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Every commission district in the county is currently rigged this way.

Take the case of District 4 County Commissioner Dumont Clarke, for instance. Back in 2000, Clarke got 2,400 votes in the Democratic primary, enough to beat his challenger Lloyd Scher, an incumbent Democrat that local party bosses had decided to take out because of his increasingly erratic behavior.

Clarke had a Republican challenger in the general election, but since the majority of voters in the district are Democrats and less than a quarter are Republicans, he squashed her like a bug on the sidewalk, taking 64 percent of the vote. No one has bothered to run against Clarke in the two elections since then. Another Democrat could theoretically try it in the primaries, but as long as Clarke stays in the good graces of Democratic donors and party leaders, anyone who challenges Clarke will be cut off from the money train. Unless the challenger was independently wealthy and could finance his own race, taking on Clarke in the primary is a waste of time.

Think about that for a minute. Because of the way Clarke's district is drawn, the man hasn't been in a truly competitive race but once in his life, and was essentially elected with a mere 2,400 votes. Clarke has no opposition this time and will sail into his third term unless he displeases the power brokers in his party.

On the other end of the county, in District 6, Republican Bill James keeps getting elected in the Republican primary, where he generally gets a few thousand votes total. James' racial diatribes probably make the majority of the voters in his Republican district cringe, but since James' district is drawn to elect a Republican and only 27 percent of voters are registered Democrats, no one can put together enough votes to beat him in the general election. As a result, he's headed into his fifth term.

James has had primary challengers in the past, but since the folks who vote in primaries are usually the most radical in their parties, he wins, as do radicals on the Democrat side.

So in the end, James rails on about homosexuals and blacks while Clarke raises taxes like a drunken sailor. Both commissioners need so few votes to win in the primary that they can not only ignore voters of the other party, they can even afford to ignore the moderates in their own parties and still win elections.

It's not just a county commission phenomenon, said Heagarty. It's happening at every level of government, from local races right on up to Congress.

"When you have districts that are bereft of any competition, no one is looking for common ground," said Heagarty, a former state lobbyist. "They are just trying to answer the party activists on one side or the other and that makes for very divided government and very divisive policy."

In North Carolina and nationally, the situation has gotten significantly worse over the last decade. Of North Carolina's 13 Congressional districts, only one -- some say potentially two -- could be considered toss-ups where either party could win. Just like the county commissioners, this state's Congress people keep getting elected with single-digit vote totals in the primaries. Sure, they sometimes have opposite party challengers in the general election, but their districts are so slanted that unless they're caught in a scandal involving the proverbial live child or dead woman the week before the election, those challengers haven't got a chance of winning.

These days, there are only 30 to 35 Congressional districts across the nation that are still competitive, says University of California San Diego professor Gary Jacobson. Since there are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, that means that less than 10 percent of the nation's Congressional seats are competitive, he says. "There's none in California," he adds.

The situation is a far cry from the 120 to 150 competitive Congressional seats that we saw during much of the 1990s, Washington political analyst Charlie Cook, author of "The Cook Political Report," wrote recently.

But it's not unique to Congress. Twenty years ago, when Davis started analyzing state legislative races here, there were more competitive districts where either party could win than any other kind. Now, with only a dozen or so left, truly competitive districts are the rarest.

The result of all this, says Heagarty, is that both the state legislature and Congress have become more polarized.

"The most strident voices from both sides are the ones that have won all of these primaries all over the country again and again," said Heagarty. "It's become so ugly. Then you have people like George Bush saying, "I'm going to go up there and bring harmony,' but you've got these people in both camps looking at each other across the aisle with hate in their eyes. You cannot harmonize 435 people split down the middle in a Congress made up of the most strident voices."