The Ohio Statehouse, located in Columbus, Ohio.
As might be expected, a clear hierarchy has emerged in the public level of interest about the different facets of 2016. At the apex of the pyramid is the presidential election (the GOP primary, in particular), followed by the United States Senate (where Democrats remain cautiously optimistic about their prospects for reclaiming the chamber). The smallish offering of gubernatorial races are a somewhat distant third. Far down the pecking order, meanwhile, are any discussions about the state of play in the U.S. House and at the state legislative level.
Some of you might read this introductory paragraph and think to yourself: no shit.
The truth is, of course, that this would be the hierarchy in any leap year, in all probability. But, that said, there is an important point to be made here. The best efforts of the DCCC and the DLCC aside (and there are a lot of good folks busting their ass for both organizations), it is damned hard to find anyone talking about the balance of power at the federal or state legislative level.
The harsh reality, which all but the most optimistic Democrats have conceded a while ago, is that the reason there is so little discussion down-ballot is because virtually no one thinks the Democrats have a chance to reclaim the U.S. House, nor is there an expectation that they'll reclaim many, if any, of the legislative chambers that they've lost between 2010 and today.
A study published by Ballotpedia earlier this year offers some glaring, and somewhat galling, data to support such pessimism. Follow me below for the stats, what they mean, and why it means that the Democrats might have to endure a bit of pain in order to resurrect their legislative prospects.
The study, published in May by Carl Klarner, pointed out two particularly disturbing statistical marks that were "highlights" of the 2014 midterm elections.
- The percentage of people living where a state legislative election was won by 5 percent or less (marginal election) was the second lowest for state senates since 1972 and the third lowest for state houses.
- The percentage of people living in uncontested state house districts was higher than any other year, while that percentage in state senate districts came close.
To put it more specifically, the percentage of citizens living in a competitive state House seat has essentially been halved since 1972. In the past election, only 4.9 percent of Americans lived in a "marginal" state House seat (for his purposes, Klarner defined "marginal" as a race where the margin of victory was 5 points or less). The numbers for state senate races have also seen a drop, though not as sharp.
For those who care about accountability in their representatives, the picture becomes even more dark, as 2014 marked the first year in which over 40 percent of those citizens heading to the ballot box to elect state representatives were faced with no true option. The figures were only marginally better for the state senate elections, where more than a third of the electorate were faced with uncontested elections.
It is very hard to look at that data, and not consider the 2011-12 redistricting process at least partially to blame for the low ebb in competitiveness. With the bulk of U.S. House and state legislative seats drawn by legislative process, it is hard to ignore the impact on those efforts. And, indeed, the purpose of gerrymandering is to eliminate competitiveness in as many cases as is possible or prudent.
Let's be clear, however: it is not solely to blame, and anyone who suggests so is being a bit disingenuous. The decline in competitiveness has been decades in the making, and thus cannot be dumped into the lap of any single decennial remapping. Klarner cites two interesting prospects: (a) the partisan realignment of the American South, which made the competitiveness numbers in the past couple of decades artificially high from roughly the mid '80s to the late '90s as Democrats began to cede seats to the GOP; (b) the general trend in American politics towards partisanship and polarization, something also addressed earlier in 2015 here at Daily Kos Elections when I questioned whether split-ticket voting was a dying phenomenon.
All that said, the role of gerrymandering cannot be ignored, particularly this latest round of redistricting. At the time, most in the public conversation failed to appreciate what an utter disaster the 2010 midterm elections were for the Democrats. The bulk of the attention was paid on the loss of the U.S. House. While a dramatic shift, it was the sea change at the state legislative level that was the true political catastrophe for the blue team. In state after state, Republicans locked in their 2010 gains, and also made inroads to expanding those gains. This was certainly true in the U.S. House, where Republicans wielded control over redistricting almost 40 percent of the seats in the House (the Democrats had control over a puny 10 percent). Our own Stephen Wolf, in a piece earlier this year, concluded that the Democrats might've been robbed of any chance of reclaiming the House in 2012 due to the impacts of redistricting alone.
Not only did the ability to reinvent the lay of the land for the U.S. House pay dividends for the GOP, it led to an even more marked effect at the state legislative level.
Take the state of Ohio, one of the classic presidential swing states. In the wake of the 2008 elections, the Democrats held a narrow advantage in the state House (53-46 D). And 2010 was an unmitigated disaster for Ohio Democrats, who lost 13 seats in the state House to fall to a 59-40 minority. One would've expected, however, in a presidential election turnout, with a lot of low-hanging fruit from the landslide 2010 election, that the Democrats could regain some ground.
But they didn't. The remap engineered by Ohio Republicans favored the GOP to such an extent that they actually gained a seat in 2012, despite an election that was, on balance, a decent Democratic performance.
Ohio is not the most garish gerrymandering of them all (that award would have to go to North Carolina, across the board), but it is an obvious one. Democrats will likely always struggle to attain a state legislative majority in the state, because of the concentration of Democratic-leaning voters in a handful of places, but there is no rational soul who could claim that the current balance of power, where Republicans control just under two-thirds of the seats in the legislature, represents an accurate picture of the state of political play in the Buckeye State.
But therein lies the problem. Not only are these districts distorted, so to speak, they are also fairly inelastic. Those changes in voting patterns, coupled with the partisan characteristics of the districts, mean that Democrats are virtually locked into the minority for the immediate future. Consider, in the case of the Ohio House, only six Republicans hold seats that Barack Obama carried in 2012. Even if Democrats could sweep all six of those seats back into their fold, they'd still be almost 10 seats from the majority. Which means that they'd have to win Romney seats to get back the majority.
But they won't. As Klarner noted, polarization has taken partisan preferences and cemented them over the years. As a result, the phenomenon of Democratic legislators holding seats that vote GOP at the presidential level has all-but-disappeared, both at the federal and legislative level. It was not long ago that there were dozens of Democrats serving in seats that voted GOP in presidential elections. They're now close to an endangered species. In Ohio's state House, for example, that number stands at ... one. In the 435-member U.S. House, at last check, the number was five.
At the federal level, the competitiveness numbers over time have also receded, though the bottom actually was hit not in 2014, but a decade earlier, when a pair of status quo elections back to back (2002/2004) had a hugely chilling effect on competitiveness.
But even in that, we can talk about redistricting. One of the reasons why 2012-2014 was marginally higher than the numbers in 2002-04 was the fact that California, in the interim, had adopted redistricting via independent commission. So, the state where more than 1-in-8 Americans live went from having no competitive races (the 2001 remap was an ugly concoction designed for incumbent protection above all else) to eight U.S. House races that met Klarner's criteria in 2014.
The damage is not permanent, but it will be extraordinarily tough to dislodge. One organization, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, is on the task, however. They have launched an initiative known as Advantage 2020, whose stated goal is "bringing together elected officials, labor and constituency group leaders, and Democratic and progressive operatives to develop a focused, national strategy to stop Republicans from gerrymandering their way to power clear until 2032."
The DLCC, which acts as the campaign arm for state legislative races (and for whom I have sung many a hymn of praise over the years), has committed a lot of time and resources into working towards flipping these key legislatures, not in a single cycle, but as a multi-cycle project.
To do so, they'll probably need the help of a political tailwind in one of the three cycles. Writer Benjy Sarlin, in a piece he wrote last fall about the DLCC program, laid out the ideal scenario:
The fantasy scenario for Democrats, if all goes right, might look something like this: President Hillary Clinton, capitalizing on a solid first term, a still-divided GOP, and the usual advantages of incumbency, leads her party to a decisive victory in 2020. Riding her performance, Democrats down the ticket take over a number of key state legislatures and governor’s seats. Now with far greater control over the redistricting process, they put the House back into play.
Another possible solution, one posited by DKE's Stephen Wolf back in June, is for Democrats to
make a push for ballot initiatives authorizing redistricting to be done via independent commission. There is no doubt that commissions not only would be better for Democrats in most states (since the GOP controlled more legislative-driven remapping), but also would produce more competitive elections.
A third scenario, which is far less appetizing for Democrats, would be to see the GOP run the table in 2016, and then suffer a backlash election either in 2018 or 2020, much in the way that Herbert Hoover and the GOP suffered in 1930 (or, the way the Democrats and Obama did in 2010).
The bad news for Democrats, when all is said and done, is that they essentially need one of these three scenarios to come to pass. Absent that, the partisan construction of the current U.S. House and state legislative maps are such that even a modest tailwind at the backs of the Democrats would not be enough to dislodge Republican majorities. The 2012 election proved that. They'll need a structural change in how the maps are made, or (like the GOP did in 2010), they'll need an electoral tidal wave to develop at precisely the right time for the Democrats to take advantage and reclaim control over the vital redistricting process.
