Most voters feel their vote doesn’t matter and their elected officials don’t represent them. New research from the Unite America Institute confirms this unfortunate reality: In 2024, on average, only 13% of voters had a “meaningful vote” in electing their state house representatives. At the congressional level, the numbers are just as stark — 14% of voters had a meaningful vote in electing the entire U.S. House of Representatives.
The main reason not all votes are “meaningful” in our democracy is a lack of competition among candidates running for one. Most districts at both the federal and state levels are “safe” for one party or the other in the general election, meaning the dominant party’s primary effectively determines the winner — typically with a low turnout. As a result, even though general election turnout can be high — 60% nationally in the 2024 U.S. House elections — the number of votes that meaningfully impacted who was elected to Congress is actually quite low. In today’s politics, with many November general elections effectively pre-determined by party affiliation alone, turnout alone is not the best metric to measure the health of our democracy.
When most elections are uncompetitive, meaningful participation is low, limiting voters' ability to elect candidates that adequately represent their views. For example, in the many instances where the general election is not competitive, the primary election of a district’s dominant party provides the only opportunity for meaningful participation. And in the many other instances where neither the primary nor the general election are competitive, it’s difficult to argue the will of ‘the people’ is truly represented in the election results. Many elected officials are insulated from any sort of accountability.
To shed light on this trend, the Unite America Institute developed the meaningful votes metric to uncover the relationship between voter participation and competitiveness in congressional and state legislative elections.
In safe seats, most meaningful votes are cast in primary elections, where voters tend to be less representative of the broader electorate. Each election cycle, legislators are incentivized to appeal to a small slice of the electorate that determines whether or not they are reelected. This has real consequences for the political behavior and policymaking, with legislators incentivized to govern in the interests of their unrepresentative party bases rather than the majority of their constituents.
This project examines meaningful votes cast for the state house of all 50 states. The following report provides a brief methodological overview of meaningful votes, summarizes the data across all 50 states from 2018-2024, describes election rules that most influence the share of meaningful votes, and provides insight on how states can most improve their scores.
