While a majority of the country’s 435 districts remain un-drawn, the early trend is in keeping with what we have seen over the last three decades in redistricting: Politicians of both parties are doing their absolute best to drastically shrink the number of even marginally competitive districts in the country.
As Wasserman notes, the anti-competitive trend in line-drawing has dovetailed with the more parliamentary nature of American elections. Increasingly, split-ticket voters — choosing a candidate for one party for president and the other for Congress — are disappearing.
Now, demographic change often confounds even the most intricate of partisan redistrictings. Population growth — and changes in the way certain groups vote — can upend the plans of political parties over the course of a decade. In short, what a state’s congressional map looks like in 2021 may well be very different than it looks in 2030.
But, looking at the maps being produced to date out of the states, it’s quite clear that we are headed — at least in the near term — to one of the least competitive national playing fields in recent memory.
Which party does that benefit? On its face, a smaller playing field might give Democrats reason to hope that even if they do lose their narrow majority in 2022 that it will not be with a massive seat shift to Republicans. On the other hand, Republicans are in control of more map-drawing processes in the states and have already begun to carve out gains for their side before a single vote it cast.
Viewed more broadly, the lack of competitive district is a very bad thing for democracy. When members of Congress never have to worry about their electoral fate in a general election, they tend to move more and more toward the extremes of their party — as a way to ward off potential primary challengers. Which means that they have even less political motivation to reach across the aisle to get things done for their constituents — since their constituents tend to view members of the other party as evil or ill-intended. And we wind up sinking ever deeper into our partisan morass.