lean or toss up, as opposed to likely or solid).
- An increasingly small share of Americans live in states that are contested during Presidential elections. A compelling report in the Washington Post noted that if the major parties do not contest Florida in 2024, as is widely expected, only 18% of the population would live in a battleground state.
Those who think that politics is sufficiently competitive will fail to look for solutions to the structural, root causes of political dysfunction. Once one recognizes the ways in which U.S. politics lacks competition, and how the two major parties have erected barriers to prevent new political competition, one realizes that the system we have is simply reacting to the incentives that have been put in place. The gridlock, dysfunction, and polarization generated by the political system are all expected outcomes given its design. And reforming the system itself is the only way to produce different outcomes.
Reforms to inject competition into politics are so important because they are the key to unlocking gridlock and making the passage of other legislation possible. Without these reforms, our system spends most of the time stuck in a gridlock that both major parties are content to endure, because they face little consequence to unproductive stalemates. Most senators and representatives of both parties will keep their jobs from one election to the next, whether they get things done or not.
Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter specified the problem well when they wrote that “Today, however, our political system has become the major barrier to solving nearly every important challenge our nation needs to address.” This type of clear thinking is the crucial first step of correctly diagnosing the core problem our country faces today. What remains is to continue the hard work of bringing about the necessary changes to make the political system more competitive and more responsive to the people it is supposed to serve. The resources page of this site lists some of the groups doing that important work.