The 2026 midterm elections should be the American people’s next best opportunity to issue a verdict on the direction of the country. In a functioning democracy, the outcome would offer a clear signal: do most voters want change or to stay the course?
But in reality, we won’t get a clear signal because our broken election system makes it nearly impossible. We already know that 80% of Senate races and 90% of U.S. House races won’t be decided in November, when most of us vote. They’ll be decided months earlier in party primaries—where turnout is low, millions of independents are locked out, and ideological special interests hold outsized sway. Technically, we’ll get an outcome in 2026—but it’s hard to argue it will reflect the will of most Americans.
The problem isn’t just who gets elected—it’s how they get elected. It’s easy to blame the most extreme voices in Congress, but the real issue is the system that rewards them. In 2024, 87% of U.S. House races were effectively decided in party primaries—by just 7% of voters. No wonder only about 10% of Americans feel the government represents them well, while 80% don’t believe elected officials care what they think.
That same Primary Problem is already looming over 2026—with implications for voters, parties, and the country.
For voters, we’ll be subjected to yet another “heads I win, tails you lose” contest. More Americans identify as politically independent than as Democrats or Republicans—yet 16.6 million independents will be disenfranchised by closed primaries in 16 states. And while we talk about a two-party system, it’s really two one-party systems. In most general elections, the outcome is predetermined. Without real competition, there’s no real choice, accountability, or representation.
The parties seem fine with this, at least for now. The system protects their hold on power, despite low favorability—Democrats at 40%, Republicans at 44%. They don’t need to be broadly popular to win; they just need to be less unpopular than the other side. In any other industry, a new product would already be on the shelves. In politics, the existing duopoly conspires to block new competition.
But the Primary Problem is already giving both parties severe heartburn heading into 2026. Just ask Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. He’s being challenged by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for being insufficiently loyal to Trump—despite voting with him over 99% of the time. Democrats face a similar dynamic: activist and former DNC Co-Vice Chair David Hogg has pledged to spend millions targeting incumbents he views as too willing to compromise. The likely outcome in both cases? Parties pulled further to the extremes—and further from the voters.
Party leaders know this could cost them seats—and majorities—because it’s already happened. In 2022, GOP primary winners in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona went on to lose winnable Senate races because they were well outside the mainstream. That same year, Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader was defeated in a primary, and the seat flipped Republican in November.
The answer isn’t a white knight politician. It’s a political reform: open primaries for all voters and all candidates, regardless of party. In an open, all-candidate primary, everyone runs on the same ballot and the top finishers advance to the general election. Leaders must appeal to a broad electorate from day one. The threat of being “primaried” by ideological hardliners vanishes—and general elections start to matter again, even in deep-blue or deep-red districts.
This isn’t hypothetical. Alaska adopted all-candidate primaries in 2022 and doubled the number of voters who cast meaningful votes (i.e., votes that actually mattered in determining election outcomes). Oklahoma may consider a similar reform in 2026. And New Mexico recently passed bipartisan legislation to allow independents to vote in party primaries—with Pennsylvania potentially next.
The Primary Problem didn’t appear overnight—and it won’t be solved overnight. But reform is not only possible, it’s already happening. The sooner we open primaries to all voters and all candidates, the sooner we can build a representative democracy that works for all Americans.
Nick Troiano is the executive director of Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform to foster a more representative and functional government. He’s also the author of “ The Primary Solution.”
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.