Chicago Tribune

The returns are in
November 1, 2002 

We're going to step out on a limb here and make a bold prediction: U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson will be re-elected on Tuesday.

So will Rep. William Lipinski. And Rep. Jan Schakowsky. And Reps. Danny Davis, Luis Gutierrez, Bobby Rush and . . . the list goes on.

For all intents and purposes, they had their elections 18 months ago when the Illinois legislature voted to approve a new map of congressional districts. The map, based on 2000 census figures, was designed to grant almost every incumbent member of Congress a safe and happy home for the next 10 years. The map was drawn to give overwhelming political advantage to the incumbents.

Think this politician-protection plan came about by accident? The homes of likely primary challengers to Rush and Gutierrez were deftly and intentionally pushed by the map-makers into other congressional districts.

That's good for incumbents, but bad for democracy. Why should anyone vote when the decision has already been made for them?

On Tuesday there will be 19 elections for Congress in Illinois, but only one where the outcome is seriously in doubt.

For the rest, Tuesday's balloting will not be about winning or losing. It will be about running up such whopping vote totals that no one in their right mind will dare challenge them for the next 10 years, the life of the map.

The same holds true in the 177 Illinois House and Senate districts; only a small handful of them have legitimate races.

So, yes, we're willing to bet the ranch that Jan Schakowsky will defeat Republican Nicholas Duric and Libertarian Stephanie "vs. the Machine" Sailor on Tuesday. If there is any suspense to this race, it is whether the cozy confines of Schakowsky's new district will allow her to run up even gaudier numbers than she had in 2000, when she spent seven times as much as her opponent and grabbed 76 percent of the vote.

At that, she was something of a slacker. She couldn't touch the winning numbers put up in 2000 by Rush (88 percent) Jackson (90 percent) and Gutierrez (89 percent).

Indeed, there is no safer investment in politics than contributing to a member of Congress. In the 2000 election, Illinois incumbents raised and spent some $18 million, nearly four times as much as their challengers.

And that's how it is across the country. No more than 40 of the 435 congressional districts have races where the outcome is in any doubt.

There is one exception to this incumbent protection plan. Iowa has five congressional districts, and four of them have truly competitive races this November. That's because Iowa decided years ago that drawing district boundaries should benefit voters, not politicians. Iowa turns the job of drawing political maps to a nonpartisan state agency and a computer.

The computer does not protect incumbents or punish their political foes. It takes the changes in population recorded by the census and uses the numbers to craft political boundaries. The legislature can approve or reject the computer-generated map, but cannot change it.

The result is that most Iowa voters get a real choice among strong, competitive candidates.

Will Illinois ever adopt such a remap system? Not as long as the incumbents are fat and happy doing it themselves, and nobody howls about it.