Troiano is the executive director of Unite America, a nonpartisan organization focused on defending and reforming our democracy.
Voters will head to the polls throughout Tuesday to choose who will represent them in Congress, on high-stakes issues ranging from inflation to abortion. Yet the vast majority of congressional elections were effectively decided months ago, by a small and unrepresentative sliver of the electorate in partisan primaries – depriving millions of general election voters of any meaningful voice.
As a result, while which party will gain a legislative majority remains in question, we can be certain that the next Congress will be the most polarized and least accountable in our lifetimes, as this “Primary Problem” worsens with each election cycle.
To have a bigger impact on who we elect, we must change how we elect. Partisan primaries should be replaced with nonpartisan primaries that give all voters a say in who represents them, regardless of party. Alaska recently became the fourth state to do so. Nevada may be next.
Just 8 percent of eligible voters nationally voted in primaries that effectively determined the outcome of 83 percent of U.S. House seats this year. That’s according to a new analysis by Unite America, the nonpartisan election reform organization I run. This imbalance, between how few voters ultimately decide many congressional elections, is due to the fact that the vast majority of districts are “safe” for one party or another – meaning the winner of the dominant party’s primary is virtually guaranteed to win the general election. Very few voters participate in these primaries, and those who do are usually the strongest partisans.
The Primary Problem is worse than it even appears on the surface: In more than a third of House contests for safe seats (130), the dominant party’s primary was uncontested – giving voters no ability to choose their representative. In another 32 of these contests, the nominee won with just a plurality of votes, not a majority. And across nine states with closed primaries, nearly 13 million Americans who choose not to affiliate with either major party were locked out of participating altogether.
It’s not a problem unique to one party: In Texas, for example, primaries dictated the outcomes in 36 of the state’s 38 congressional districts – including in 15 runoff contests in which less than 3 percent of eligible voters turned out. In Massachusetts, the entire nine-member congressional delegation was effectively determined in the Democratic primary, where no candidate faced a single opponent. Can the November election even be called an election?
Primaries present an acute threat to democracy within the Republican Party, as increased polarization manifests as outright hostility to free and fair elections. In 117 “safe” GOP congressional districts, representing over a quarter of the next Congress, Republicans nominated candidates who have fully denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to FiveThirtyEight. Further, all four House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and ran for reelection in partisan primaries were defeated by Trump-backed challengers – with $53 million dollars of help from Democrats who sought to maximize their chances in the general election by running against a more extreme opponent.
What happens when both parties make standing up for democracy wholly incompatible with winning a Republican primary in any red state or district? Every election conducted under the design of our current system brings us closer to losing our republic altogether.
The only three Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach or convict Trump to make it to November’s elections are Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington, Rep. David Valadao of California and Sen. Lisa Murkowski Alaska – who all hail from states that have scrapped partisan primaries.
Washington, California and Alaska have adopted nonpartisan primaries, in which all eligible voters can participate and all candidates run on a single ballot. Washington and California advance the top two finishers from the primary, regardless of party; Alaska advances the top four finishers to the final round, which is determined by an instant runoff.
Alaska’s system can be a model for our country. Almost every race remains competitive in the general election with multiple Democrats and Republicans on the ballot, giving every voter a real voice. There are no forgone conclusions based simply on the letter next to a candidate’s name on the ballot.
Nevada may follow in Alaska’s footsteps if voters pass a ballot initiative to adopt nonpartisan primaries this election, giving 600,000-plus independent voters a voice in elections they are currently prohibited from participating in. Both political parties oppose the measure — but a majority of voters have an opportunity to show them who is truly the boss on Tuesday.
Primary reform can ensure November elections matter for all voters – producing better choices, giving more power to millions of Americans who deserve to be heard, and fostering a more representative government at a time when democracy itself hangs in the balance.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.