Republicans in the fast-growing suburbs north of Dallas had a scare last year.
Democrat Joe Biden came within a single percentage point of then-President Donald Trump in the congressional district represented by Republican Van Taylor. Though Taylor easily won reelection to the U.S. House, Trump’s narrow margin was a warning sign that a typically easy win might not be so easy anymore.
So when Republicans, who control the Texas Legislature, redrew the state’s congressional maps this fall, they protected Taylor. They scattered his constituents into multiple districts, consolidating GOP voters to make safe districts. One is a bizarrely shaped tripod: a narrow leg jabs into a suburb to grab Republican-leaning voters, while the other two legs reach into rural areas all the way to the Oklahoma border.
Taylor’s new district isn’t competitive anymore. It voted for Trump by 15 percentage points. The Justice Department this week sued Texas, saying the state’s new district lines discriminate against minority voters.
As the country approaches the halfway mark in its once-a-decade redrawing of political maps, competitive congressional districts are becoming rarer and rarer. Lawmakers in both parties, but especially Republicans, are creating districts that shore up their vulnerable members and trying to ensure easy reelections.
The new maps are likely to accelerate the demise of competitive elections, a warning sign for the health of democracy, experts say. Increasingly, party primaries are the contests most likely to unseat an incumbent. That leaves representatives catering to their party’s base, with little incentive to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. Ultimately, it feeds the heightened partisan polarization that has poisoned Washington.
“It’s definitely a problem and you see it to some degree every cycle,” said Joe Kabourek of RepresentUS, an advocate for overhauling redistricting. “What the lack of competitive seats means is elections are basically over before they begin.”
In the last presidential election, only 13 of 435 House seats switched between the two parties. It’s evidence of a decline in competitiveness that dates from the middle of the 20th century and has accelerated as the two main political parties have become more ideological. In the 1950s, political handicappers ranked about 130 of the seats in the House as competitive, but now only categorize about 48 like that, said Josh Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Governmental Affairs Institute.
Huder notes redistricting isn’t the only cause. An even bigger factor is that voters are choosing to live in places where they are surrounded by like-minded neighbors — Democrats clustering in cities, Republicans in rural areas, for example. That makes it more likely that districts will be dominated by voters of just one party.
The decline of competition has helped lead to growing partisanship. Just 19 of 213 House Republicans recently voted for the new infrastructure bill, a measure with broad bipartisan support in polls and in the Senate.
“It shifts the dynamics and incentives of members of Congress pretty dramatically when you have safe seats,” Huder said. He noted that most representatives only need to win over “partisans who are typically much more extreme” to stay in power.
This redistricting cycle is poised to make it worse.
“It’s almost inevitable that we’re going to see polarization in these really safe districts,” said Adam Podowitz-Thomas of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which monitors redistricting. “It’s going to be harder for moderates or people who work with the other side to get elected in these districts.”
Both parties agree that the number of potential swing districts is dwindling.
The main Republican redistricting organization, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, found that, in the states that have drawn new maps, there are now 15 fewer seats where the margin of victory was 10 percentage points or less in 2020. Its Democratic counterpart, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, tracks competitiveness slightly differently but finds 16 fewer seats.
