From Sam Levine at the Guardian:

When millions of American voters head to the polls this autumn to vote for congressional candidates, the vast majority of their votes won’t matter at all.

It’s an idea that’s anathema to the very idea of US government – that politicians are accountable to the people. But America is poised to have a staggeringly low number of competitive seats in the US House, an alarming trend that makes it harder to govern and exacerbates political polarization.”…

It’s a trend that will probably profoundly affect American politics. Instead of worrying about appealing to voters during a general election, candidates are pushed to the extremes of their parties, becoming more focused on fending off primary challengers. It also discourages compromise and bipartisanship, instead incentivizing politicians to brandish their ideological bonafides…

Competitive seats are the grease that make the machinery of the House function. And we’ve seen an annihilation of competitive seats in the last several decades,” Wasserman said….

“I’m very concerned about what’s happened,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University who has written about the dangers of non-competitive congressional elections. “The more members are in safe seats, the more they’re capable of acting as these kind of independent free agent politicians … it could make the House even more ungovernable.” The 116th Congress, which was in session from 2019 to 2021, was one of the least productive in US history….

“The basics in Texas are, in most cases the primaries determine who the victor is gonna be in the general election in most cases,” said Joshua Blank, the research director at the Texas Politics Project. “Candidates in both parties are adjusting to the new normal of having to seek support from a more ideologically homogenous, but also more extreme primary electorate.”

A lack of competitive districts could also affect where parties choose to invest their campaign resources, said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a group focused on local races. The Democratic party, she noted, tends to focus its effort in places where there is overlap between competitive congressional districts and presidential battlegrounds.

“The fewer competitive elections there are, the fewer places that will be able to have concentrated effort and intentionality around,” she said.