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Sam Levine in New York |
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Hello and happy Thursday, The most fundamental concept in American government is that all politicians are accountable to the people. Constituents accept laws shaped by the people they vote for, knowing that they have the power to eventually vote them out of office if they disagree. But when it comes to the US House of Representatives, this pillar of democracy is crumbling. An overwhelming majority of seats in the US House are becoming non-competitive. That means that when voters show up at the polls in November to vote for their candidates, the contests will already be decided. Their votes won’t matter. It felt strange writing that as the opening to a story we published last weekend exploring the decline of competitive congressional seats. How could voters’ choices not matter in an American election? But academics, analysts and other experts say the trend is undeniable. |
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Just 27 of the 335 congressional districts that have been drawn so far as part of the redistricting process are considered competitive – meaning either party has less than a five-point advantage – according to FiveThirtyEight. Dave Wasserman, an elections expert for the non-partisan Cook Political Report, told me he expects there to be 30 to 35 competitive seats in total once states finish drawing all 435 district boundaries. That means that as many as 94% of representatives would be running in relatively safe seats – a figure that astonished me. Why is this happening? Some of the decline in competitive seats is due to natural geographic clustering of likeminded voters. That clumping means that when states draw new lines, it’s harder to draw competitive districts. In 2012, there were 66 competitive districts, Wasserman noted. By 2020, under the same set of lines, there were 51. But politicians are undoubtedly accelerating the decline in competition by distorting district lines to their advantage. As redistricting has unfolded this year, elected officials made aggressive efforts to change district lines to shore up incumbents, locking in their seats for several more years. The clearest example of this happened in Texas, where Republicans, who have complete control over the redistricting process, reduced the number of competitive districts from 12 to one . The decline in competition has huge consequences. No longer worried about a general election, politicians become more worried about fending off challengers in a party primary. That disincentivizes bipartisan compromise and incentivizes playing to their party’s base. “This will further increase polarization … it’s also a reflection of polarization, but it’ll also entrench polarization more deeply,” Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University, told me. “They will do even more of what we know they already do, which is tack to the more extreme wings in order to try and fight off potential primary challengers to protect themselves on that flank.” The lack of competition can have consequences beyond congressional races, said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, which focuses on down-ballot contests. She noted that the Democratic party focuses its resources in battleground states where there are competitive congressional districts. Fewer competitive districts, she said, would mean fewer resources. “The fewer competitive elections there are, the fewer places that will be able to have concentrated effort and intentionality around [races],” she told me. Thinking about competitive districts also caused me to rethink what constituted a “fair” electoral map. A state that is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans – with 10 congressional districts, for example – could draw five safe Republican districts and five safe Democratic ones. Would that map be fair? Would it be fairer than one that has three safe districts for each party and four competitive districts? I posed this question to Pildes. He said that politicians tended to favor the former approach. “One reason parties don’t like competitive seats is that if the districts are all 3% to 4% predicted to go in one particular direction, they can all flip in a single election. Whereas if they’re plus-nine for one party, a three-point shift isn’t gonna do anything,” he said. “The value of competitive districts gets sort of short shrift in the political process because there’s not a lot of political self-interest in creating competitive districts.” Also worth watching …
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