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The 2024 elections are a closely fought battle, and not just for the presidency: control of Congress is also at stake. But despite all the money and energy spent on the various campaigns in the House and Senate, it is likely that few seats will change hands. That’s because seats — especially in the U.S. House of Representatives — have effectively become the property of one party or the other, with very little party switching. Gerrymandering — the practice of drawing district lines to favor one party or the other — has long been a factor. But so does the American practice of clustering into like-minded geographic enclaves.
The Ratelaar is a weekly newsletter from JD Tuccille. If you’re concerned about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday freedom, this is for you.
Job security for lawmakers
“In every election, the vast majority of House districts are won by the party that already controls them,” says Drew DeSilver of Pew Research. noted last week. “For example, in 2020, 93% of districts remained in the hands of the same party; only 18 of 435 districts (4%) changed.”
With a small majority in the Republican House 220 seats for 212 Democrats and 3 vacanciesThis means that control is truly yours for the taking. It also means that only a handful of seats will likely be in play to determine who has a majority in the next Congress. The incumbent re-election rate for 2020 was not an outlier.
Looking at incumbent representatives (not parties) through the decades, OpenSecrets found the re-election rate for members of the House of Representatives above 90 percent in the past ten years. It hasn’t fallen below 85 percent in at least 60 years.
Pew’s DeSilver went back further – to 1922 – and found much of the same. The high point for competitive House races in which a given seat changed hands at least twice between political parties was between 1932 and 1942. During that period, “there were 71 districts with mixed parties, accounting for 21% of the 342 districts we analyzed. .”
In this year’s election, DeSilver believes that “only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are competitive.” That is where control of the House of Representatives is decided.
By comparison, the Senate has one small more turnover. Well, for a third of that, it’s on the ballot in every federal election. Over the past forty years (reelection rates were lower in the 1960s and 1970s), the lowest reelection rate was 75 percent, in 1988. Otherwise it has been 80 percent (OK, 79.3 percent in 2000 and 2006) and more since then . All incumbents running for re-election won their races in 2022. It was “the first time that no Senate incumbent has lost a general election since 1914,” said Jazmine Ulloa. wrote for The New York Times.
That’s impressive job security for an institution that enjoys an all-time low in trust (32 percent, according to Gallup) of the American people.
Gerrymandering helps create safe seats
When discussing the House, many critics point to gerrymandering as the culprit. That is the ‘practice of drawing constituency lines to favor one political party, individual or constituency over another’. according to to Ballotpedia. Such pranks have been indulged in by many political parties that control redistricting, whose name goes back to Elbridge Gerry, then governor of Massachusetts, who drew a particularly distorted map in 1812 to keep his allies in power.
“Most gerrymander efforts are best understood through the lens of two basic techniques: cracking and packing,” explain Julia Kirschenbaum and Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Cracking divides groups of people with similar characteristics, such as voters with the same party, across multiple districts. Because their voting power is divided, these groups have difficulty electing their favorite candidates in any of the districts. Packing is the opposite of cracking: Card loading crams certain groups of voters into as few districts as possible. In these few districts, the ‘congested’ groups are likely to elect their favored candidates, but the voting power of the groups is weakened everywhere else.”
Americans who sort themselves based on politics make seats even safer
These days you may have to gerrymander aggressively to create competitive districts. That’s because the “great breed” sees Americans voluntarily moving into communities that are becoming increasingly politically homogenous. The term ‘large species’ was coined by Bill Bishop, who wrote a Book from 2008 by the name. The phenomenon persists today, as noted in 2023 by PBSwhich showed that “Americans are rapidly becoming divorced by their politics.”
In an analysis published last week, Ronda Kaysen and Ethan Singer said of The New York Times looked at the voter registrations of 3.5 million people who have moved since the 2020 presidential election.
“Across all climbers, Republicans chose neighborhoods that Donald J. Trump won by an average of 19 percentage points in 2020, while Democrats chose neighborhoods that President Biden won by the opposite margin (also 19 points).” wrote. “Overall, the movers started in neighborhoods separated by 31 percentage points; they ended in neighborhoods separated by 38 points.”
The result is that “in all but three states that voted for Biden in 2020, more Democrats entered than Republicans. The reverse is true for states that Trump won – more Republicans moved in except one.” Additionally, 36 states are disproportionate lost members of the losing party who moved elsewhere. Yes, we’re talking about California, but not just now that state.
Interestingly, the analysis found that politics was only one factor in determining where people moved. But lifestyle preferences are now so closely tied to partisan preferences that walkable urban neighborhoods tend to become more Democratic, while small towns and rural areas near wilderness become more Republican. People also like to reduce tensions by moving to like-minded neighbors.
While some scholars once blamed gerrymandering for our increasingly fractious and hostile politics, this self-sorting could play a bigger role.
“The districts themselves have undergone a ‘sorting’ that overwhelms any impact of gerrymandering,” says Peter Feuerherd observed in 2018 in an overview of research for JSTOR Daily. “Liberals and conservatives are now much less likely to live in close proximity to each other. This clustering makes it easy to create more homogeneous political districts.”
And of course, homogeneous political districts will tend to keep a seat in the House of Representatives held by the same party. Entire states that become more clearly Republican or Democrat will likely do the same with Senate seats. No one trusts Congress, but we’re more likely than ever to keep it in the same hands.