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Competition and Congruency
By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter
As originally published in the "The Rhodes Cook Letter".
Sen. Sam Brownback swept to a second full term last fall with 69% of the Kansas vote. President George W. Bush carried the state with 62%. And in the presidential balloting, 98 of the 105 counties in the “Lands of Aahs” were won with at least 60% of the total vote - 97 of these “landslide” counties going for President Bush.
That Kansas is top-down Republican is not the point. Many other parts of the country are at their political bedrock very Democratic. What is the point is that the national political map these days is more clearly divided into Republican and Democratic sectors than it has been in decades, with the result that the 2004 election – as intense and hard fought as it was – was basically close only in the sum of its parts. Viewed in its individual geographic units, the vote was often not that close at all.
Certainly that is the case when the presidential race is examined on a state by state basis. Nearly two-thirds of the states were conceded to one party or the other before the general election campaign had begun, a mindset that helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy. On Election Day, less than a dozen states were decided by a margin of less than 5 percentage points.
Within the states, down at the county level, the presidential contest proved to be just as non-competitive. Fully 58% of the nation’s counties voted in landslide numbers, giving at least 60% of their total vote to one party or the other. That percentage is much higher than other close elections of the recent past. In 2000, 45% of the counties were won in a landslide; in 1960, the proportion was 44%; in 1976, it was only 33%.
States with the largest proportion of “landslide” counties tended to be very rural and very Republican. Those that were most “internally” competitive were in New England and the Upper Midwest and were much more Democratic in orientation.
While fully nine out of every 10 “landslide” counties went for President Bush, many of the nation’s most populous counties went Democratic by very hefty margins, including Cook County, Ill., by more than 840,000 votes, and Los Angeles County by more than 830,000. The net effect was that John Kerry’s overwhelming success in a handful of urban counties virtually cancelled out Bush’s supermajorities in hundreds of rural counties, producing a presidential election that in “macro” terms was quite close but in “micro” terms was much less so.
Meanwhile, at the congressional level, competition also continued to decline. The 2004 election marked only the second time since World War II that the incumbent reelection rates in both the Senate and the House of Representatives exceeded 95% (the other election was 1990). And the reelection rate for House incumbents would have approached unanimity if not for the GOP-orchestrated remap in Texas that was executed before the 2004 vote. Four House incumbents (all Democrats) were ousted in Texas last November; only three other House members (two Republicans, one Democrat) were defeated in the rest of the country.
Senate incumbents came very close to a perfect reelection rate as well. The shift of less than 2,300 votes in South Dakota from Republican John Thune to Democratic incumbent Tom Daschle would have saved Daschle’s seat, and would have meant for the first time in at least 60 years every sitting senator who wanted another term would have gotten it.
Yet it was not just that few congressional incumbents were beaten in 2004, few were even threatened. As recently as 1992, there were more than 100 House “marginals” (winners with less than 55% of the total vote). But that number has steadily dwindled over the years, to the point that in 2004 the number of marginals was down to just 32.
Actually, twice as many House winners last fall had no major party opposition at all as had to break a sweat. And even among the meager total of marginal winners, a dozen were not incumbents at all but challengers or winners of open seats. Less than two dozen of the sub-55% House winners in 2004 were incumbents.
Part of the decline in electoral competition is due to money – incumbents usually have it; challengers usually don’t. Part is due to pro-incumbent redistricting, which was the modus operandi in many states when congressional district lines were fashioned earlier this decade. Part is due to the disappearance of the ebb and flow in congressional politics, when scores of House candidates were swept into office on the coattails of the winning presidential candidate, and a number were swept out two years later when they had to run on their own. With Bush the first presidential candidate since 1988 to win even a simple majority of the popular vote, presidential coattails of late have been awfully short.
And as American politics has grown more shrill and partisan over the last decade, straight-ticket voting has increased. This has been very apparent in the district-by-district voting for president and Congress.
As the population became more suburban, more mobile and more independent after World War II, a rise in split-ticket voting was evident. From 1956 through 1996, there were at least 100 districts each election that voted for one party’s candidate for president and the other party’s candidate for the House. The number of split districts spiked to nearly 200 in 1972 and again in 1984 - landslide Republican years at the presidential level.
But in 2000, the number of split districts dropped to 86 and in 2004 to just 59, the lowest number in any election since World War II.
Through the latter half of the 20th century, most of the split districts voted Republican for president, Democrat for House, with the South remaining the cornerstone of Democratic congressional majorities long after the region had abandoned the party at the presidential level. But the South went Republican with a vengeance in congressional voting in 1994, fueled by a host of Democratic retirements and redistricting mandates at the beginning of the decade that increased the number of black-majority districts at the expense of white Democratic members.
Since then, Congress has been Republican, with the South at its cornerstone. And the number of Democratic “misfits” – Democratic House members in Republican presidential districts – has virtually dried up. When Bush’s father was elected president in 1988, more than half of the Democratic House seats (135 of 260) were in districts that voted Republican for president. Nearly half of those (66) were in the South.
In 2004, the number of Democratic “misfits” was down to 41 nationwide, with just 22 left in the South. As a result, there are no longer Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, but there is a national political map that is more congruent that at any point in a generation.
All 26 states in the ‘L’-shaped heartland – the South, Plains states and Mountain West (plus Alaska) – voted for Bush last fall. Fifteen of 16 states in the Northeast and Pacific West voted for Kerry (the lone exception being West Virginia). That left only the industrial Midwest, from Ohio west to Missouri, as a battleground. The eight states there split evenly between Bush and Kerry.
Yet geographical congruency was not just a feature of the presidential contest. It extended to congressional voting as well. Inside the Republican ‘L,’ the GOP currently holds 77% of all Senate seats, 66% of all House seats, and for good measure, 62% of the governor’s chairs. In the Democratic coastal sector, Democrats hold 72% of the Senate seats and 63% of the House seats, with the governorships split evenly between the two parties.
Meanwhile, the industrial Midwest lives up to its billing as a prime battleground. Republicans hold 17 more House seats across the region, while Democrats have a 2-seat Senate advantage. The governorships are divided evenly.
The congruency of the nation’s electoral map is not likely to change soon, particularly at the congressional level. The Republicans came out of the 2004 election with just 18 “misfits” in the House, 10 of them in the Northeast. Four of the Kerry-district Republicans are clustered in populous southeast Pennsylvania; three are in Connecticut.
As for the 41 Democratic “misfits,” four are in Texas, three each are in Arkansas and Tennessee. But there is also a Bush-district Democrat in Kansas in the person of Dennis Moore. He has yet to surpass 55% of the vote since winning his Kansas City-area seat in 1998, and is constantly a target for Kansas Republicans. By ousting him in 2006, they could make the state’s political landscape even more congruent and less competitive than it already is.
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Rhodes Cook
rhodescook@aol.com© Rhodes Cook 2005.
