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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. |