Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the number of competitive races.
Winning the vast majority of U.S. elections requires a plurality of votes, meaning a candidate just needs to get more support than anyone else – not a majority of votes. In fact, it often leads to candidates winning party nominations even though the majority of voters supported other people.
According to new research by the democracy reform group FairVote, 120 candidates for the House, Senate and other statewide offices won primaries this year without a majority of support. And with many races considered safe for one party or the other thanks to partisan gerrymandering, winning a primary is tantamount to winning an election.
Among those nominees, 32 are considered heavily favored to win the general election, and just 37 are in competitive races, based on race ratings and polling data reviewed by FairVote.
Among those nominees in safe races, three received less than 30 percent of the primary vote: Democrats Daniel Goldman (25.7 percent) in New York’s 10th district, Jonathan Jackson (28.2 percent) in Illinois’ 1st district and Shri Thanedar (28.3 percent) in Michigan’s 13th district.
The Republican who won a primary with the smallest percentage of votes in a safe race was Chuck Edwards, who took 33.4 percent in North Carolina’s 11th district GOP primary.
Among statewide races, two Democratic candidates for governor – Wes Moore of Maryland and Daniel McKee of Rhode Island – are expected to easily win after taking less than 33 percent of the vote in their respective primaries.
“Instead of majority rule, our primaries have become a race to the bottom – who can win with the fewest votes? And with more than 90 percent of congressional districts so partisan that the election is decided in the primary, our elected officials are increasingly chosen by only a fraction of a fraction of the electorate,” said FairVote President and CEO Rob Richie.
It’s not just FairVote that sees a problem with the current primary system. Unite America, another nonpartisan reform organization, has been studying primary participation and found that in 2022, just 8 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in primary races that will determine 85 percent of the congressional representation. Those numbers are nearly the same as in 2020.
But not all races are effectively decided in the primary. Another 37 of those 120 winners have advanced to “toss up” races – the most competitive elections. Carrie DelRosso, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, pulled the smallest vote share among that cohort, taking just 25.6 percent of the vote.
On the Democratic side, Robert Zimmerman, running for the 3rd district of New York, garnered 35.2 percent of the primary vote in advance of a toss-up election.
FairVote explained in its report why plurality primary victories in competitive races are also harmful to democracy.
“This means in 37 elections, a party is not putting their best foot forward in an otherwise winnable race. In these 37 races, a majority of that party’s voters have to make the difficult decision of voting for someone they did not want representing them on the general election ballot, or helping the opposing party win,” the report states.
FairVote is a leading voice in the call for ranked-choice voting, a method of casting and counting ballots that is guaranteed to result in the winner having the support of a majority of voters.
In an RCV election, voters rank candidates in the order they prefer. If a candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, that person wins the race. But if no one receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and that person’s support is redistributed to voters’ second choice. This process – also known as an instant runoff – continues until someone has a majority of the votes.
Proponents argue that RCV not only guarantees majority support for the victor but also saves the government’s money (by eliminating additional rounds of in-person or mail-in voting) and encourages more civil campaigns (because candidates would want to appeal beyond their base in order to garner second- and third-choice from other voters).
“Ranked choice voting dramatically improves voters’ choices, and makes for stronger candidates coming out of primaries,” Richie said.
Maine and Alaska have both adopted ranked-choice voting. Alaska combines RCV with an open primary system in which the four candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, advance to an RCV-managed general election. Maine uses it for state and federal primaries and for general elections for federal offices.
More than 50 cities around the country also use RCV. This fall voters in Nevada, Seattle, Portland, Ore., and seven other jurisdictions will decide whether to switch to RCV for future elections.
Opponents say the system is overly complicated, although people who have voted in RCV elections say that has not been their experience. The ballot initiative in Seattle marks the first time voters will be able to choose between RCV and another option known as approval voting (or to stick with the current system).
In an approval election, voters mark the names of as many candidates as they wish and the person with the most votes wins.
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.