Uncontested races, undemocratic trend

Georgia House Minority Whip Carolyn Hugley, D-Columbus, and state Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, no doubt disagree on many issues. But here’s one they agree on: Redistricting in Georgia is, as McKoon put it, “horribly broken.”

They’re right. And the problem isn’t just in Georgia.

At least the state’s recent high-profile race, between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff to fill the vacated U.S. House seat of Tom Price, was a competitive (if outrageously expensive) one.

At the state legislative level, most of them aren’t. As the Associated Press reported last week, almost half (42 percent) of all state legislative candidates in 2016 elections faced no major party opponent.

Much of that statistic, of course, is the result of gerrymandering — the majority party sculpting districts that serve its interests by slicing off areas that don’t. It’s perhaps not as flagrant (or unabashedly racist) as Alabama carving out majority-black Tuskegee to create a white “majority” Macon County decades ago. But Georgia’s Republican majority has continued what Democrats did for decades, resulting finally in elections that are less a democratic exercise than a costly formality of political balkanization.

(A similar disincentive is in play every four years in presidential elections: Red voters in the Deepest Blue states, and vice versa, know they’re basically casting phantom ballots — a compelling case for proportional electoral vote tallies — but that’s another discussion.)

These are not good numbers:

In 180 Georgia House districts in 2016, just 31 — that easy math comes to slightly above one-sixth — featured candidates from both major parties for a House that is two-thirds Republican. On the flip side, 160 elections for the Massachusetts House, which is 80 percent Democratic, included only 34 races with both major parties represented.

Nationwide, AP reported, some 4,700 state legislative races in 2016 included not quite 2,000, almost equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, in which one major party candidate was unopposed by the other major party.

Not only does that leave too many voters with too little (or no) choice; it’s a disincentive to political involvement at all: "With an increasing number of districts being drawn to deliberately favor one party over another,” College of William & Mary government professor John McGlennon told AP, “lots of potential candidates will look at those previous results and come to a conclusion that it's too difficult to mount an election campaign in a district where their party is the minority."

Natural demographics, of course, account for voting trends as well as political district lines. But politicians long ago learned to study the former as a means of manipulating the latter.

McKoon advocated a bipartisan redistricting commission, an idea that never got out of committee. It should have.

"When you're drawing the districts with an eye to representing communities of interest rather than partisan strength, McKoon said, “you're going to have more competitive districts.”

His, of course, is a principled and perhaps idealistic assumption that most officeholders and office-seekers want more competitive districts.

This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 5:09 PM with the headline "Uncontested races, undemocratic trend."