Oct. 21, 2023
Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl wrote for Time on how winner-take-all elections create a polarized two-party system, promoting conflict over compromise.
Instead, members of Congress need to worry about placating their primary voters, who tend to be much more intensely partisan and really, really dislike compromise. Shortly after McCarthy was removed, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin neatly summarized the position of the right-wing base: "I would not negotiate with Hakeem Jeffries and these Democrat Marxists and the Squad and all the rest of them if you put a gun to my head. These people are destroying our country at every turn. They are the enemy."
Similarly, after some Republicans floated the idea of temporarily giving Speaker powers to the current Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, the party’s right flank drew a line in the sand. Heritage Action, the advocacy wing of the far right Heritage Foundation, announced that they would consider any vote for empowering McHenry a “key vote” that would seriously harm the members’ scorecards. That’s no small thing. House Republicans’ careers can be made or ruined by the grades they get from conservative organizations and commentators, because it’s the primary, not the general election, that often determines whether they keep their job. And the competition within the party is real, too. Former Rep. Mark Meadows famously manipulated other Republicans into voting against Heritage Action recommendations so that his score would look better in contrast. In this hyperpartisan environment, even most moderate Republicans are motivated to lean as far to the right as they can in order to get through their primary elections.