The 2002 Congressional Elections:
Do the Math, and the Result Is: Not Much of a Contest

By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter

ELECTION ANALYSIS ARCHIVES

Presidential Competition and Congruency A Bush Mandate? The Election of 2004: A First Take More Voters Steering Away from Party Labels Primary Analysis Charts Bush, The Democrats and 'Red and Blue' America Winning "the Invisible Primary" The South, the GOP and the White House 2000 1996

Congressional/Gubernatorial 2002: Fit to be Tied: The Battle to Control Congress in 2002 Do the Math, and the Result Is: Not Much of a Contest Parties Could Do Better in 'Civics 101' A Good Start for Incumbents Charts: Summary of Election Results What's Up in 2002 Gubernatorial and Senate Nominations at a Glance House Casualties 2000: A Few Incumbents Under Fire

Election Wrap-Up 2000: Part Retro, Part New Age

As originally published in The Washington Post Outlook section on October 6, 2002.

Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan seems like the perfect target for the Democrats as they try this fall to wrest away the six seats they need to recapture control of the House. Not only did the incumbent freshman win his 2000 race by the smallest margin in the country - 111 votes - but he represents a district that switched back and forth between the parties three times during the Clinton years.

Yet Rogers’s seat is widely regarded as safe for the Republicans. How come? Certainly his fundraising has gone well - his campaign had amassed more than $700,000 by the middle of last year. But just as important has been the redistricting effort of the GOP-controlled state legislature, which made Rogers’s Lansing-area district significantly more Republican and significantly less competitive than it was two years ago.

Rogers has plenty of company. Scores of incumbents will face little or no competition in their quest to return to Washington next year, and many of them can thank the redistricters. So when the media machine revs up for its usual breathless coverage about “the battle for the House” and you see those big color-coded maps on Election Night, remember that the vast majority of those 435 House seats were decided months before any voter pulled a lever or pressed a touch screen.

The power of incumbency is a well-established fact of political life. But incumbent protection became the dominant theme of this round of congressional redistricting - assisted by ever more sophisticated computer programs that can track demographic changes block by block. The result is that you won’t need a scorecard to tell the players - because there aren’t that many to keep tabs on. Most political handicappers say that no more than 40 to 50 of this year’s House races will be “competitive” (won by a candidate who receives less than 55 percent of the vote).

The competition was much fiercer in 1992, after the last round of redistricting. Then, the House banking scandal (remember that?), the widespread worry about a recession and an anti-incumbent sentiment personified by Ross Perot’s maverick presidential candidacy all served to roil the political waters. More than one out of every four House contests (111) that year was won with less than 55 percent of the vote, and two dozen incumbents lost. The 1994 election continued this trend, producing the Republican Revolution that ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House and the Senate. But in the 2000 election, barely one of every eight House races (57) was won with less than 55 percent, and only six incumbents were defeated (others resigned or ran for different offices, creating more turnover but not necessarily more competition).

This fall, recession is back, the threat of war is in the air and redistricting has rearranged the boundaries of practically every district in the country. It would seem the perfect environment for turmoil in congressional races from coast to coast. But with the House of Representatives about as closely divided as it has been at any point in nearly a half century (223 Republicans, 208 Democrats, 3 Democratic vacancies and 1 independent), the two parties have opted to be safe rather than sorry.

California has led the way. The Golden State’s ruling Democrats, who employed partisan redistricting with a vengeance in the 1980s, decided this time to consolidate their recent election gains with a map that is expected to maintain the status quo of 32 Democrats and 20 Republicans. In the nation’s largest delegation, only one seat appears up for grabs. “It was like a kids’ birthday party,” University of Oklahoma political scientist Keith Gaddie said of the California redistricting. “Everybody got a prize.”

And there have been prizes galore, all around the country. The corporal’s guard of vulnerable incumbents numbers around two dozen. About half the competitive seats this year are open, either newly created by reapportionment or in the process of being vacated by a departing incumbent.

To be sure, partisan redistricting has created some interesting battlegrounds in several states where one party controlled all the levers of redistricting (the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature). Republicans, for example, are hoping to gain a few seats from their line drawing in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Democrats hope to offset with their creative cartography in states such as Georgia and Maryland.

But in big states such as California, Texas and Illinois, it is hard to find more than a single competitive race - or any at all in New York, Ohio and Michigan. Those half dozen states contain almost 40 percent of the nation’s congressional districts, but they are almost entirely removed from this fall’s action.

The current muting of competition, as anti-democratic as it may seem, has a certain logic.

Incumbent protection served as the path of least resistance for state legislatures redrawing the lines. Unlike in 1992, there were comparatively few retirements this time that would naturally create competitive open-seat districts. And there are fewer districts that are competitive by nature of their internal contradictions - for example, voting for one party’s candidate for president and the other party’s for Congress. In 2000, the number of such “split-ticket” districts was at its lowest level in nearly 50 years.

Neither party wants to lose its hard-won gains. With the partisan balance almost even, every seat counts.

It is a far different situation than a decade ago, when the Democrats approached the 1992 elections with a huge 100-seat advantage in the House. Republicans had barely a toehold in the redistricting process in many states, but they had a powerful ally in President George H. W. Bush’s Justice Department. It used the Voting Rights Act to encourage the creation of more majority-minority districts across the South, at the same time diminishing the minority vote in adjoining districts that had sustained white Democrats.

The effects were not felt immediately. But when the political winds shifted dramatically in the Republicans’ favor in 1994, the GOP was poised for its historic breakthrough. More than one out of every four House seats has shifted party hands at least once since 1992, and the South has been transformed from the cornerstone of the Democratic House majority to the building block of GOP control.

The lines this time have not been drawn with the expectation of dramatic upheaval. But there is the potential for small shifts - either now or later in the decade - that could tip the balance in a closely divided House.

Prime targets are the roughly 30 districts that elected one party’s House candidate in 2000 while voting decisively for the other party’s presidential candidate. The group is nearly evenly divided between a band of moderate Frost Belt Republicans and a cadre of centrist Southern and border state Democrats including six from Texas alone.

One of the Republicans who must run this year in hostile terrain is Maryland’s Constance A. Morella, whose revamped Montgomery County district cast roughly two-thirds of its ballots for Democrat Al Gore in the last presidential election. Reelected to an eighth term in 2000 with just 52 percent of the vote, Morella is considered one of the House’s most endangered incumbents.

As this decade unfolds, more of these “misfit” seats may become competitive, as incumbents either become vulnerable or they opt to retire. Such a development would create more opportunity for change on Capitol Hill. And that would be all to the good for those who would like to see a true battle for the House rather than a rerun of past elections.