WASHINGTON - Even if Democrats recruit great candidates, raise gobs of money and run smart campaigns, they face an uphill fight to retake control of the House in this year’s congressional elections, regardless of the political climate in November.
Republican strategists spent years developing a plan to take advantage of the 2010Census, first by winning state legislatures and then redrawing House districts to tilt the playing field in their favor.
In states such as Ohio, Michigan and North Carolina, Republicans were able to shape congressional maps to pack as many Democratic voters as possible into the fewest House districts. The practice is called gerrymandering, and it left fertile ground elsewhere in each state to spread Republican voters among more districts, increasing the GOP’s chances of winning more seats.
Geography helped in some states. Democratic voters are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas, making it easier to pack them into fewer districts.
The first payoff came in 2012, when Republicans kept control of the House despite a Democratic wave that swept President Barack Obama to a second term.
Gerrymandering has a long history in the United States, pursued by both Democrats and Republicans. But the GOP’s success at it this decade has been historic: In 2012, Republicans maintained a 33-seat majority in the House, even though GOP candidates as a group got 1.4 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.
It was only the second time since World War II that the party receiving the most votes failed to win a majority of House seats, according to statistics compiled by the House clerk. Democrats gained eight seats but were still a minority.
“The fact that Republicans controlled redistricting [after 2010] meant that they were able to build up a wall, stopping a lot of the tide from running out,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor and redistricting expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “They were able to shore up a lot of the districts that had been won by, in many cases, Tea Party freshmen or other Republican freshmen.”
The Republicans’ advantage will fade as the decade wears on and the population changes. In the meantime, lopsided House districts are having a direct effect on the ability of Congress to tackle tough issues. House districts are drawn so that Democrats and Republicans often represent very different groups of people with different views on divisive issues.
The 2010 election was a disaster for Democrats. Republicans picked up 63 seats to win control of the House. They also gained seats in the Senate, though Democrats kept their majority. Republicans also won control of state legislatures in key states, giving the party the edge that is still paying dividends.
Every 10 years, after the census, states redraw the boundaries of House districts to account for population changes. Some states gain seats and others lose them, so the overall total remains 435. In most states, the legislature and the governor draw up the new districts.
“I think Democrats made a terrible mistake. They did not put nearly enough attention or resources into legislative races at the state level,” said Matt Bennett, a former aide to President Bill Clinton. “A bunch of these legislatures slipped by very narrow margins, and some of them flipped for the first time since Reconstruction in the South.”
For Republicans, it was a combination of luck and planning. The political winds were in their favor, but they also had been plotting for years to take full advantage of redistricting.
The project was called REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. It called for targeting statehouse races in states that were expected to gain or lose congressional seats after the census. GOP strategists reasoned that redistricting could have a greater effect in these states because there would have to be more changes to district boundaries, said Chris Jankowski, former president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which heads up the party’s national effort to elect candidates to state offices.
Republicans spent more than $30 million through the project to help elect legislative majorities in states such as Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Jankowski said.
“We’re not talking about two-month-long broadcast buys on network TV that never stop, like you see in a U.S. Senate battle,” Jankowski said. “We’re talking about cable, radio, mail, ground game - very basic stuff.”
“We targeted the resources to have maximum impact on congressional redistricting,” Jankowski said.
The strategy worked. Before the 2010 election, the GOP had majorities in 36 state legislative bodies. Afterward, the party controlled 56, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In almost half the states, Republicans won control of the entire redistricting process. They gained control of at least one legislative chamber in other states, limiting Democrats’ ability to draw districts favoring their candidates.
In all, Republicans controlled the process of drawing the boundaries for 210 House districts, compared with just 44 districts for Democrats, according to statistics compiled by Levitt. The rest were drawn by a divided government, the courts, or in a handful of mostly Western states, independent commissions.
Six states illustrate the Republicans’ advantage in House elections: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and Florida. Obama won all six in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. But the House delegation for each state is overwhelmingly Republican.
To help analyze voting patterns in congressional districts, The Associated Press divided the votes from the 2012 presidential election into all 435 House districts.
Nationally, Obama received nearly 5 million more votes than Republican Mitt Romney. But in some states, large numbers of Obama’s votes were packed into heavily Democratic congressional districts. As a result, Romney won 17 more House districts than Obama.
The six states accounted for the entire disparity.Obama won the statewide vote, but Romney won the most congressional districts in each state.
Republicans engineered these disparities by packing large numbers of Democrats into relatively few districts. This resulted in lopsided Democratic districts. For example, Obama won more than 80 percent of the vote in 26 House districts spread across 10 states.
Republican voters were spread more evenly. As a result, Romney won more than 80 percent of the vote in just a single House district in the Texas Panhandle.
Lopsided districts help explain why Congress is so polarized. The divide is reflected in demographic differences, which can shape the debate on a variety of issues.
Immigration. The average Democratic district has about twice as many Hispanic residents as the typical Republican district.
Minimum wage. Democrats represent the vast majority of districts with large pockets of low-income workers and families living in poverty. Interestingly, Democrats also represent most of the wealthiest districts, along the East and West Coasts.
Health care. Democrats represent the vast majority of districts with high concentrations of people who had no health insurance before Obama’s new health law.
Independent experts give Democrats little chance to retake the House this year. Even beyond Republicans’ redistricting advantage, the party of the president usually loses seats in Congress during midterm elections.
Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who is in charge of the House Democrats’ campaign operation, rejects arguments that Democrats can’t do it, regardless of the map.
Jankowski, on the other hand, expects Republican candidates to continue enjoying the fruits of redistricting. But he notes that people move and populations change. As the decade wears on, the political benefits diminish, and another redistricting battle will loom.
“It has a shelf life to it, and it’s usually not the full 10 years,” Jankowski said. “That’s the reason we have a census every 10 years.”
While Democrats mapped out the districts Arkansas is using to send people to Congress through the current decade, they face a tough time winning any of the seats because of the state’s shift toward Republicans and the dislike of Obama, political scientists say.
The rightward shift didn’t occur in Arkansas until 2012. That left congressional redistricting in Democrats’ hands, but to no avail. GOP candidates swept all four U.S. House seats despite an attempt to shift Democratic areas into seats held by Republicans.
“Democrats did what they could in terms of protecting districts for Democrats in giving them a fighting chance,” said Jay Barth, political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway who ran for the state House in 2010 as a Democrat and lost.
Demography was one factor that worked against Democrats: The fastest-growing portions of the state from 2000-2010 were the Republican strongholds in Northwest Arkansas and the Little Rock suburbs.
“And the second, of course, was President Obama’s unpopularity in the state. It created special challenges even in districts where Democrats have a fairer fight,” Barth said. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Arkansas voters are dissatisfied with Obama.
In 2014, of the four Republican incumbents, only two are seeking re-election to their current seat. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is challenging incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Rep. Tim Griffin is seeking the lieutenant governor’s post.
Races for those open seats include two Democrats who already enjoy some level of name recognition and accomplishments - James Lee Witt, running in southern Arkansas, is a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Patrick Henry Hays, in central Arkansas, is a former North Little Rock mayor.
Obama’s continued unpopularity remains a factor for 2014. Republican advertising already attempts to link the Democrats’ top candidates to Obama, and his health-reform law.
“The questions are, is the antipathy to the president still significant as it was as last two cycles?” Barth said.
But Janine Perry, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, isn’t so sure the president will bear greatly on the contests.
“Unlike in 2012, Barack Obama will not be at the top of the ticket so people won’t be reminded of him before they are asked to cast a ballot. … That makes it a little bit different,” Parry said.
Information for this article was contributed by Cliff Maceda and Christina Huynh of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/31/2014