By Bill Bishop
Sunday, May 15, 2005
AUSTIN When not a single California congressional or state legislative seat changed political party in last year's election, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reacted with his signature bluntness. "What kind of democracy is that?" he demanded. Blaming the lack of competitiveness in all the races on state legislators who in 2000 created voting districts guaranteed to preserve their own seats and their respective parties' dominance, Schwarzenegger has proposed taking control of redistricting away from partisan politicians and entrusting it to a panel of retired judges.
On the virtues of this plan, the unconventional governor has a lot of conventional company. Many see independent redistricting, free from the possibility of gerrymandering -- the practice of drawing a voting district to one party's advantage -- as the route to resurrecting competitive elections and resuscitating democracy.
But the paucity of competitive elections isn't simply something created by diabolical legislators or nerdy mapmakers. It has been, in large measure, an inside job, the result of citizens who, given the choice, would prefer to live among those most like themselves. Taking redistricting away from the politicians may do something about the appearance of partisanship in the legislature, but it can't change the actual partisanship that resides in our communities.
Schwarzenegger has a point, of course. Most legislative races aren't competitive. In U.S. House races in 2004, only seven of 401 incumbents lost. Only 22 races were decided by a margin of less than 10 percentage points.
But when the early-19th-century Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry redrew a state Senate seat to his party's advantage in a shape that looked like a salamander -- thus enshrining the "gerrymander" forevermore -- was he contributing to the demise of democracy in the 21st century? Several political scientists who study congressional elections don't think so.
Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, measured the "competitiveness" of congressional districts in a recent study. He used presidential election returns to get a sense of whether congressional districts vote more Republican or Democratic than the nation as a whole. Abramowitz found that over the past 30 years, there have been fewer and fewer districts where Republicans and Democrats are evenly mixed. But redistricting doesn't seem to be the cause.
Abramowitz reasoned that if partisan redistricting were causing the decline in competitive House races, then there should be a jump in non-competitive districts -- defined as districts that are 10 percentage points more Republican or Democratic than the nation as a whole -- right after legislative redistricting, which by law must occur after the new census every 10 years. But Abramowitz found no discernible increase after the new districts were drawn. Instead, districts grew most lopsided in between redistricting years. So other factors must be at work.
Yes, legislatures can still gerrymander to get rid of incumbents. The Texas legislature did that in 2003, under House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's tutelage, when it drew congressional districts in a way that led to the defeat of four incumbent Democrats last November. But Abramowitz contends that the unusual mid-decade redistricting simply recognized the growing partisanship in Texas.
"I keep hearing Democrats saying that Republicans basically stole those seats by redistricting again," said Abramowitz, who describes himself as a liberal Democrat. "The fact is, that's a minor issue. The underlying reality is that states like Texas and Georgia have been trending Republican. Sooner or later, more likely sooner, that was going to translate into a Republican takeover of the congressional delegation."
This is also true nationally. More people are choosing where to live based on demographic factors that now align with political party. In effect, voters themselves are largely responsible for tipping the balance in many districts by moving to where they can find neighbors of like mind.
Vanderbilt University professor Bruce Oppenheimer has a simple way of testing whether gerrymandering is increasing partisanship in congressional districts. He recently studied the seven states that have only one representative in the House -- Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North and South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming -- to compare their behavior in the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections. Since their borders are unchanging, whatever has happened in the past four decades can't be the result of redistricting.
The national vote in both the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections was evenly split. But over the 40 years between those two elections, these seven single-district states grew more partisan than the average congressional district. In 1960, the winning candidate for president (whether Republican or Democrat) in these seven states received an average 53.1 percent of the vote. In 2000, however, the winning candidate received an average 62.9 percent of the vote.
"A lot of this has to do with self-selection," Oppenheimer said. "Democrats tend to live next to Democrats. Republicans tend to live next to Republicans."
That is indeed happening. Last year, I helped prepare a series of articles for my newspaper showing that from 1976 to 2004, most U.S. counties became increasingly lopsided politically. The paper's statistical consultant, former University of Texas sociologist Robert Cushing, found that by 2004, in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, nearly half of the country's voters lived in communities where the winning presidential candidate had won by at least a 20 percentage point margin. Over seven presidential elections, Cushing's measurements of Republican and Democratic residential segregation increased by 50 percent.
Another reason why incumbents are winning at increasing rates is that oldest of political advantages: money. Regardless of party, incumbents are raising far more money than opponents, even in districts where Republicans and Democrats live in a near electoral balance, said Abramowitz. From the early 1990s to 2002, the median spending by incumbents in these competitive districts increased from $596,000 to $910,000. Median spending by challengers in these same districts fell from $229,000 to $198,000.
During the 1970s, Abramowitz found, winning congressional candidates spent 69 percent of the amount spent by all candidates in their races. From 1998 through 2002, however, the winning candidates accounted for an average of 82 percent of the total campaign spending.
So if money and demography are mostly to blame for less competitive elections, then what good would it do to turn redistricting over to some retired judges, as Schwarzenegger has suggested? Not much, probably. In most states, regions have become so resolutely partisan that it would be nearly impossible to draw competitive districts, says Nathaniel Persily, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has worked on redistricting cases in New York, California, Georgia and Maryland.
"That's been my experience every time I've been drawn into these redistricting cases," Persily said. "It's incredibly difficult to draw competitive districts. The only way you can do it is to turn cities into pizzas, where you have districts that go from the inner cities out into the suburbs."
Or barber poles. In the San Francisco area, Schwarzenegger's nonpartisan panels would have to draw legislative districts in stripes connecting the Democratic coast to the Republican inland, says Abramowitz.
This would require some new thinking. The opposite of the gerrymandered district is a compact legislative region encompassing a community of interest. That's the goal of most redistricting reforms. But as communities themselves become politically like-minded, these good government definitions may have to be abandoned in pursuit of competitiveness. Creating competitive districts in the age of political segregation, in short, might require more cunning than that of an Elbridge Gerry -- or an action hero turned governor -- and more shapes than the simple salamander.
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Bill Bishop is a reporter with the Austin American-Statesman, where a version of this article previously appeared.