A new report from Fair Vote, a nonpartisan election reform organization, found that in statewide and House races, candidates are increasingly being swept into office after winning primaries with the support of just a sliver of the voting population.
Since 2018, Fair Vote has tracked a particular path to power made possible by the structure of American primary and general elections. In many states, candidates can win their party primary with only a plurality of the vote in a crowded field and then go on to win the general election in a safe district of states for their party.
In one example, Illinois’ 9th District, the Democratic nominee won the primary with 29% of the vote, accounting for just 5.2% of the district's total population. In absolute terms, Daniel Biss received 38,804 primary votes in a safe Democratic seat, essentially locking in a general election victory, in a district with 740,435 residents.
In another district, Dan Green, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, squeaked out a primary win with just 25.4% support in the primary election, accounting for just 1.8% of the district’s population.
Fair Vote has tracked election victories like Biss’s since 2018, and they found that this year, 2026, was on track to have the most examples of these types of victories. In total, there are around 126 candidates who won their primaries with plurality support and are expected to win in either a House or statewide race this year – the most of any year since 2018. In Fair Vote’s analysis, the severity of the situation this cycle is due to mid-decade redistricting and retirements.
The problem, in the analysis of Fair Vote, is that this system incentivizes candidates to cater to a relatively small fraction of their constituency, just enough to get them through a party primary. It also means that the winning general election may not even be the most popular member of their own party who ran for the seat, due to multiple primary candidates aligned on policy splitting the vote.