2009 Elections Kick Off the Secret War for Congress

You've probably heard one of two things about the Virginia governor's race. First there's the thesis. GOP nominee Bob McDonnell wrote a master's thesis 20 years ago in which he condemned "cohabitators," working women, feminists, "fornicators," and legalized contraception for unmarried couples, among other things. McDonnell has dismissed the paper as old news, an "academic exercise," and aside from a brief tightening in the polls immediately after it was disclosed, he has, incredibly, maintained a consistent lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds.

Then there's the Obama factor. The Virginia governor's race and its New Jersey counterpart are being closely watched through the prism of the president. The results of the two races will be described by the victors as being a referendum on Obama and by the losers as completely localized and unrelated to national politics.

But the elections also mark the kickoff of a much bigger battle. You're not going to hear as much about it in the media, but it's got far-reaching implications. Next month's contests will commence a national scramble for the pens that will redraw the congressional map for the next decade, bringing with it the ability to put a partisan tilt on each state's political playing field.

What makes the 2009 and 2010 state elections so important is next year's decennial census, which will bring two major political rearrangements. First, representation in Congress will be reapportioned according to shifts in population (the Northeast and Midwest are expected to lose a total of eight House seats, which will end up in the West and South). Then, each state will revamp its political lines, carving out new sets of congressional districts. While 13 states, including New Jersey, have tried to reduce the politics in redistricting by having special commissions draw the new maps, it remains an intensely political process in the bulk of states. The details vary from state to state, but the key body is most often the state legislature. According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, legislatures control the process in three dozen states, encompassing 383 congressional districts. Once per decade, in other words, the political class that gets the least national attention—state legislators, most of whom will be elected in November 2010—suddenly has enormous political clout.

In this case, that means being able to protect your incumbents while weakening the other party's. The GOP might put two Democratic incumbents in the same district, or Democrats might pack GOP voters into one gerrymandered district, creating a solid Republican seat surrounded by a host of Democratic-leaning ones. "You're talking about five election cycles in which the fundamental pattern of congressional elections are set," says John Ryder, the Republican National Committee's redistricting chairman.

And sophisticated data-crunching and computer programs have turned gerrymandering from an art to a science, with a small cadre of experts around the country able to craft a district's partisan balance with great precision. Control of the redistricting process "will decide the makeup of Congress in a close fight," says Tom Davis, a Republican former House member from Virginia. Davis, who knows more about the minutiae of district voting patterns than even most of the members representing them—he headed the National Republican Congressional Committee during the last go-round—estimates that with the right breaks, either party could pick up 10 to 12 House seats nationally.

Democrats currently control 43 of the 71 chambers (Nebraska is unicameral) that run their states' redistricting. The battle will focus on the seats in the 22 legislatures, spread across 17 states, where a small partisan swing would flip control. That group includes Virginia's House of Delegates, where the GOP seems likely to maintain control next month. Big states figure to be, well, big: Both chambers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas are up for grabs, for example. The same is true in Tennessee and Wisconsin. New York's Senate will be a big focus, as will Michigan's.

Democrats have more to defend: They currently control 12 of the 22 chambers in play. And those states currently have 198 U.S. House seats, almost 60 percent of which are Democratic.

Democrats are still smarting from how they did 10 years ago. They "let Republicans win the last couple of rounds of redistricting," says Matt Compton of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. "This cycle, we're determined not to let that be the case." Both sides are in somewhat new territory. The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign law banned unregulated campaign money—"soft money"—which the parties used to fund a lot of their redistricting efforts. So now they are relying to a much greater extent on outside groups to help fight the redistricting battles, giving Democrats—who have used such vehicles for other campaign efforts in the past—an edge.