A Fake Democracy?
Why no one has much chance of toppling Congress's incumbents
And yet with Democrats needing to pick up 16 seats to take back the House--a fraction of what the GOP managed in '94--few political handicappers are predicting a Democratic revolution this November. In fact, the Cook Political Report rates just 35 of this fall's 435 House races as competitive. Other analysts put the number at 25, or fewer than 6 percent of races. That's down from more than 100 competitive races in 1992, leaving the Democrats virtually no room for error.
But almost all Democratic House incumbents are safe this November, too. Two years ago, nearly 98 percent of House incumbents seeking re-election won, capping a decade of partisan stasis unmatched in U.S. history. "House elections ... are starting to take on all the suspense of contests for the old Soviet Union's central committee," writes Juliet Eilperin, author of the new book Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives. What happened to the institution the Founders designed to be more responsive to voters than any other? The answer has to do with redistricting, money, and an increasingly polarized "red"/"blue" America. At a moment when the Bush administration is aggressively pushing democracy abroad, there are serious questions about the health of the American democratic experiment at home.
Line drawings. Congressional redistricting has long been done with an eye toward maximizing partisan advantage. The word gerrymander was coined in 1812, when Massachusetts partisans allied with former Gov. Elbridge Gerry crafted a salamander-shaped House district. But beginning in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court ruled that all congressional districts must include roughly the same number of residents, the art of manipulating the demographic map took off. Usually done by state legislatures once a decade after the census, congressional redistricting often had the effect of increasing the number of competitive House races. After the 1982 round, for example, the tally jumped from 69 to 79.
But with the introduction of sophisticated redistricting software in the 1991 round, the number of competitive races--where the winner took less than 52 percent of the vote--began to drop. "In 1982, the lines in upstate New York were drawn on Mobil Oil maps," recalls New York Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "In 1992, I went to a Park Avenue mainframe computer, made requests, and they brought out [maps]. In 2002, you did this on a laptop with $140 software." That software allows redistricters to tote up the ballot choices of individual voters in previous elections and to carve them up block by block. In crafting Murphy's Pennsylvania district, for example, Republican state legislators wove lines to take in Republican-leaning bedroom communities while avoiding the Democratic industrial towns. The result: a district that resembles a crudely drawn M and that slices through towns like Monroeville.
After the post-2000 redistricting, the number of competitive House races tumbled from 53 to 38. With Republicans in control of more state legislatures and governorships than at almost any time in the previous 40 years, they redrew maps in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere without consulting Democrats, who'd long dominated the process in states like California. In Pennsylvania, home to half a million more Democrats than Republicans, GOP-led redistricting turned a congressional delegation comprising 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats to a 12-to-7 Republican advantage (the state lost two seats because of slow population growth). "Gerrymanders in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida pretty much account for the Republican advantage in Congress," says George Mason University Prof. Michael McDonald. "If we had neutral maps, we'd be talking about a much different nation."
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