In 2002, Democrats fell short for the fourth straight time in their effort
to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. To the surprise
of most observers, Republicans actually gained House seats for the first
time since 1994.
The conventional wisdom on this outcome is that President George W. Bush
made the midterm elections into a referendum on his post-Sept. 11 leadership
in the war against terrorism. Other analysts have pointed to a superior
GOP get-out-the-vote effort, or to better candidate recruitment.
While all these factors probably had an impact, the overriding obstacle
to a Democratic takeover of the House was set in place long before the
midterm election campaigns -- by the congressional reapportionment and
redistricting after the 2000 Census. In fact, this process gave Republicans
an advantage that will be difficult for Democrats to overcome before the
next decennial redistricting.
To a lot of people, this seems counterintuitive. To the untrained eye,
the House appears fairly evenly divided: 229 Republicans to 206 Democrats.
That suggests that the nation favors Republicans by 5.2 percentage points.
But if you judge by presidential voting behavior -- the purest indicator
of national political sentiment -- the nation really is much more evenly
split: almost 50-50. Al Gore won more of the popular vote in 2000, but
Bush won 239 congressional districts to Gore's 196. That shows how redistricting
can tilt the scales in the House.
The basic trend in redistricting, reinforced after the latest census,
is incumbent protection. This means the creation of as many safe, noncompetitive
districts as possible. The number of competitive districts -- those
that might change from one party to the other in any given election -- is
declining dramatically. The number of incumbents who lost in the general
election fell to an average of 16 in the 1980s, 12 in the 1990s, six in
2000, and -- if you control for redistricting and scandals -- zero
in 2002. We've reached the point where incumbents just can't lose. Never
before has there been such a preponderance of safe seats. And that is
bad news for the minority party in the House -- Democrats, who must
win an overwhelming percentage of marginal seats to regain power.
Aside from the incumbent-protection racket, Republicans did a better
job of gerrymandering House seats in the relatively small number of states
where one party or the other was in charge of redistricting and willing
to use its advantage.
The best example was Florida. We know from the 2000 presidential election
results that Florida is, in terms of political sentiment, the most evenly
divided state in the union; Bush won the state by only 500 votes. So if
Florida's congressional seats properly reflected the state's politics,
its 25-seat delegation would be divided roughly in half. Instead, it has
18 Republicans and only seven Democrats. That shows the power of redistricting
built around the creation of safe seats -- and the power of technology
that allows very precise map-drawing. It also demonstrates the partisanship
that is driving redistricting these days.
In Florida, exhibit A is the central region in the Tampa-Orlando axis.
It's a huge population center, and hugely important. Forty percent of
the state's voters live there. The region has 12 congressional districts,
and it's a politically competitive region -- unless you redistrict it
in such a way as to make it noncompetitive.
Look at recent elections. The 2000 presidential vote in the Tampa-Orlando
area was split down the middle. So its 12 House seats should be divided
roughly six to six. Instead, there are 10 Republicans and two Democrats.
Why? Because of very clever gerrymandering by a Republican-controlled
legislature. The lines were drawn not only to keep high-probability Democratic
voters, like minorities, bunched together in two districts with major
urban populations in Tampa and Orlando, but also to carefully disperse
probable Republican voters throughout the other 10 districts, giving them
a 55-45 advantage in almost every one. A Democratic legislature, by the
way, could have drawn lines to create exactly the opposite effect. That
shows how manipulative redistricting can be. District lines are just a
contrivance of somebody's partisan inclinations.
In California, where Democrats are the majority, they did it differently.
The line-drawers were able to make all the marginal seats safer. Therefore,
incumbents of both parties -- 33 Democrats, 20 Republicans -- are
all but guaranteed re-election until the next redistricting. The same
thing happened in the second largest state, New York.
In 2002, 80 of 82 House races in California and New York were won by
more than 10 percentage points -- and one other was won by 9.6 points.
This means that in the nation's two most populous states, controlling
about one-fifth of the entire U.S. House of Representatives, there are
almost no competitive races.
The creation of an overwhelming preponderance of safe seats has the effect
of nullifying politics. In other words, no matter how the voters feel,
about 90 percent of the districts are now preordained to go to a certain
party because of sophisticated gerrymandering. In many cases, this was
agreed to by both parties, because all incumbents -- Democrats and Republicans -- like
incumbent protection plans. In states where one party clearly dominated,
incumbents sat down in a room and drew a map that favored them all. Call
it consensual gerrymandering.
This is, unfortunately, the trend all over the country. Lack of competition
is the new watchword of congressional politics. Today only 40 to 45 seats
out of 435 can be called competitive. Another 20 can be competitive when
public opinion favors one party. In 2002, more than 80 percent of House
seats were won by margins of 20 percentage points or more. In my view,
only seats won by a margin of 4 points or fewer are truly competitive;
there were only 15 of these in the entire nation in 2002.
The decline of marginal districts has a polarizing effect on House politics,
and, indirectly, on all politics. Safe seats lock in the left-liberal
tendencies of the Democratic Party, and the right-wing dominance of the
Republican Party. They ignore the public will. That's not good for the
country because it creates an intransigent Congress that can't accomplish
anything. Today the Democratic Party caucus in Congress certainly appears
to be to the left of the country, to the left of recent (and likely future)
presidential nominees, and probably to the left of most people who call
themselves Democrats. That's not healthy -- especially at a time when
old stereotypes of Democrats as weak on national security and too addicted
to Big Government are re-emerging.
Besides redistricting within the states, Democrats were also disadvantaged
by the reapportionment among the states that followed the 2000
Census. In keeping with a 30-year trend, congressional seats continued
to move from the North into the Sunbelt; 12 seats migrated to the South,
where the voting is trending Republican. Every state that gained one or
two new seats had voted for Bush in 2000 -- with the exception of California.
In the 2002 congressional races, Republicans won seven of the new seats
and Democrats won five. And the obverse is also true: Of the 12 seats
given up by Northern states, more had been held by Democrats than by Republicans.
So Democrats took a hit coming and going.
Another important factor in redistricting is demographics. You can't
elect Democrats anywhere in America -- except possibly New York City -- without
a substantial minority population in a district. Even in presidential
elections, Democrats are winning only about 42 percent of the white vote
nationally. In the South, especially in rural areas and in exurbia, it's
closer to 30 percent. That's why in the formerly Democratic "Solid
South," the trend toward Republicans is continuing. As elderly Southern
Democratic conservative members of Congress depart, they're being replaced
by Republicans.
If one analyzes the districts where one party enjoys a 70 percent or
80 percent lock on the vote, 44 of them went for Gore and 17 for Bush
in 2000. That tells us that the Democratic vote is completely locked inside
a slew of urban areas. This means it is not "efficiently" dispersed
throughout the country.
What to do? Clearly, there's something fundamentally undemocratic
when more than 80 percent of our people's representatives don't really
have to run for re-election. It's as though they are being elected to
10-year terms instead of two-year terms. We need to look for remedies,
not only for the sake of the Democratic Party but for the sake of our
political process. We need to find ways to avoid a spiral of gerrymanders
that skews the playing field toward the ruling party and puts a fair chance
of political upset out of the reach of the opposition party, no matter
how persuasive its ideas.
One way to break this system is to take redistricting completely out
of partisan hands. We should, at a minimum, consider putting redistricting
under the control of state redistricting commissions balanced in party
make-up, with perhaps one independent member in case of tie votes. Independent
commissions in Iowa and Washington state produced much more competitive
redistricting after the last census -- four of Iowa's five seats are
competitive.
Alternatively, either though legislation or through a court case, we
could ban partisan gerrymandering. Under current case law, partisan redistricting
and incumbent protection is explicitly allowed. A suit could be brought
to try to change that. Line-drawers, whether political or independent,
could be forced to follow criteria such as compactness, community of interest,
and proximity rather than simply the principle of creating safe seats.
Yet, even as Democrats try to change the fundamental rules, there are
things they can do to try to win within existing ones. First they need
to absorb and recognize what really happened in 2002 -- that they were
steamrollered, not by George W. Bush, but by the latest redistricting.
This means they must prepare for real hand-to-hand combat by the time
of the next redistricting. (It even could come earlier if any other states
than Texas attempt to redraft redistricting in midstream; Texas Democrats
showed themselves ready for the fight when they dodged the Republican
seat-grab scheme last May by simply leaving the state.) They should study
districts that show a history of Democratic presidential voting but that
now have a Republican representative. More than 30 districts that Gore
carried elected a Republican House member. Most of these are in the Northeast
and in the suburbs of central cities elsewhere. Those seats should, with
the right candidate, be rich targets for Democrats.
Finally, Democrats have to focus on changing their image on the so-called
cultural issues if they are to regain the ability to compete in rural
or exurban districts. While Democrats have done a good job of inoculating
themselves on economic issues, a lot of voters suspect the party of excessively
liberal views on welfare, immigration, gay rights, guns, religion, and
other cultural issues. Democrats must learn to swim against the tide,
address negative perceptions of the party, and broaden the battlefield
of competitive districts. Otherwise, Democrats may spend a long time in
the wilderness before seriously challenging Republicans for control of
the House.
