Next Tuesday (June 24th), Utah will hold its primary election. Utahans will know that there isn’t anything to get excited about particularly in terms of House races. Unlike most states, Utah does not select its party nominees for House races through a primary. Instead, they use a smaller, more extreme method: party conventions. So both the Republicans and the Democrats have already selected their candidates, and primary voters will only nominate candidates for the state legislature, among a few other positions. When the general election does roll around, however, there will be one interesting House race. UT-4, Rep. Jim Matheson’s current district, will be a hard fought race between Democrat Doug Owens and Republican Mia Love. After barely scraping out a 700 vote victory over Love last cycle, Matheson has decided he will not run for re-election.
This is one of a series of diaries I am writing about the lopsided state of House of Representatives races throughout the US. These diaries focus on this distortion created by single-member districts through the lens of FairVote’s analyses and proposed reforms . All race projections are from our Monopoly Politics 2014 report, which projected 333 races last cycle, each one correct. For this election, our updated report projects 368 winners, although most of the remaining 62 races have a clear lean as well. Our projections rely only on relative presidential outcomes in districts and relative performances of House candidates, and we’ll be releasing our 2016 House election projections on November 6, two days after the general election.
That we can forecast almost 400 races two days after the general election is not a testament to our forecasting abilities, but rather a demonstration of how flawed our democracy truly is.
Utah – The Landscape
Always a growing state, Utah was able to add a third seat to its Congressional delegation after the 1980 Census and a fourth after the 2010 Census. While Utah is a growing state, it is also a very red one: in the 30 years that it held 3 seats, Democrats held 2 of 3 for only 4 years. When the fourth seat was added, long-time moderate Democrat Jim Matheson was able to cling to his seat in a newly drawn competitive district, while the additional seat landed safely in Republican hands. But now that Matheson is stepping down, there is a good chance that UT-4 will give Republicans a clean sweep of all the House seats (and Senate seats).
Methodology
FairVote’s projections are grounded in two factors:
1. The partisanship of a district. This is determined by the performance of major party candidates in a presidential race relative to their performance nationally. Charlie Cook later adapted this to create his PVI.
2. Performance Over Average Candidate (POAC). This is determined by how a candidate fares relative to what we would expect for an average candidate of the same party and incumbency status in his/her district.
The incumbent with the strongest POAC score is Chris Stewart, who had a -4.3% POAC. The weakest incumbent was Jason Chaffetz, with a -6.1% POAC, although he still won handily. You can see our full Utah report here.
2014 Projections
We project every single Utah district to be won by the Republicans this cycle. Other projection outfits such as RollCall and Cook Report predict the same. No incumbent is running unopposed, but none of them appear to be in much trouble either. It seems safe to say that Utah’s Congressional delegation will be exclusively Republican come 2015. In a state where around a quarter of voters are Democrats, this seems unfair. A fair, more proportional system would ensure that Democrats held at least one seat, if not more.
What Utah Needs
Utah obviously could have had a better redistricting map for Democrats if they had drawn it. They probably would have had a fairer map if an independent commission had drawn it as well.
But the root of the problem for Democrats goes much deeper. As people continue to sort themselves into likeminded communities, urban areas are becoming more liberal and less urban areas becoming more conservative. As I have pointed out in previous posts, this self-selection means that independent redistricting commissions can only do so much. Achieving competitive districts would require familiar snake-like districts.
The best solution is to create larger “super districts” that each elect 3, 4, or 5 Representatives. FairVote has developed a national plan to do that, as it shows with this interactive flash map analyzing districts as they are and as they could be. We recommend that candidates be elected by ranked choice voting (RCV), where voters rank candidates (Utah Republicans already use this method in some of their party conventions to ensure that candidates don’t win with a small plurality). In multi-seat districts, the percentage of the vote declines with the number of seats – it is just over 25% of the vote in a three-seat district and about 17% seat districts. Done nationally, it would completely remove the incredible partisan bias we now see in U. S. house races, where Democrats are unlikely to retake the House without surpassing 55% of the vote, as we explain in this analysis.
In contrast to the current plan, our Fair Voting plan projects a more even playing field: since winning election would require just over 20% of the statewide vote, Democrats would likely retain one seat, unlike what will probably happen under the current plan. Those projections depend on voter participation, though, so all voters in every district would be urged to participate. We’d likely see greater diversity within the parties, as well as the ability for independents and minor party candidates to hold the major parties accountable.
Adopting a plan that actively creates competition (and allows both parties to earn their share of seats) is the best way forward. All it requires is a statutory change from the US Congress. While that might not seem feasible now, it could very well happen in the future – especially if we recognize that our current gridlock stems from the structural failure of our electoral system.