Many Texas Republicans who voted for John Cornyn this spring will walk into the voting booth today without a candidate they truly want. Some told The Texas Tribune they were torn between backing Ken Paxton, voting for the Democrat, or leaving the Senate race blank.
Their choice was made for them months ago, when a much smaller group of primary voters picked the nominees. The same thing happened in Michigan, where Democrats chose Abdul El-Sayed over Representative Haley Stevens, and in Ohio, where Republicans lined up behind Vivek Ramaswamy once President Trump and the state party endorsed him.
Our primaries increasingly reward candidates who excite a party’s most committed voters, and then hand the result to everyone else in November. You can still vote for anyone on the ballot, but you cannot vote for someone who was pushed out, scared off, or never encouraged to run.
In my recently published book, titled The Opening, I documented how five forces have worked together over the past fifty years to pull both parties away from the center and toward their fringes: campaign money, the Internet, partisan cable news, sweetheart gerrymandering, and the primary system. Together, these forces have narrowed the political coalitions within both parties, steadily pushing moderate voices out of organizations that once welcomed them.
Meanwhile, a record 45 percent of American adults identified as political independents in Gallup’s 2025 polling, compared with just 27 percent who identified as Democrats and 27 percent as Republicans. More Americans now belong to neither party than to either one, yet the two parties still decide who most of us get to choose from in November.
As the midterm results come in over the next several days, it is worth looking at how these candidates reached the ballot in the first place.
Loyalty Became the Job Requirement
Cornyn was no liberal. According to The Texas Tribune, he voted with Trump’s agenda 99 percent of the time, yet none of that mattered once the president endorsed Paxton.
Money could not save him either. Cornyn and his allies outspent Paxton nine to one over the course of the campaign, and Paxton still won the runoff by 28 points, the Tribune reported.
What primary voters wanted was loyalty. When Trump endorsed Paxton, he praised his “Loyalty to the Cause” and his support for ending the filibuster, the Senate rule that usually requires 60 votes to pass major legislation. The race stopped being about who could best serve Texas and became a contest over who stood closest to the president.
Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie learned the same lesson in May, when he lost his primary to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein. Massie had pushed to limit the president’s war powers over Iran and led the effort to release the Epstein files, and Trump responded by backing someone to replace him.
Nobody would call Massie a moderate, yet refusing to go along with the president on a few major issues was enough to cost him his seat. This is what I mean by POTER, the Party of the Extreme Right: a party that keeps moving further right while demanding that its members never break ranks.
Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy found that out as well. He lost his primary to Trump-endorsed Representative Julia Letlow, and voters had not forgotten that he voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial. Every Republican still in office has received the message: cross the president, and your seat is at risk.
Democrats Are Moving Left
Democrats are narrowing too, though in a different way. In Michigan, El-Sayed beat Stevens, a centrist with the backing of party leaders, by fewer than 14,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast. The certified results gave El-Sayed 48.4 percent and Stevens 47.6 percent, with the rest going to Mallory McMorrow, who had dropped out. El-Sayed won, but nearly half of Michigan’s Democratic primary voters chose the moderate.
His agenda places him well to the left of Stevens, including support for Medicare for All, ending the filibuster, ending lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, and replacing Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a new structure.
He is not a socialist, however, and the distinction matters. El-Sayed calls himself a capitalist and is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The real socialist gains came in House races. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America won primaries in several states, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Donavan McKinney in Michigan.
Kiros defeated Representative Diana DeGette, who had held her Denver seat for nearly 30 years, and McKinney unseated Representative Shri Thanedar near Detroit. The Associated Press describes these candidates as likely on their way to Congress, because they won in districts where Democrats are heavily favored.
None of this means democratic socialists run the Democratic Party. It does mean an organized group has learned how to win primaries, and it is about to gain more seats at the table.
Maine Took a Different Road
Maine’s eventual Democratic nominee was not selected by primary voters. Graham Platner won the June primary, but he later withdrew. Party delegates then chose Troy Jackson to replace him at a convention in July.
Jackson won 566 of the 571 delegate votes, and the Associated Press reported that his platform includes Medicare for All and dissolving ICE. Whether through a primary or a convention, a small group of party activists made the choice that every Maine voter will face today.
Maine also shows that moderates have not vanished entirely. Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has often broken with her party, is on the ballot again and ran unopposed in her primary. She is a reminder that the trend is strong, but it is not yet complete.
Ohio’s Field Was Cleared Early
In Ohio, the Republican field was settled before most voters were paying attention. CBS News reported that Attorney General Dave Yost dropped out after Trump and the Ohio Republican Party endorsed Ramaswamy, and that Lieutenant Governor Jim Tressel, the former Ohio State football coach, decided not to run.
That left Ramaswamy facing Casey Putsch, a small business owner who won about 18 percent of the vote. Ramaswamy’s victory was overwhelming, but Ohio Republicans never had the chance to weigh him against their sitting attorney general or one of the best-known figures in the state.
Ramaswamy’s own promises raise questions as well. He wants to phase out the state income tax and roll property taxes back to pandemic-era levels, and he says economic growth will make up the money that local governments would lose. Yet Ohio’s public radio statehouse reporters found that neither he nor his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, has given a firm answer on how to pay for their plans.
The Five Forces at Work
Each of the five forces I describe in The Opening shows up in these races.
Campaign money gives donors and outside groups enormous say over which candidates look like serious contenders. Yet Paxton’s win shows that even a nine-to-one spending advantage cannot buy primary voters who have already made up their minds.
The Internet lets candidates rally a national following online, so they no longer need the local party leaders and broad coalitions that once decided who could run.
Partisan cable news holds on to its viewers by keeping them in a constant fight with the other side, which rewards candidates who pick battles rather than solve problems.
Sweetheart gerrymandering, the practice of drawing House districts so that incumbents of both parties stay safe, means most House members never face a real contest in November. That is why so many House members worry far more about a primary challenger than about the other party.
The primary system is where all of these forces come together. Before candidates can ask the rest of us for our votes, they first have to win over the smaller and more partisan group of people who vote in primaries.
A 2026 Stanford study of state legislative races found that more extreme candidates have a growing edge in contested primaries, while the advantage moderates once enjoyed in general elections has shrunk to nearly zero over the past decade.
What Has Really Changed
The old days were no golden age, and strong liberals and conservatives have always won elections alongside moderates. What has changed is how much room each party leaves for people in the middle, and how safe it is for an officeholder to work with the other side. A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute found that moderates are less likely to run for Congress at all, and that sitting members change how they vote to head off primary challengers.
In other words, moderates do not have to lose a primary to disappear. Many never run at all because they know they would not survive one. Others who are already in office begin voting the way their party’s most active voters demand, simply to avoid drawing a challenger.
That leaves general-election voters with whatever the primaries produce. Millions of Americans will vote today for a candidate mainly to stop the other party, not because they agree with everything their candidate stands for.
After Tuesday
The midterm election results will decide who takes office, and they will also start a new fight inside each party over what those results mean.
A broad Republican defeat would not automatically bring moderates back into the party. As I explained in my earlier article, Trump could blame the loss on Republicans who questioned him and demand greater loyalty. That response could push the Republican Party further toward what I call POTER, the Party of the Extreme Right, leaving even less room for moderates and independent voices.
Republican victories could push the party the same way, because its leaders would conclude that demanding loyalty works. Either outcome points toward a narrower Republican Party.
Democratic socialists, meanwhile, will point to their primary wins as proof that they deserve a bigger voice in setting the party’s agenda and choosing its leaders. That sets the stage for a struggle over who controls the Democratic Party, and the midterm results will help decide how fierce it becomes.
The five forces I wrote about in The Opening have already shaped the ballot. Americans will choose among the candidates in front of them, but millions will be choosing from a list that was highly filtered through the primary system long before today’s midterm elections.
That filtering has left America with two political parties that have moved toward opposite extremes, and the days of cooperation and compromise are long over. Forecasters expect Democrats to win the House and give them a good chance of taking the Senate, but a change in who holds power will not change how either party’s members got there or whom they must keep happy to stay.
For the next two years, the battle between the two parties will continue on new ground. Members who won their primaries by promising never to give an inch have little reason to compromise now, because the next primary is never more than two years away. Those who do compromise, as Representative Jared Golden of Maine did in September to help Maine lobstermen, with Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington joining him on a key vote, risk losing committee seats, leadership posts, party campaign money, and even their next primary to a challenger backed by their own side.
So Americans should not expect much progress on the problems that have gone unsolved for decades, from immigration to education to health care. Solving any of them requires the give-and-take that our primary system now punishes.
The best we can hope for come January is a Congress willing to slow or stop some of the unraveling of federal oversight that should never have happened without its approval. When President Trump fired 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs who root out waste and wrongdoing inside federal agencies, a federal judge ruled that he broke the law by failing to give Congress the required 30 days’ notice and explanation. A Congress that simply insists on its own authority would be a modest step forward.
That is a low bar for the most powerful nation on earth. It is also the bar that the five forces have set, and it will stay there until Americans demand candidates who are willing to govern rather than fight.