Three stories that are actually the same story

Party systems explain everything around me

Three very different stories I want to talk about this week. They range from your congressional district to the U.S. Capitol to Berlin. They’re about different aspects of politics, from elections to oversight to checks and balances to coalition negotiations.

But underneath, all three tell the same story. Political parties are important. More specifically, party systems matter. How many parties you have. How they’re elected. Where they’re elected from. They’re how politics are organized — guiding how democracies operate, how politicians behave, and who ultimately ends up in power. The party system you have is a big factor in whether your democracy survives.

Spoiler alert: ours isn’t looking so hot. Especially in comparison to the alternatives.

1. Electoral competition is party competition

First story, by the Times’ Nick Corasaniti and Michael Wines: The death of competition in American elections (gift link).

They explain one of the most under-appreciated trends in American politics today. Most of our legislative leaders aren’t really elected, at least not in the meaningful sense where the voters chose them over an alternative:

[A] close review of the 2024 election shows just how undemocratic the country’s legislative bodies already are.

After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year.

Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.

Increasingly, members of Congress are not even facing primary challenges. About a third of the current members of the House ran unopposed in their primary. All but 12 of those districts were “safe” seats, meaning 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their election.

The absence of primaries is even more striking in state legislatures. More than three-quarters of those primary races in 2024 were uncontested, according to voting data from The Associated Press.

The reasons for this trend are both complicated — polarization, geographic self-sorting, nationalization of politics, mass media, etc. — and add up to something relatively straightforward: the contours of American politics have simplified into a zero-sum clash between two roughly equal-sized parties on clear geographic lines. In a winner-take-all electoral system where each election elects one (and only one) winner, that means the only real competition gets concentrated down to a vanishingly small number of competitive seats that could go either way. Everyone else just gets elected essentially by default since they’re the Democrat or the Republican.

We call them “battleground” or “frontline” districts for a reason. With apologies for the martial metaphor, our politics are like a land war between two evenly matched countries fought on an ever-thinner geographic front.

2. The two-party grudge match has swallowed checks and balances

Which brings us to the second story. What happens when those legislators get elected?

We’re seeing it, right now.

The Republican majority in Congress has essentially abdicated their constitutional role in our system of checks and balances. They have meekly confirmed some of the most unqualified, extreme, and dangerous cabinet nominees in history. They have stood idly by as an unelected billionaire has ripped the power to make spending decisions out of their control. And they have essentially shrugged as the executive branch has openly ignored numerous laws passed by Congress — like those creating whole agencies or protecting Inspectors General.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chair, memorably captured the quasi-official Republican position in a quote to POLITICO:

“Congress can’t do anything except complain.”

That is obviously untrue. Almost laughably so. Congress holds most of the cards in our constitutional system. They set the budget, they pass the laws, they confirm the appointees, they conduct oversight, and if they don’t get what they want, they can impeach essentially anyone involved in this, up to and including the president. This is a voluntary surrender.

There are many factors that explain Congress’ willingness to cede power. Some Republicans may genuinely support what Trump and Musk are doing and are happy to sacrifice their own branch to make it happen. Others may be afraid of personal ramifications to opposing Trump, from primary challengers to threats of violence. As Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reports:

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.”

In any case, this abdication is part of the same broader issue: in our two-party, winner-take-all system, Republican members of Congress and a Republican president are on the same electoral team. They win or lose together. The biggest factor in whether Republicans retain their majorities in two years will likely be Donald Trump’s approval rating, so standing up to him could cut across their own self-interest.

The Constitution was designed with the presumption that the different branches — Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court — would jockey for power, and in so doing check each other’s excesses. But these days, that’s not how it works. The fundamental political competition in our democracy happens between the parties, not the branches.

Read more: The great congressional vanishing act

A system that asks co-partisans in different branches of government to check each other only works if politicians have the backbone and conviction to put the country’s interests above their own.

Those leaders are growing harder and harder to find. Our party system and electoral system — where everything’s a team sport and the only way to win is to play the two-party game — is slowly weeding them out, with disastrous consequences.

3. What healthy party competition looks like

Here’s the third story. What does healthy (or at least, healthier) party competition look like?

Look at the German election this week.

If you were to squish the results down into a basic United States-analog, comparing the performance of the three parties of outgoing center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government (the Social Democrats, Greens, and neoliberal Free Democrats) versus the two conservative parties (the center-right Christian Democrats and the extremist right-wing AfD), it looks . . . like an exaggerated version of 2020 to 2024 in the United States. A big swing rightward against an unpopular center-left leader (for reasons that would require its own piece, or pieces).

But that chart is worthless. It doesn’t tell the story at all.

Because German politics aren’t compressed into two parties like ours are. Instead of winner-take-all, they use a proportional representation system. That means there’s a range of parties from left to right to idiosyncratic. Here’s what the election results actually looked like:

So yes, big and — frankly — scary gains for the AfD, the far-right, anti-immigrant party with neofascist and neo-Nazi links (and which was endorsed by Elon Musk).

But the AfD only won about 20 percent of the vote. They will not be in government. Instead, Germany will likely be led by center-right businessman Friedrich Merz leading a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats.

In American terms, that would be sort of like electing Mitt Romney as president, backed by an infrastructure bill-esque coalition of center-left and center-right legislators like Mikie Sherrill and Mike Lawler.

Germany’s democracy isn’t the strongest it’s ever been. But its party system is still managing to corral and contain a growing anti-democratic threat. Certainly better than ours is.

The forces of Trumpism aren’t uniquely American. Our system just magnifies them

A lesson from the AfD’s surge in a country that’s (supposedly) uniquely aware of the dangers of authoritarianism? We in the United States are not exceptional. Yes, the authoritarian faction in the United States has had outsized success, but the underlying political dynamics aren’t that different from somewhere like Germany.

As political scientist Lee Drutman has observed:

“If ‘Trump Supporters’ were their own party, they’d be about as popular as Germany’s far-right AfD.”

One example from this week: Bright Line Watch, a truly indispensable survey project in this time, looked at how much support there is among Americans for different types of political systems. They found that while authoritarian leanings are concentrated among strong Trump supporters, even then, only about 50 percent (depending on how you ask the question) are willing to back full-blown autocracy.

(See the full survey results here — lots of important and alarming findings in this one.)

Those are dangerous numbers. But they’re not a majority. The problem is that our system lets them govern like one.

Read more: Advantaging Authoritarianism — How the U.S. electoral system favors extremism

When you have two parties, only two parties, and you’re always going to have only those two parties, all an authoritarian faction has to do is commandeer one of the two (such as through a low-turnout primary). Then all the non-authoritarian voters and politicians in that party are forced to choose between democracy and their own self-interest. Get enough of them to shrug, like has happened in the U.S., and, boom, the autocrat has a straight shot at power.

The solution: changing our party system

I can see a variety of ways our party system could change. It’s possible the disruptions and chaos of this period in history end up being so intense that the two-party system we’re all so used to comes apart at the seams in the coming years. (I didn’t necessarily think this was possible, but after the last month it doesn’t seem totally off the table. After all, it’s happened before.)

In any case, reforms like fusion voting that allow new upstart parties to form — and play a constructive, not spoiler, role in elections — can help manage and facilitate a healthier form of innovation and change in our parties. Indeed, this was a part of the last realignment, as Corey Brooks and Beau Tremitiere explained last month in the St. John’s Law Review: Fusing to combat slavery: Third-party politics in the pre-Civil War north.

In the long term, though, it’s likely that a healthier party system that’s more resilient to the authoritarian threat is possible only if we change our electoral system. After all, when each and every election has one and only one winner, the pressure for politics to collapse into two and only two opposing parties is enormous. If you ask most political scientists, they’ll tell you the best way to change the outcomes is to change the rules that lead to those outcomes.

We have to switch to a system like the one Germany uses — we need to go from “one” to “more-than-one” winner in at least some of our legislative elections.

For some of the benefits of what that switch to proportional representation would look like — including but not limited to allowing multipartyism — I recommend this piece by New America’s Oscar Pocasangre: Eight reasons to champion proportional representation for the U.S.

American democracy is going through turbulent times. The causes behind the country’s turmoil are many, but one important factor is the single-member district plurality system used for electing members of the House of Representatives and of most state-level legislative assemblies.

Also known as a winner-take-all system, this electoral system is associated with many of the current ailments of American politics. Fixing these problems will require upgrading the American electoral system to proportional representation, a tried-and-tested system used around the world that ensures fair representation through multi-member districts and formulas that allocate seats to parties in proportion to their votes.

More next week.