Creative Loafing originally intended to fill this space with a voter guide. Then we made a shocking discovery. There’s no one to vote for. This election has already been stolen. Because of the way they drew their districts, political incumbents and the party anointed are practically bulletproof in Mecklenburg County. The situation is so extreme that almost no one bothered to sign up to run against these chosen few in the Nov. 2 general election because running is pretty much a waste of time. The result is that in almost 90 percent of the district races in this county, the winner has already been picked because only one person is running. Half the electorate could show up to vote in these districts on Nov. 2, or no one at all, and it won’t change who wins.
Local voters who will cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election may think they’re selecting their politicians, but the reality is that the politicians who drew the districts they’ll be voting in have already selected them, in the process getting rid of other voters who might have been inclined to throw them out of office.
There’s not a single challenger in any of the six Mecklenburg County Commission district races this November. Only one of the six had a challenger in the primary. There are 15 state legislative districts that crisscross Mecklenburg County, but there will be two-person races in only three. No opposite party challengers bothered to sign up in the others because they tilt so much toward one party that running is pointless. Two of our three Congress members come from districts so slanted toward their parties that they’ll slide back into office without half trying.
Since there’s almost no one to vote for, CL decided not to waste space pretending there is. So our election guide will be very short this year, because we’ll be confining it to the handful of races left in which voters can still make a difference.
Across the state, voters and the media are flipping out about electronic voting machines or paper ballots, obsessing over how every vote will be counted.
The irony of the whole thing cracks Chris Heagarty up. What most people don’t realize, said Heagarty, the executive director of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, is that the bulk of the district elections that will be held in this state are already so rigged that what goes down at the polls on Nov. 2 won’t matter much.
The two parties have done such a good job at carving the state up into safe districts that of 170 seats up for grabs in the state legislature, only 12 are truly competitive, say Heagarty and North Carolina Forum for Research and Economic Education (NCFREE) Executive Director John Davis.
Big donors are pumping mega-bucks into those races because they will determine who controls the state legislature. But since none of those races are in Mecklenburg County, voters here won’t have much say in who runs the state.
The Bill James Effect
It’s one of the greatest scams in modern politics, and it’s polarizing the electorate as never before. From the county level on up to Congress, politicians know
that if they draw their districts right, they only need five percent of the vote to win. That’s not five percent more than their opponent, mind you, but five percent total. How do they do it? Take the Mecklenburg County Commission for instance.
At this moment, there are about 470,000 registered voters in Mecklenburg County. Each of the six county commission districts has between 70,000 and 90,000 registered voters. Yet most commissioners are elected again and again in district races where they get only 3,000 to 5,000 votes total — that is, when anyone bothers to challenge them at all. They accomplish this by chopping voters of the opposite party out of their districts to such a degree that it’s nearly impossible for someone of the other party to beat them in the general election, where voters might cast tens of thousands of votes. Then, all they have to do is win the primary race, in which only about 6,000 voters vote.
It’s a pretty simple formula, really. When they’re drawing districts, all politicians have to do is keep the voters of the other party in the 25 percent range, keep unaffiliateds in the 25 percent range, then make sure the rest of the district is filled with voters of their party.
All politicians need to do to own their districts is to make sure that at least 47 percent of the voters in them are members of their party. Like lemmings, about half the unaffiliated voters can be counted on to vote for each party — and they think they’re independent — so count them in for another 10 to 12 percent. With this “arrangement,” the incumbent can pretty much count on getting 60 percent of the vote in the general election.
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.”
Worse yet, said Heagarty, those with the safest districts are the ones who have the most seniority because they’ve been around the longest, so they end up running everything.
“That’s like when they talk about how you would get this crazy liberal in charge of the armed forces if the House went over to the Democrats because of seniority — because that’s a guy who can keep getting elected time and time again because nobody can challenge him, and the district is carved out in such a way that even if you had another Democrat that wanted to challenge him, he’s been an incumbent so long that you just can’t lodge him out of there,” said Heagarty. The state legislature works much the same way these days, he says.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but chief among them, political observers agree, is technology.
UNCC political science professor Ted Arrington has been drawing political districts for local government for decades. Just 15 years ago, Arrington, like other political cartographers across the country, drew districts using maps, crayons, voter registration numbers, a calculator and his best guess as to how people might vote. But in the early 1990s, GIS technology quickly began to change that. Computer programs began to emerge that for the first time allowed politicians to use geographic and census data to predict with stunning accuracy how voters in tiny areas no bigger than a block would vote. Reams of old voting pattern data for tiny areas could be loaded into these programs and produce instantaneous results. With this technology, the elected could manipulate voters as never before.
Davis remembers a conversation he had with state House Co-Speaker Jim Black about the technology, which state government legislative staffs now use to draw North Carolina’s districts.
“He was describing it to me one day with the excitement of a child at Christmas,” said Davis. “He was talking about how the mouse is one of these balls that you roll around with the palm of your hand and wherever you draw that district, you could do it blindfolded, and you could see an immediate printout of everything about the voters within those perimeters including how they would likely vote in Democrats versus Republican races,” said Davis. “It is very sophisticated, but simplified to the point where everybody can purchase the equipment and the software and get involved in this game.”
That level of sophistication is creating districts that are safer for incumbents.
“Before, when people had to sit down and do this by hand, they’d usually keep counties together and there might only be a handful of counties that were split,” said Heagarty. “But now not only can you split counties, you can split townships, you can split precincts. It’s amazing the level of detail they can get down to in carving out friendly districts.”
The irony of this of course is that it takes partisan cooperation to draw slanted districts.
The way politicians of both parties see it, if they drew 10 districts in which voters are split 50-50 between the parties, they’d risk their party winning all ten, or winning closer to zero. But if they work together to draw five districts that favor one party and five that favor the other, they can create an incumbent protection system for almost everyone.
That works if neither side gets greedy. Problem is, someone often does. Then everyone winds up in court because each side is trying to capture a sixth safe district, and inevitably, the other side sues. In the last decade across the country and in North Carolina in particular, the final word on who will represent voters is increasingly being decided in court, where both sides hope judges friendly to their parties will be the ones who rule on redistricting cases and ultimately wind up redrawing the districts.
It’s how the Republicans in North Carolina finally succeeded in drawing themselves into the political game in the state legislature, which had been controlled by Democrats. In recent years, NC’s Republican legislators have sued 10 times over districts they felt favored Democrats. The result was the first set of districts drawn by sympathetic judges that favored Republican control of the state house and brought the control of the state Senate almost dead even.
“It was an extraordinary political coup in this state because it had never been done before,” said Davis. With the stroke of a pen and no input from voters, a judge had altered the political landscape of North Carolina.
The same thing happened across the country over the last decade or so, says Jacobson, particularly in the South. Republicans have seized the advantage legislatively or won control of a record number of state legislatures, which means that they now draw more of the nation’s state and Congressional districts.
“It’s a relatively short-term phenomenon,” said Jacobson. “There was plenty of competition in 1994 when the Republicans picked up 52 seats, so it’s not impossible to have competition. But there are two things going on right now. One is the last round of redistricting after the 2000 census has reduced the number of competitive seats somewhat and even before that in the redistrictings in the 1990s there was a fair amount of racial gerrymandering which has the effect of producing solidly Democratic districts and helps to contribute to solidly Republican districts. But after the 2000 redistricting there was some serious partisan gerrymandering by Republicans in about five states and a lot of kind of pro-incumbent gerrymandering in a lot of other states where both parties’ incumbents were given better districts in terms of the partisan makeup of the constituency. The cost was competition.
“Republicans have a real structural advantage nationally,” said Jacobson. “In 2000, Gore won by half a million votes out of a hundred and five million cast, but if you look at how these votes are redistributed around the current Congressional (House) districts, there are more Bush voters than Gore voters in 240 districts and more Gore voters than Bush voters in only 195 districts. So Republican voters are distributed more efficiently for their party. Democratic voters tend to be concentrated and that gives the Republicans a real advantage when everything is so close.”
To Heagarty, it’s the same sort of voter manipulation that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Back then, most of the South was controlled by Democrats who kept blacks out of the political process by carving up black communities when districts were drawn. By putting the members of a single African-American community in four different majority white districts, instead of one majority black district, politicians could ensure that blacks could never be elected because their voting power was diluted.
“What we’re seeing is that same sort of thing that was done for race-based politicking is now done freely for partisan politics, but because both sides really benefit, no one will really take up the charge to reform that,” said Heagarty.
Not everyone thinks that this is such a bad thing. Arrington acknowledges that the six districts he drew for the county commission — which are also used by the school board — aren’t exactly competitive and were designed to re-elect incumbents. But they are also representative, he says. The county’s overall voter registration is pretty evenly divided between the two parties, he argues, and so are the county commission districts. Three are designed to elect Democrats, the other three Republicans. Which party controls the nine-member board is usually decided in the at-large race, where three seats are up for grabs this year.
Of course, the flip side of that is that the six district members, who make up two-thirds of the commission, answer to no one but a small handful of voters who represent the most extreme elements of their parties. And while in the final tally things may be “balanced” between the two parties, many of the issues county commissioners deal with aren’t partisan. If the majority of the board has to answer only to a tiny percentage of voters, it could make it harder for constituents to get basic problems addressed, like getting trash removed from local parks, because district commissioners don’t need that many votes to win.
Part of the problem, says Arrington, is that housing patterns make it harder to draw balanced districts than most people would think, so drawing slanted ones guarantees that both parties are represented.
“I can draw a district that I know Bill James can win and I can draw a district that I know even a very liberal black Democrat can win,” said Arrington. “But it’s very difficult to figure out how I can draw a district that anybody could win.”
Davis, like Arrington, says people have to look at the bigger picture.
“This is a democracy,” said Davis. “In a Democracy you must seize the advantage. No one is going to give you the advantage. No one gave Martin Luther King Jr. civil rights, he took it. He seized it. No one is giving women equal opportunity in the workplace. They are taking those opportunities. That’s the way a democracy works. It’s okay for conservatives to do that. It’s okay for liberals to do that. It’s okay for people to group by party or by coalitions or by whatever means they have of forming a powerful enough bloc. All of us are driven in one way or another by the notion of right and wrong as far as public policy and where we’d like to see the country go. You have to seize the opportunity to direct the country, so it’s a fight and fights are ugly. Fights are not fair. If one side has power so they’re able to raise 85 percent more money than the other side, is that fair? It is in the greater sense of how a Democracy works. You seize the advantage any way you can and there are all kinds of ways of gaining an advantage. You do it in campaigns, granted, but you also do it through reapportionment and you do it through litigation.”
The way Davis sees it, North Carolina politics may not be fair for most voters, but it’s better than it used to be.
“For 100 years in the South, it didn’t matter if you were a member of a party other than the Democrats,” said Davis. “You just had no chance. Over the last 30 years the South let go of their hate of Abraham Lincoln. That’s where the state has evolved. In the last two decades it has gone from where Democrat registration was over 75 percent to today it’s under 50.”
Both Davis and Heagarty agree that the tide could quickly change in the next decade, that Democratic factions could begin to seize more control as the conservative ones did in the 1990s. But Davis concedes that that would probably occur through adding more safe districts for the other side, not by providing voters with more competition.
But for now, that won’t help Mecklenburg voters much in the upcoming election, where what looks like a ballot packed with choices offers few choices at all.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2004.
