[OliverJones]

In an two-stage election system, rigging the districts to make the second stage irrelevant to the outcome, well, makes the first stage relevant to the outcome.

When the first stage elections are contested among isolated ideological subsets of the electorate their results tend to extreme positions.

What I'm saying is this: it is inevitable that the REDMAP project that yielded the kinds of district-level results shown in this article will continue to generate more and more extremist election results.

Ryan and McConnell, and the whole US federal house of representatives, have bought and paid for their dysfunction with this systematic gerrymandering. The situation isn't going to improve as long as this holds.

Pouring money into contesting the general elections in these districts is entirely a waste. It enriches nobody but robocall and television companies, and doesn't affect the outcome.

[specialist]

Agree with your analysis, sentiment.

It's still necessary to contest every race. Because of down ballot races. Moving the needle 5 points in a statewide race can mean winning a lot of local elections. Ditto putting initiatives on the ballot, which motivate your base to turn out.

[int_19h]

I very much agree with this. What gerrymandering (and partisan voter suppression) does, is reduce the number of competitive districts in the country. Next year, the expected number of competitive House districts is 23 to 38 - out of 450! So, in over 400 districts, primaries are the only thing that matters.

On the other hand, primaries attract more motivated voters than the general. And those motivated voters tend to be motivated by their ideological positions - in other words, they're more extremist. From the perspective of candidates in the primary, they have to pander to those more extreme voters to get to the general - but they have no incentive to pander to the center, because even the more centrist members of their own party will vote for them over the opposition candidate anyway.

This also sets up a positive feedback loop, where even less ideologically radical voters, forced to vote for more and more extreme candidates of their party in the general, adopt at least some of the positions of those extreme candidates over time (making it easier to cast such a vote). Which in turn makes primaries more extreme, and shifts the overall party platform in that same direction.

We've already seen Republicans walk down that road, and where it got them. Now Democrats are going through the same process (Indivisible etc). It looks like we're undergoing the last political realignment possible in the current system, and at the end of it, we'll have two "ideologically pure" parties, with most voters going for straight party ticket, and with most legislative votes going down party lines. At which point the system is going to deadlock, because it pretty much requires some compromise to function properly.

[squiggleblaz]

But if this process is as you describe, won't the moderate voters eventually start electing independent candidates?

[int_19h]

The problem is that this process drags aside the two parties to the point where moderate voters in each are further away from each other than they are from extremists in their own party. More specifically, the other party becomes less acceptable - e.g. most people who voted for Moore in Alabama didn't really like him, but they couldn't fathom voting for his opponent, because of his position on one or the other wedge issue (e.g. abortion).