Virginia Governor Tim Kaine (D) is leading an effort to change how the State’s legislative and Congressional districts boundaries are drawn – reports here, here and here.
Kaine joins the Campaign Legal Center , Common Cause and others calling for reform in the ways in which election maps are drawn. Kudos to all of them.
There is no question that the system is broken. As Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Mann put it, “The legitimacy of the American electoral system requires some minimal level of fairness, responsiveness and accountability. Recent elections to the US House of Representatives threaten these principals, as contests suffer from unusually high levels of incumbent safety, a precipitous decline in competitiveness, and a fierce struggle between the parties to manipulate the rules of the game to achieve, maintain or enlarge majority control of the chamber.”
Districts designed by those in power to keep that power inevitably skews the system in their favor. Republicans represent largely Republican districts, Democrats largely Democratic ones. Virtually every seat in the US House of Representatives and in most legislatures is “safe.” In such a system the only way to lose your job is in a primary. Primary voters tend to be party regulars and those with the biggest ideological axes to grind. Elected officials have a disincentive to represent the majority of voters in a district, and an incentive to represent the far ends of their party. The result is a Congress and legislatures in which cooperation, compromise and common ground are punished at the polls. Issues become evidence of fealty to the party line, purity tests that keep activist agitators acquiesced.
If a Democrat can only reasonably lose in a primary, groups that control (or claim to control) groups of Democratic voters have disproportionate power. Such groups don’t tend to be moderate or balanced – we hear a lot more from MoveOn.org than Third Way or the Democratic Leadership Council. The same holds true on the Republican side of the aisle. The number of moderate Republicans in the House and Senate who regularly look to build coalitions across party lines could fit in a phone booth (a dying metaphor, using it where I can).
Of course redistricting reform cannot lead to completely competitive elections in districts that don’t look goofy. There are tradeoffs between competitiveness and compactness (to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district competitive one would have to draw lines to the mountains, trying to make Arizona’s Second Congressional District competitive would require some profoundly creative cartography). Nor will making districts more reasonable solve all of our electoral woes – money will still matter, incumbency will still matter, as will a host of other extraneous variables. But doing what we can to make reasonably make more legislative and Congressional districts reasonable will go a long way to improving the quality of our political discourse, and the quality of the policies that emerge from that discourse.
