Congress has become increasingly partisan over the last two decades. It’s hard to find middle-of-the-road senators and representatives willing to make the necessary compromises to crete laws acceptable to a bipartisan majority. As a result, even the smallest issue is transformed into a party-line test, a winner-take-all donnybrook.
That is not what American voters want, according to the polls. So why does the situation continue to worsen? The received wisdom is that gerrymandering (like that monstrosity in Louisiana shown above) has created partisan congressional districts in which one party or the other has a strong advantage, so that the primary is the meaningful contest, not the general election. Consequently, Democrats elected are likely to be to the left of the average Democrat (nationwide), and Republicans to the right of the average Republican. Furthermore, incumbents in such unbalanced districts have little moivation to compromise with their opponents—their own party’s primary voters are likely, in fact, to punish them for not hewing to the party line. So further polarization leads to declining competition in a never-ending spiral.
But the received wisdom may be wrong. Alan I. Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning of Emory University have written a groundbreaking study,
"Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections," that questions whether redistricting has much at all to do with the decline of competitiveness in House elections. They write:
Competition in U.S. House
elections has been declining for more than 50 years and the 2002 and 2004 House
elections were the least competitive of the postwar era. This paper tests three hypotheses that
attempt to explain the decline in competition in House elections: the
redistricting hypothesis, the partisan polarization hypothesis, and the
incumbency hypothesis. We find strong
support for both the partisan polarization hypothesis and the incumbency
hypothesis but no support for the redistricting hypothesis. Since the 1970s there has been a substantial
increase in the number of House districts that are relatively safe for one
party and a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts. However, this shift has not been caused by
redistricting but by demographic change and ideological realignment within the
electorate. Moreover, even in the
remaining marginal districts only a small minority of House races are
competitive. The main explanation for
the lack of competition even in marginal districts appears to be the inability
of challengers to compete financially with incumbents.
It’s the money, they say, that protects incumbency and reduces competition. And if that’s true, I would posit, it’s the money that increases partisanship and pushes members of Congress toward the margins of their own parties.
That’s a good reason to work for public financing of elections, as Mark Schmitt argues persuasively. It can be implemented, given voters’ distrust of the current system, and has been in Arizona and Maine. Implemented nationally, it will open up the process to new blood and begin to overcome the natural Republican advantage in private money—an advantage the Democrats almost nullified in 2004, though that campaign was possibly anomalous.
But Schmitt also questions the researchers’ basic finding about redistricting. There may be more to the received wisdom than their data suggest. He writes:
I do have one caveat to the Abramowitz et al paper: I don’t find his
rejection of the theory that redistricting is a principle cause of the
decline of competition to be convincing. The authors theorize that if
redistricting reinforces incumbent advantage, one should expect to see
a greater decline in competition in the cycle immediately after
redistricting, that is, 1982, 1992, or 2002. Since those election
cycles tend to be more competitive than cycles in the middle/end of the
decades, they conclude that redistrticting is not the major factor in
incumbent advantage or partisanship. But redistricting is always going
to be a disruptive event. Even if redistricting is done in a way to
protect both current incumbents and the party in power, the election
immediately after a redistricting is likely to bring some change.…So, let’s not take redistricting off the table as a factor.
I agree. And even if redistricting is less important than we thought in reducing competitiveness, it still accelerates the spiral of dual radicalization and rigid partisanship. That’s reason enough to work for a national legal standard for nonpartisan redistricting.