The NPR Politics Podcast - Why bipartisanship is disappearing from Congress

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

The nationwide push to redraw congressional districts mid-decade has not led to a big advantage for either political party, but it has created less competitive districts. We discuss how that reduces bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, and we discuss one lawmaker who seems to buck that trend.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, congressional reporter Sam Gringlas, and political correspondent Ashley Lopez.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Sam Greenglass. I cover Congress. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And today on the show, a political trend that experts say is killing bipartisanship. and making government work worse.

Ashley, you have some reporting this week that shows that this trend was actually really heightened by the redistricting arm race that we saw last year. Can you explain all this? Yeah. So basically what we found is that this redistricting fight that was started by Trump when he asked Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map so that there were more favorable seats for Republicans in the state. And then, you know, obviously that prompted other Republican states. to do the same and Democrats countered with maps that favored their party in other states, including California. This is created a situation where really no party now has like a significant edge electorally coming into the midterms. But what it did do was it created the situation where

there are fewer competitive seats now, meaning there are more seats that will pretty much be settled by primary elections and not those general elections in November because those were drawn to quite explicitly favor one party over the other. Got it. So like super red districts or super blue districts as opposed to the districts that actually have a chance of going either direction. Why does that actually matter? Well, I mean, let's look at from the voter side, right? Like, if you're like a blue voter and one of those red districts, like, what incentive do you have in November to go vote? Like, you just feel like a little bit, like, not represented. Like, there's no real person on your side who has any sort of fighting chance to represent you. You pretty much only have some power in deciding who wins the primary. It means that you don't have like, really a say in where power goes in Congress. And then on, you know, the legislative side, like if you're a lawmaker, you pretty much don't have to listen to the part of your electorate that doesn't vote in primary. So meaning not the ideological partisans in your party, the independent

voters. And independent voters are the largest growing electorate in the country. There are more people who are registering as independents than part of either party. So that is like a whole swath the voters who are just pretty much either ignored or not heavily factored in their lawmakers thinking. Yeah. And, you know, because of that, we see lawmakers have way less incentive to compromise when they get to Congress. I just watched this play out at the Capitol in the context of this effort to preserve those expiring affordable care health subsidies in the House, the handful of Republicans and Democrats who were most interested in working across the aisle to cut a deal to try and do something here. They came from the handful of competitive districts that do still exist, but it's really just not many.

And so there often aren't enough people to cut these kinds of deals. Okay. So, yeah, you have fewer competitive districts heading into this election cycle. And that creates what experts call the primary problem, which is that primary voters kind of have an outsized influence over the general feel of the American government right now. Can we zoom in on that a little bit more? Ashley. I know there are numbers about like the amount of voters that actually elect Congress. Do you have any up to date numbers on the extent of the primary problem? Sure. So let's look at 2024. So it was calculated that just 7% of voters elected essentially 87% of U.S. House races. So this is a very small sliver of people who vote who have actually had a meaningful outcome on who has power in Congress. And so let's look at this year. So we're coming into this year. midterm elections where the Cook political report says that just 18 out of 435 races are actual toss-ups where either party could win. And if even you were to expand that to like districts that

maybe lean a little bit in one direction or the other, that's still just 36. So we're looking at less than 10 percent of races where races are even a little bit competitive or fully competitive. And compared to Trump's first term, there were 48 of those kinds of seats. So we are seeing a market difference in the number of seats. And I mean, who has power in Congress is ultimately decided by a very small number of seats. That kind of decline in the number of competitive seats is pretty meaningful. Right. I mean, Sam, you saw this firsthand when you were a local reporter in Georgia, right, this kind of decline of competitive districts happening in real time. Yeah, I mean, I think it can be really helpful here to put a point on what this actually looks like in the real

world. So I lived in Atlanta, and the metro Atlanta suburbs were growing a lot in the last decade, becoming more diverse, and Democrats were able to flip two suburban congressional districts, one in 2018 and another in 2020. And then after the 2020 census, Republicans gerrymandered these districts, and you ended up with, instead of having two pretty competitive districts, you had one very blue one and one really red one. And I heard from so many voters who kind of like Ashley was talking about earlier regretted that they did not have a real general election choice. And then you can imagine how that will influence how the members that those districts elect will end up voting in Congress and the types of policies they're going to pursue and the extent to which they're going to

be willing to compromise and work across the aisle. Yeah. And another added issue here is that primary voters because of the way this is all structured, just don't look like the broader electorate that you would see in November, right? They tend to be older, wider, more affluent, and more partisan, more ideologically, like, aligned with the base of the party. Like, we're talking about the base of the party, really.

Lawmakers are thinking about that group of people more than they are, these low propensity voters who tend to have, like, an economically different sort of situation or be more racially or ethnically diverse or younger. So I think that also has an influence in how people govern. I do feel like this is one of those things that just impacts every aspect of our politics. Well, I don't understand why we're not talking about every single day. I mean, even Sam, every single Congress story is impacted by the fact that the lawmakers

voting on every policy are mostly in safe districts and mostly only accountable to their primary voters. Why do you guys think this isn't a bigger deal? Well, electoral reform is hard. It's complicated. I think telling voters that something that is hard to fix is the root of all their problems. It's not a fun conversation to have all the time. And there have been efforts to get at the primary problem from like different angles. During the Obama years, we saw a rise in the number of redistricting commissions that are aimed to be independent and not connected to politicians in any way, kind of taking the work of drawing districts away from politicians. And then there are efforts to open up primaries as well. meaning allowing those independent voters to have a say in primaries to give them a bigger role. And those have been a mixed bag in 2024. A lot of the statewide efforts to do this did not pass.

A lot of it is because parties message a lot around these issues and parties don't want this to change. They like that they have a lot of power here. And it is really hard to get parties to relinquish that power in any meaningful way. And I think voters, when they hear that messaging, they either get confused or they are suspicious of the intent of changing something big in the way our politics work. I do wonder, though, if this redistricting arms race will change this at all. I went to Indiana last fall where Trump's allies were pushing this off cycle redistricting effort. And at the Capitol, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there protesting.

I went to a couple holiday parades around town. And people knew about the redistricting effort and were pretty well versed in what was going on. even people who don't follow politics really regularly. And so I wonder if this is waking people up to the point where maybe they're going to be more engaged in some of these debates going forward. One other thing that kind of is just sticking with me from this whole effort over the last couple of months to gerrymander these districts. Ashley mentioned that in the end, this all might amount to not giving Democrats or

Republicans much of a different advantage in control of the House. And I asked a University of Indianapolis political science professor Laura Merrifield Wilson about this. And what she said is something I keep thinking about. What if enough states do this? And it's actually a wash. The real loser here are voters in those congressional districts. Yeah. And advocates who work in this space. So United America, I talk about them a lot because they're very focused on the primary problem. their executive director and founder, his name is Nick Troiano, he told me he's like, we're looking at a situation when we're walking into a midterm that is about to be the least competitive of our lifetimes. And he thinks that means we are also about to have the least accountable Congress of our lifetime. He goes as far as to say that voters will just have less influence in what their lawmakers are doing now. Yeah, it's worth remembering that the sort of last time we saw a big push across the country to change some of the stuff. was with all the independent redistricting committees. And that came out of a similar sort of

high-profile redistricting effort, but Republicans led in 2010. So really, and I think that got a lot of news and that got a lot of people paying attention to the idea of who draws the districts and the system. And so it'll be interesting to see whether this last year, you know, plays out similarly. Okay. Let's take a quick break and more in just a moment. Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. And we're back.

And Sam, while we are on the topic of the decline of bipartisanship in American politics, you recently profiled a pretty interesting person, Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama. What brought you to her as somebody to really focus on? Yeah, so Katie Britt's first introduction to a national, audience, I guess, happened two years ago when she gave the Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden's final State of the Union address. And, you know, this job is often called the worst assignment in politics. So it's kind of a daunting task for really any up-and-coming politician who takes it on. But Brits' response kind of went viral in not a good way necessarily. It got parodied on Saturday

night live. And I think for people who maybe this was their first introduction to who this person was, saw her as this hyper-partisan firebrand. So when I got to Congress, I was really surprised to learn that this is actually really different from the profile that she's trying to cut in the Senate. And she has been in the center of a couple of recent efforts to try and come up with bipartisan compromises, deals across the aisle, including ending that record-long government shutdown in the fall. And her latest assignment now is working with Democrats and the White House to try and come up with some policy changes to how federal immigration agents operate after those two deadly shootings in Minneapolis.

I mean, I do feel like working on bipartisan issues in the Senate right now and in any form of government right now feels difficult. What did Britt tell you about that? Yeah, so I had a chance to talk with her and I asked her why she even wants to engage in these kind of debates at a time when, as we've been talking about, there's just really little incentive to give and take and reach across the aisle. Anybody can go sit in a corner. Two-year-olds do it best. And we have a lot of people that are taking their ball and sitting in the corner.

And I just think that there's too critical of a moment in our country's history to do that. Do you feel like her approach to bipartisanship was shaped by, she worked for Richard Shelby, right? Former Senator in Alabama? Yeah, so Britt is actually a longtime Hill Staffer before she got to Congress as a member herself. And she worked for a long-time. top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is really known for being bipartisan in nature. And it's kind of this old school approach to the Senate where you develop relationships across the aisle, even friendships, and build that trust that is necessary for cutting deals and

doing this kind of give and take that we're talking about. And I talked about this with someone who's known Brit for a really long time, a veteran Alabama political columnist Steve Flowers. And what he told me is that he sees two different kinds of senators, ideologues and facilitators. He said Shelby was a facilitator, and that's the kind of senator that Britt wants to be. That's what Katie's role will be is bring home the bacon, get things done for Alabama, as well as voting conservative. The next one we have will be a Fox News chasing publicity hound. He wants to be known as a right-wing fire eater. But Flowers told me that this is actually really different.

to be that kind of facilitator in this era because of everything that we've talked about compared to the time that Shelby was serving in the Senate. And that's in part because there's just trip wires everywhere. You know, not only are you trying to maintain relationships with Democrats and your Republican leadership in the Senate, but you also have to deal with the White House, which sees kind of any little bit of criticism or break from the party line as disloyalty. And on a topic so fraught like immigration, those possible hurdles are really everywhere. I do wonder about whether this still comes back somehow, Ashley, to the primary problem of just the fact that even in the U.S. Senate, in every level of government, these elected officials

have to win this first election with the most ideologically pure, small group of, as you mentioned, wealthier, more highly educated, more vociferous voters. I mean, do you think this problem goes beyond the U.S. House. Yeah, in some ways. So unlike the House, senators don't have like little slivers of the state cut out for them that give them basically a foregone outcome in November. They do have to, at least in a general election, appeal to independence and a statewide electorate. But yeah, when you're looking at a primary, every senator's biggest fear is getting outflanked, is getting primary from their left if they're a Democrat or getting primaried from their right, if they're a Republican. And that is still the same electorate that is holding a lot of power here. These base voters

who don't look like the broader electorate are still have an outsized power in how these senators think. Now, you know, you do see this a lot in Senate races where, you know, they do try and fend off their left or right flank in a midterm and then pivot to, you know, trying to have a more palatable set of policies for a group of voters that's going to look very different. But yeah, those both audiences are really important. And you can tell when it is primary season because lawmakers are acting kind of different. They're acting like their main constituency are those primary voters and not the people they're going to have to face in November. And before this year, I almost would have assumed once you're an incumbent, you're in that office, you're a senator like this ceases to be

as much of a problem anymore. But then I feel like we've got this Texas race next week where we're about to watch John Cornyn, one of the longest serving U.S. senators. He's currently in a very competitive primary with somebody who's running to his right, Ken Paxton. And so I don't know. I just wonder if everyone in the U.S. Senate right now, especially on the right with the risk of, you know, being on President Trump's truth social, is a little bit on eggshells all the time right now. So incumbency power is particularly important during a November election, but it is less important sometimes during primaries because this is a smaller group of voters that have a little bit more influence and it is sort of easier to convince a smaller group of people if you're trying to outflank

a sitting senator. Now, there is a history of senators doing really well in primaries, like I think was Dick Lugar, who was like the last sitting U.S. senator to get out primaried. But, you know, these are different political times. A good example of this happening, not just to John Cornyn, is also happening in Louisiana. The Republicans there change primary rules so that they could more effectively out primary and out flank Bill Cassidy, who they're unhappy with because he voted to impeach Donald Trump. You know, so U.S. senators don't have to deal with like the primary problem quite like the U.S. House, but it is still a problem they have to deal with. And something I'm watching for is whether this dynamic changes at all. Once we get through the heart of primary season, do we start to see more Republicans, especially being willing to compromise and break ranks with the president and with their party?

once this threat of a primary challenge is behind them. All right, definitely something to watch, but man, primary season is a long time. I feel like that's going to be a long couple months. Yeah, not until into summer. Yeah, we can leave it there for today. Tomorrow on the podcast, we'll talk about some of the other political stories you might have missed this week. Hit that follow button in your favorite podcast app and make sure you don't miss it. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Sam Greenglass. I cover Congress. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org.