Chronic lack of competition in congressional elections

Out of the 435 U.S. House elections in 2022, five out of every six races were decided by more than 10 percentage points. The average margin of victory for winners in contested elections was 28 percentage points. And that’s not counting the 32 seats (one out of every 13) that went uncontested by one of the major parties, compared to 27 uncontested seats in 2020. 

Competition has been steadily decreasing since 2018 – in 2022, only 36 races were true toss-ups (a final margin within 5%), compared to 44 in 2018. The number of “competitive” races (final margin between 5% and 10%) has fallen from 45 to 35. Even the number of races where the final margin was between 10% and 20% fell significantly, from 81 to 73. Meanwhile, the number of landslides and completely uncontested races has jumped from 265 to 291. 

While this lack of competition is a national problem, individual states’ performance on these and other key measures of democracy and accountability vary greatly. 

Partisan skew leaves voters unrepresented

In addition to uncompetitive individual seats, the election results are also far from fair. Under a fair, proportional system, a party’s candidates should earn roughly as many seats in a state as votes cast for that party. However, states with three or more representatives had a median “skew” between votes and seats of 18%. States with large partisan skews include New Mexico, where Democrats won 100% of the seats with only 55% of votes, and Iowa, where Republicans won 100% of the seats with only 56% of votes.

A Congress elected by only 24% of the voting age population

One measure of a congressional mandate is how many eligible voters select the winners. We call this “voter consensus.”  From 2014 to 2020, voter consensus for winning candidates as a percentage of the voting age population largely grew, from 23% to 34%. However, it hit a low point in 2022 at 24% – showing that only a small portion of the population is represented by these recently elected members of Congress. This low “voter consensus” value reflects both low voter turnout and winners elected with a low share of the vote. 

See the Voter Voice rankings

We ranked all 50 states on “Voter Voice,” a metric consisting of five sub-measures. In higher-ranked states, citizens are more likely to have their voices heard and more likely to make a difference in election outcomes. 

The chart below shows the rankings for each state. These rankings are also shown in the map at the top of this page.

Rankings on individual sub-metrics

We also ranked all 50 states on each of the sub-measures. Find tables of state rankings on the sub-measures below. 

How to improve congressional elections

As each state is responsible for drawing its own Congressional maps and setting voter eligibility requirements, every state can improve its standing and the health of its democracy.

Nationwide, replacing winner-take-all elections with a system of proportional representation would solve many of the problems that make democracy dubious in so many states. To provide real choices and improve representation, we need to pass the Fair Representation Act and move to multi-member congressional districts with fair elections based on ranked choice voting.

Download the data

The full dataset is available in this spreadsheet.