Competitive congressional races on decline due to new redistricting maps – Everett Post

Everett

(WASHINGTON) – Competing races across the country are expected to disappear as states begin submitting their newly drawn maps for this decade’s redistribution round.

While only 18 states have completed their gerrymandering process, nearly half a dozen highly competitive seats have been removed from the final pile of congressional cards, according to data tracked by FiveThirtyEight. Instead, swing and slightly safe districts are being turned into established safe havens, giving Republicans a competitive edge over Democrats on the overall map, with 55 seats leaning on the Democrats and 90 seats on the Republicans.

On the old maps drawn in 2011, Republicans had 21 competitive seats and 67 permanent seats; This goes around, only 12 competitive seats remain while 78 is solid GOP. Democrats cannot count on the same certainty. Instead, many cards drawn by the Democrats have so far added competition by creating six new competitive left-wing seats rather than creating additional safe races.

“The competition is worrying because Republicans do not consider their ability to compete in a competitive race to be very permanent,” Doug Spencer, redistribution expert at the University of Colorado’s Bryon White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law, told ABC News. “The Republicans did a very good job of gerrymandering in 2010 so they don’t have a lot of room to grow and they have a lot of room to lose, so now they’re building as many of those places as you can safely.”

The rapid change in racial demographics, particularly in key suburbs within the red states, is one of the motivating factors for GOP-led lawmakers to propose redrawn borders so as not to lose seats to a more diverse electoral bloc in future elections, even if that means to provide safe seats for the Democrats in return. So far, compared to old cards, the Democrats have taken six safe seats while the Republicans have two more. That shift is evident in hugely coveted Georgia, where a proposed map powers two highly competitive counties in the Atlanta area, GA-6 and GA-7, squeezing Democratic MP Lucy McBath into a highly conservative district, and effectively a safe GOP -Create a challenge. and placing MP Carolyn Bourdeux on a safe Democratic seat. McBath has since announced that she will run for Congress in the Bourdeux district instead.

“I refuse to let (Governor) Brian Kemp, the (National Rifle Association) and the Republican Party stop me from fighting,” McBath told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “You won’t have the last word.”

Gwinnett County, part of which is in GA 7th District, had nearly 90% white residents in 1990. Now it’s down to 35% – a clear threat to potential Conservative candidates who are likely to be part of this round of the Gerrymandering calculus, redistribution expert Michael Li told ABC News.

“The suburbs are becoming much more mixed than in the past, and at the same time white suburban voters have proven to be much more volatile, much less automatically supporting Republicans than in the previous ad that created uncertainty for Republicans,” said Li, Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “Suburbs are dangerous to Republicans in ways they weren’t before. So under the circumstances, your best bet is to circle the wagons and try to hold on to what you have and make your districts ultra-republican. “

Such buffer structures exist in Texas, a state with rapidly diversifying population growth. New maps in the Lone Star State show a net loss of five competitive seats, with the Democrats taking five safe seats and the Republicans taking two. Out of 538 data tracked, Republicans were able to flip seven “bright red seats” (or somewhat safe) and a Republican swing seat into safe seats. Only one race in Texas will remain competitive with the newly approved card, a much more beneficial card to Republicans in the state than it has been in years past.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a non-partisan analytical tool that measures political advantage in redistributing maps from state to state, awarded Georgia a “C” rating for partisan fairness, competitiveness and geography. Texas received an “F”.

Eliminating competition on the new cards in the medium term is likely to anger the Democrats, says Spencer. He suggested that Democrats might be able to use collective anger to boost turnout in the few key contests that remain, though knowing so early on whether passionate messages alone are enough to get you in impressive number to collect. He agreed that a lack of persistence, especially in the suburbs, had motivated Republicans to drag districts with a view to official protection.

The immediate effects of less competition are uncertain. However, Spencer said he was concerned that more secure seats could negatively affect voter engagement and the foundations of the democratic system.

“You’re basically dampening the voices of a lot of people who just feel like politics is dead to them,” Spencer said. “If we live in a country where you can’t vote out the people you don’t support, it’s not a democracy. The central tenet of democracy is that elections are a control of the government and without competitive seats it is simply not true. “