Once every decade, state legislators embark on a complicated and often contentious process of redistricting seats for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. This follows the decennial census and is mandated by the Constitution to keep districts roughly equal in population. It’s also fodder for partisan gerrymandering, leading to the kind of creative geography that has given us “the praying mantis” (Maryland’s third district), the “upside-down elephant” (Texas’s thirty-fifth district), and the “Goofy kicking Donald Duck” (Pennsylvania’s seventh district).
But surprisingly, in 2022, as the current round of redistricting unfolds, egregious gerrymandering isn’t the only big story. State courts, in fact, have become much more aggressive in rejecting heavily gerrymandered district maps. Meanwhile the U.S. Supreme Court—with the exception of Wisconsin and Alabama, where redistricting maps that expanded Black-majority districts in both states were overturned—has largely taken a back seat in deciding redistricting cases. This has shifted the terrain to the states and resulted in several high-profile battles between state legislatures and the courts. In Ohio, for example, the state’s districting plan has been sent back four times and now continues its limbo in litigation.
Uncompetitive district maps can be just as dangerous for democracy as gerrymandering.
As partisan gerrymandering becomes increasingly contested, we’ve seen another alarming trend: a sharp increase in the number of “safe seats” secured in the standard redistricting process. These are seats where the expected margin of victory for one party is more than 15 percent—enough to discourage serious challenges from the opposing party and render a district uncompetitive. This phenomenon remains distinct from gerrymandering; while both processes involve manipulating the electoral map, gerrymandering implies geographic distortions of districts for partisan gain, and safe seats can be achieved without this.
These “safe” districts may satisfy the standards of compactness, contiguity, and preservation of communities that are red flags for gerrymandering. But though they may not look unusual or warrant any notorious nicknames, they are effectively locked in for one party or the other. By using advanced data-gathering tools and other strategies, parties have boiled down a way to secure the benefits of gerrymandering without actually having to engage in gerrymandering.
According to FiveThirtyEight, only thirty-three of the 395 districts that have been drawn so far in the current round of redistricting across the country could be considered competitive. Once the redistricting process is complete, it is expected that there will be no more than forty competitive seats. This is less than 10 percent of the 435 seats in the House and down from sixty-two competitive seats in the last round of redistricting in 2010.
This is not entirely new. Competitive seats have been on the decline for decades, but the trend is accelerating. Several factors are contributing to this: First, voters are increasingly “sorting” along geographic lines by moving to communities with distinct partisan characteristics; second, voters in general are more partisan than they were a few decades ago. Even as polls show a sharp increase in independent voters, feelings of strong partisanship are on the rise for those affiliated with a party, and this goes along with increasingly negative views of the opposing party.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, parties simply know more about the electorate than ever before. Changes in technology now allow data mining of voter information to create extensive databases. This data, accessible through government agencies and private companies, can yield a great deal of information on the electorate, everything from a person’s name and date of birth to their history of voting and occupation. Taken together, these data points can offer predictive models of a party’s expected vote in a given locale.
As a result, parties have a much better sense of where their voters are and can draw maps that appear appropriate by traditional standards, but in reality secure seats for their members by taking advantage of the increasing political lopsidedness in states’ geographies instead of attempting to minimize it. While parties have always tried to gain an advantage within the redistricting process, these factors are making it easier and less visibly egregious.
Safe seats can be achieved without partisan bias, too. This usually involves a level of collusion between the parties rather than a one-sided quest for partisan advantage. Maps can be drawn where the overall distribution of seats in a state is roughly proportional to both parties’ distribution of votes, but where the districts are uncompetitive. Take Virginia, for example, where the electoral map distributes seats roughly in proportion to the parties’ support in the state but where all but one of its seats are uncompetitive.
Similarly, in Texas, the new map is more proportional (though still far from equitable), with Democrats gaining five seats—bringing them closer to their level of support in the state—at the cost of losing five competitive seats overall. Courts only consider the fairness of the redistricting scheme in terms of how accurately it reflects the representation of communities within the state. While they may not technically violate these standards of fairness, uncompetitive district maps can be just as dangerous for democracy as gerrymandering.
Party competition is a central pillar of democratic politics. Having robust competition for seats provides voters with distinct choices in the voting booth and an important mechanism of accountability. Competition serves as an important source of information that can help voters stay engaged on a whole range of issues. It is also a vehicle for mobilizing voters, getting them to the polls so they can weigh in on other important races and ballot questions. When competition in a district becomes muted, so, too, do its voters’ voices.
Perhaps the greatest danger of the rise of safe seats, however, is that it shifts attention to primaries, which become more competitive as the district becomes less so. This is because our electoral system of single member districts leans heavily toward two-party competition. When one party is taken out of that equation through the construction of safe seats, it encourages internal challengers from within the dominant party who see their chances of success increase.
While more competitive primaries may seem attractive, they tend to have a polarizing effect on representation. This is because competitive primaries tend to embolden challengers from the far-left and far-right flanks of the political spectrum. And since the winner of the primary will not have to seriously compete with a member of the opposing party, there is nothing to push candidates toward the middle. Consequently, the composition of the House becomes more polarized, and this polarization makes governing more difficult.
Some have proposed taking parties out of the redistricting process with independent electoral commissions. Currently, ten states use commissions for redistricting—Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington. This improves the outcome somewhat, but since members of the commissions have their own political leanings (in some cases parties play a role in selecting members), they are often still tied to party politics. Another proposed remedy is to automate the redistricting process with computer generated maps. Arbitrarily drawn maps, however, can be very destabilizing, producing radical shifts that break up historical constituencies.
The reality is that we still need the parties to play a role in this process. But we also need to constrain them. We can do this with stricter regulation of the use of voter information in the process. States can, for instance, prohibit the use of partisan electoral data such as election results, party registration, and other demographic data when redrawing districts. Several states—Arizona, California, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska—already do this.
Other states go further: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, New York, and Washington explicitly identify competitiveness as a criteria for redistricting. These stricter guidelines, along with stricter enforcement, could go a long way toward restoring competitive districts.
We must also bring more voices into redistricting, empowering civic organizations and citizens with the knowledge they need to advocate for their interests. We can work to make redistricting data more available and accessible to the general public, and support organizations dedicated to bringing nonparty actors into the process.
Though we cannot get parties out of redistricting, we can create conditions that make them more responsible and give voice to nonparty interests.