Let me, to use a popular Twitter meme, state my unpopular opinion: I do not believe that, reflexively, “every district” should have a Democrat running in it. To paraphrase the wonderful and dearly departed TV show The West Wing, it is a tough task to get a candidate to go on a political suicide mission. For example, even in my deep blue home state of California, GOP incumbent state legislator Shannon Grove sits in a district that voted 64-34 for Mitt Romney. Let’s face it: a lot would have to go wrong for Grove to lose a district like this. Which is why there are virtually no Democrats serving in districts that vote that lopsidedly Republican at the federal level. There are a handful on ancestrally Democratic southern districts that still fit in this category (I didn’t crunch the numbers, but one of the most extreme examples would have to be Oklahoma Democrat Johnny Tadlock, who reps a 76-24 Romney district), but it is a fraction-of-a-fraction, to be sure.
On paper, therefore, one would expect the “competitive districts” at the state level to be where “the action” is. After all, when the general political momentum in a district isn’t squarely in either camp, only a light tailwind, as opposed to gale-force winds, are required to flip a district.
There is mounting evidence, however, that unopposed districts are on the rise, and those potentially competitive districts are no longer immune.
A study by the invaluable Ballotpedia found that, in 2014, only 57 percent of state legislative races featured candidates from both of the major parties. If that simple statistic isn’t disturbing enough for you, consider that just four years earlier (in an election that was acknowledged by most to be uphill for Democrats from the get-go), 67 percent of the state legislative races featured a D vs. R matchup.
It’s early, and the sample size is thin (and a bit biased...no truly competitive legislatures have had a filing deadline yet), but 2016 looks to be even worse than 2014, in the early going.
What’s more, districts that should have full electoral dance cards often don’t. Last week, when we looked at the relative paucity of “competitive” legislative districts, we defined those districts as seats where the Obama share of the 2012 presidential vote fell between 46.00 to 55.99 percent. In other words, roughly within 5 points of Obama’s national performance.
By looking at the data provided in last week’s essay, we see that in the 48 states studied (again, it was not feasible to do the analysis on Alabama and Maryland, because we have yet to obtain presidential vote-by-LD data for those two states), there were just over 1,400 “competitive districts”. This made up just under 20 percent of the districts nationwide.
What might surprise you, however, is that over 240 of those districts featured unopposed major-party candidates the last time they came up for election. In other words, even in the most competitive turf at the state legislative level, roughly 17 percent of the districts did not feature competitive November matchups.
Even in the districts that should be the most fertile ground for competitive, spirited matchups, elections have essentially become coronations.
How can this be? As it happens, in advance of the 2014 elections I warned about this particular problem, and offered a theory as to why contested elections were becoming progressively more scarce:
in the current state of affairs, even nominally competitive districts suffer. [...] It is only supposition, but a plausible explanation for this could be the fact that ambitious souls may have no hunger for making the sacrifices necessary to run a competitive legislative campaign, only to be ensured life for the foreseeable future in a deep legislative minority. Consider: In several states that are considered competitive at the national level, the GOP enjoys a 10-plus seat majority in one or both chambers. Among those states: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and the aforementioned duo of North Carolina and Wisconsin. One has to imagine that the current landscape does make it more difficult for Democrats to recruit quality candidates, just as the outsized Democratic majorities probably stifle GOP recruiting in places like California or Illinois.
This year, we will likely get a great case study of this phenomenon out of Florida. In the Sunshine State during the last election cycle, a total of eight potentially vulnerable Republican districts lacked a Democratic challenger. Despite the fact that Florida was the closest presidential election contest on Election Night 2014, the state Senate has been solidly in Republican hands for years.
Of course, close followers of election news know that the Republican-drawn Senate maps are now invalid. Ruled a violation of the state’s “Fair Districts” admonition, the map was replaced by a far more equitable map by court order in late December.
So, did the gerrymander stifle political interest in Florida? We’re about to find out. It will be extremely interesting to see how many of the marginal districts in the state now field competitive races, given that a semi-permanent 26-14 GOP majority in the chamber is no longer ensured.
We can look at other states and see a similar phenomenon. For example, we spoke at length last week about the utterly clever gerrymander concocted by Republicans in Wisconsin. By using the median districts metric that my colleague Jeff Singer shared with us last summer, Wisconsin’s gerrymander is clear, but is not as egregious on paper as many others. However, recall that the (evil) genius of the map in Wisconsin is that there are a ton of districts that look marginal on paper, but all lean ever so slightly red. As a result, a state that President Obama carried with nearly 53 percent of the vote has an outsized (63-36) GOP majority in the state House. Part of that majority is propelled by a total of nine marginal districts where Democrats did not field opponents for Republican incumbents.
Now, it is fair to note that Democrats would likely have won few, if any, of those races had they been contested. After all, the most vulnerable of those seats was still a 50-48 Romney district. But every dollar the state party did not have to spend on those districts was an extra dollar that could be spent in races that were being hotly contested. That is a little-considered, but critically important, way to preserve and strengthen a legislative majority.
The lack of competition, however, is not entirely about gerrymanders. It can also be a reflection of the hopeless partisan circumstance in deep blue and deep red states. Consider: of the 115 Democratic districts in marginal territory that lacked a GOP challenger, eighteen of them were in a single legislative body: the Massachusetts House of Representatives. That is a chamber, at last check, that has a Democratic majority of 125-35. Given that disparity, it is not difficult to understand why Republicans might be reluctant to take the plunge, even in nominally favorable turf.
There are also that diminishing breed of districts that are not contested because the incumbents have simply locked down their districts over time. For example: normally, a 51-47 Obama district might look like an attractive target, especially in a nominally red state like Indiana. But five-term Democratic state Rep. Steven Stemler has obviously nailed down his district: Republicans have left him unopposed in every election since 2006. Of course, this only applies to those states that do not have term limits, and therefore there are not many folks like this left to consider.
On a moral level, this phenomenon (and the larger phenomenon of increasingly uncontested legislative elections) should be of great concern. Our elected officials, regardless of party, should have to justify their continued service. That, of course, is the purpose of regular elections. But when the overall political landscape discourages citizens from seeking public office, that’s a legitimate danger to our democracy. And if the game appears fixed from an outset, you can’t blame folks for wanting to stay on the sidelines. Therein lies another reason that redistricting reform, far from an esoteric topic that only election nerds should care about, can easily be argued as an essential ingredient to reviving our elective democracy.
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