House races lose swing as partisan redistricting whittles away competitiveness

Ryan King

July 11, 06:00 AM July 11, 06:00 AM

When voters head to the polls in November to decide who controls the House of Representatives, those in a small fraction of districts will get to have much of a say in it.

That's because the bulk of House seats in the 435-member chamber are drawn by partisan state lawmakers to ensure their side wins congressional races and the other side loses. There's nothing new about it — the term "gerrymandering" goes back to early 1800s map-drawing chicanery. But due to specialized map-drawing technology and growing partisan trends in politics generally, it's possible that less than 10% of House seats will actually be competitive.

THESE 30 HOUSE RACES WILL DECIDE IF DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS WIN THE MAJORITY

The end result is a midterm election rife with shoo-in general election races and a political breeding ground ripe for an even more bitterly partisan Congress.

“Most voters are irrelevant and can be taken for granted. Then a handful of low engagement, low information swing voters who happen to live in competitive swing districts get to decide which party should have control of Congress,” Lee Drutman, an analyst at New America, told the Washington Examiner. “It's kind of an idiotic way to run a democracy.”

The decennial line-drawing process takes place after each census to keep congressional representation in sync with population distribution. The 2022 midterm elections will serve as the first time the new boundaries will be used in a general election. And the midterm elections come as House Republicans only need to net five seats to reclaim to the majority the GOP lost in the 2018 Democratic wave.

Under the new congressional maps heading into the midterm elections, there are a mere 33 House races classified as toss-ups by Cook Political Report, accounting for about 8% of all House races. That analysis evaluates factors such as polling, candidate quality, and district lines. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight that looks at district contours ranks 40 districts as highly competitive — a roughly 13% drop from the previous apportionment outlook.

“Competitive districts create incentives for members and candidates to appeal to the voters in the center of the electorate,” Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University, told the Washington Examiner. “My concern is that the demise of competitive districts is going to make Congress even more dominated by the ideological extremes of each party and harder to function effectively.”

Most of the swing districts that got eradicated in redistricting were located in states such as Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas, where a political party held full political control and pressed hard to procure more advantages.

In Texas, for example, Republicans crafted a map that purged five competitive districts so the party could pick up two, per FiveThirtyEight. New Jersey Democrats knocked off two swing districts to push three district contours in their favor. Illinois lost one swing seat, and Democrats gained advantages in two. In Georgia, Republicans scrapped one swing seat in favor of another that leans red. Then in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis forced his state legislature to pass a map that wiped out three swing districts so the GOP could boost party favorability in four, including a seat the state gained from the census.

REDISTRICTING ENDING AS NET WIN FOR HOUSE REPUBLICANS, DASHING DEMOCRATIC HOPES

Further fueling the drying up of swing districts is the rise of geographical political sorting and the decline of swing voters more broadly. More and more voters find themselves living among like-minded neighbors or engaging in partisan voting patterns, according to Drutman.

“The core problem here is that Democrats and Republicans live in very different places. There's been a long-standing trend of sorting,” Drutman said. ”It's very hard to draw districts that are competitive while also maintaining some semblance of compactness.”

In 1984, about 44% of districts split their vote for president and House member among the two parties. But that has rapidly declined, falling to 8% in 2016, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

“Gerrymandering is more effective now because voters are more predictable — or more predictable in their partisan voting patterns than in certain earlier decades. There are fewer voters who switch between the parties,” Pildes said.

Despite the political lean in many congressional districts, both parties have feared that wave years could threaten their grip on power and have used redistricting to hedge against such forces.

“Neither party is confident of itself in any of these elections. There have been too many swings. And so in general, what happened was across all the states, the Republicans shored up their seats to try to make them more or less vulnerable to these swings that have happened in 2010, 2018,” Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford University, told the Washington Examiner.

Not all states pulverized competitive districts. Some states such as New York, Maryland, and North Carolina gained swing seats, mostly due to court decisions that gutted partisan mapmaking.

New York was the crown jewel for Democrats in the redistricting cycle until a court tossed out their map and enacted one that added a competitive seat while costing both parties a favorable district. The state lost a seat due to the census. In Maryland, a court scrapped a map and enacted a new one with a swing district at the cost of one Democratic-leaning seat.

While redistricting generally takes place every 10 years in the 44 states that have more than one congressional district, the lines are not guaranteed to remain in place for the next decade. About a dozen states have litigation pending against their maps, which means the courts could tweak their maps at some point down the line. In theory, this could mean that places like Louisiana or Florida may wind up with more competitive lines after the midterm elections.

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Overall, redistricting appears to have added fuel to the expected red wave in the midterms as Democrats contend with historical headwinds and President Joe Biden faces myriad problems such as inflation and lackluster approval ratings.

Democrats managed to tip six district contours in their favor this redistricting cycle, bringing the total Democratic-leaning districts to 187, while Republicans remained the same at 208, per FiveThirtyEight. However, Democrats hold many of the seats that got bluer and some of the seats that had become more favorable to Republicans, leading many analysts to dub the GOP the winner of redistricting, expecting the GOP to net three to four seats from reapportionment alone in the midterm elections.