Rep. Sarah McBride faced off against every incumbent’s favorite opponent in Delaware’s Democratic primary Tuesday: uncontested.
McBride did not have a single opponent in her primary for the state’s lone seat in the House, setting her up to coast to a second term in a state where Republicans haven’t won a governor’s race or any of its three seats in Congress since 2008.
McBride’s easy path to reelection is not unique: 150 winners of primary elections, to fill 435 House seats, faced no opposition in the spring and summer contests, and now head into the general election without any doubt of their victory in November. A huge majority of those are incumbents seeking reelection.
Moreover, an additional 233 winners of House primaries sit in uncompetitive districts and are all but assured of winning, making the November general election an afterthought. That’s 88% of the entire House essentially already chosen through a primary process that often lacks competition itself.
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Those are the findings of Unite America, a nonprofit group that is the leader of a coalition trying to change the primary election system to involve more voters. The group’s goal is to try to create a better functioning Congress with lawmakers who appeal to a broad set of constituents and not just a narrow clique of ideological voters who show up in primaries closed off to independents.
“Change happens slowly, and then all at once. And I think we’re entering a period in our politics where increasingly people are looking for solutions to the corruption and dysfunction they are seeing,” Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, told The Washington Sun.
These advocates want other states to follow the lead of two vastly different states — Alaska, the third smallest by population, and California, easily the largest.
Both states conduct an open primary system in which all candidates for office appear on the same ballot. In California the top two advance to the general election, regardless if it’s two Democrats or two Republicans. In Alaska the top four vote-getters advance to November and then, in the general election, voters rank their candidates one through four. If no one clears 50% in the first round, second and third choices are counted until someone has a majority.
Proponents believe this creates a more civil brand of politics and sends lawmakers to Washington with a mindset of appealing to lots of constituents.
“If I’m a smart politician, I’m going to try to work this so that I don’t trash talk everybody because I might want your folks to rank me number two, and that’s going to help me. So I think it encourages more civility in the process,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who built her own unique coalition in 2022, told The Sun.
Murkowski, a top centrist dealmaker in the Senate, pointed to how this system has also worked at the local level and created a state Senate where the two parties have had a power-sharing agreement for the second-straight term.
“It’s exactly the meld that you want — to bring together people who want to try to get things done for the purposes of good policy and not for the benefit of politics,” she said.
Washington state also has a wide-open primary system, with the two top candidates moving to the general election, and in Maine, after the primaries are held, the general election in congressional races uses ranked-choice voting.
Opponents disagree and believe that American politics has always been about a single vote for each person, not a dilution of that support for multiple people.
“Our campaign is about one person, one vote. That’s been the bedrock of the American republic for the last 250 years,” Bethany Marcum, the treasurer for the anti-ranked-choice-voting group Repeal Now, testified at a July legislative hearing in Alaska.
Others point to what was actually a volatile, competitive primary season this year in states that do not have these open procedures.
Thirteen House incumbents lost their primaries this year, almost evenly divided between the parties, and two Senate Republicans, John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also lost their primaries.
Moreover, several dozen other incumbents had to run strong campaigns to push back against primary challengers. Those ranged from Rep. Richard Neal, a 19-term lawmaker who faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from a younger Democrat from western Massachusetts, to Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed to replace her late brother Lindsey and beat several conservative challengers in South Carolina.
Troiano, however, views those tough primary elections as a more poisonous breed of hyper-partisan politics and big-moneyed special interests.
Several incumbents lost because they are from states that held mid-decade redistricting designed to drive more seats to one party or another, such as Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, whose district got moved further away from Houston’s suburbs and lost to a state legislator who represented much of the new district.
Some, such as Cassidy and Cornyn, lost because President Donald Trump and his supporters deemed them insufficiently loyal and worked to support their opponents.
Others lost because their states hold closed primaries that do not allow independents to vote and result in low-turnout affairs, where ideological purity matters most. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York), briefly considered a rising star in his caucus, lost to a more liberal challenger who criticized his support for Israel.
And many other primaries got competitive because single-issue super PACs funded by narrow special interests — particularly the cryptocurrency industry and the pro-Israel AIPAC — flooded money into those districts trying to choose a winner solely based on their support (or opposition) to that narrow special interest.
Unite America joined Issue One, another pro-democracy group, at a conference in Alexandria, Virginia, earlier this month in which they talked about the range of reform issues they would try to advance in the coming years. Their allies also include FairVote, Veterans for All Voters and Open Primaries.
The initial goal of the coalition is to get at least 10 states to adopt the Alaska or California model for elections. These groups believe that would create a bloc of 20 senators who might have won election in the manner that Murkowski used in 2022 — a unique coalition of moderate Republicans, independents and moderate Democrats.
In the first ballot that year she had a narrow lead of less than 1 percentage point over a conservative Republican. In the second ballot, she cruised to a commanding 7-point margin of victory.
“If you give voters the freedom to choose whoever they want and ensure whoever gets a majority wins, you wind up getting a more representative, responsive government,” Troiano said.
The types of changes that have broad support but have remained stymied on Capitol Hill — banning gerrymandering so incumbents cannot choose their own constituents; barring members from trading individual stocks; stricter revolving-door limits on ex-lawmakers lobbying — might get freed up in a Congress with more incumbents trying to appeal to centrist voters.
“These reforms are critical to achieving the other policies that voters want to see from the government that are currently being locked down,” Troiano said.
But these types of election reforms have had a mixed record of late. Six states had ballot referendums to create some form of open primary or ranked-choice voting in 2024, and all lost, including Troiano’s home state of Colorado.
And this year the coalition is focused, first and foremost, on defending a second bid to repeal Alaska’s voting rules, including open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Murkowski won her first Senate race in 2004, at a point where Alaska’s primaries were closed off so voters could only choose between Republican or Democratic candidates.
“With each successive election cycle, whether I was running or not, I saw the primaries becoming more exclusive,” she recalled.
Looking ahead to her decision to run for another six-year term in 2028, Murkowski acknowledged that the effort to repeal Alaska’s new system could impact whether she runs again.
Troiano pointed to the progressive movement of the early 20th century. The first state to move toward a direct primary occurred in 1904, and within a decade a majority were using primary elections instead of party bosses choosing nominees.
He thinks history is poised to repeat itself for states again opening up their primary systems.
“Maybe it’s a decade, and maybe change happens quicker now than it did 100 years ago,” he said.
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