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Houston Chronicle
Get
your election results here: 99.8% accurate
By
Steven Hill and Rob Richie
November 3, 2002
If we said we could predict the winners in
three-quarters of the horse races at Sam Houston Raceway, you'd say
the fix is in. But when it comes to the 435 races for the U.S. House
on Nov. 5, the fix really is in.
Even before the polls open on Election Day, we can
tell you the winners in 76 percent of the races. For all intents and
purposes, most House races have been over for months. No wonder that
barely a third of adults will bother voting this year -- the lowest
national election turnout in the world among long-time democracies.
Most Americans simply have given up on stale, noncompetitive
congressional elections. Turnout in primaries this year was a mere
17 percent of adults.
So here are our predictions for this year's House
races, taken from our new report called "Monopoly Politics":
Democrats will win 159 seats in the House, 104 by lopsided
landslides and 41 by a comfortable spread of 10 points or more. The
Republicans will win 173 seats, 91 by landslides and 59 by a
comfortable 10-point spread. A total of 332 seats are locked up for
one party or the other, and most of the remaining districts won't be
competitive either due to weak challengers. More than 95 percent of
incumbents will again cruise to victory, usually by huge margins.
We have made predictions for previous House elections,
and those predictions were 99.8 percent accurate. What is perhaps
most interesting is that we make our predictions so confidently
without knowing anything about inequities in campaign financing
between the candidates, or even knowing much about who the
candidates are.
We can do this because of a simple fact: Most
districts tilt strongly toward one major party or the other,
courtesy of the redistricting process. That's when legislative
district lines are redrawn by the dominant political party and
manipulated to favor those already in power. Think of it as "insider
trading," just like Enron or Martha Stewart -- except this is
political insider trading.
What's the end result? Most voters have become
bunkered down in safe, one-party districts where their only viable
choice is to ratify the candidate -- usually the incumbent -- of the
party that dominates their district. If you are a Democrat in a
solidly Republican district, a Republican in a solidly Democratic
district, or a supporter of a minor party, you don't have a chance
of electing your candidate, no matter how much money your candidate
spends. While we think of ours as a two-party system, in fact, most
voters' frame of reference for legislative races is that of a
one-party system.
This fact directly undercuts voter enthusiasm and
public debate about issues. It also undercuts campaign-finance
reform. Compared to the lopsided nature of most House districts,
campaign-finance inequities are of secondary importance in
determining who wins and loses most legislative elections in
November (big money has its greatest impact in primary races).
The sad fact is that for most voters who care about
which party controls the House, it will be more effective for them
to donate money to a candidate in a competitive race halfway across
the nation than vote in their own districts. It's little wonder that
so many voters are losing interest. Our votes count for too little,
and this contributes to an alarming level of apathy and resignation.
To improve voter choice, we should start by following
Iowa and Arizona's example, and take the redistricting process out
of incumbents' hands and give it to independent nonpartisan
commissions with a mandate to make our legislative races more
competitive.
But we won't return choice and empowerment to voters
unless we join most other modern democracies in transforming our
"winner-take-all" elections. We should break up the single-seat
districts and try multi-seat districts elected by a system of
proportional representation. That will produce more competitive
elections, and more voters will have a fair chance to win
representation.
In the meantime, place your bets, everyone. It's easy
money when the fix is in. And you don't need to wait until Election
Day, you can find out who your representative will be by visiting
our predictions at www.fairvote.org.
Richie is the executive director of the Center for
Voting and Democracy, a national nonprofit organization in Takoma
Park, Md. Hill is senior analyst for the center and author of a new
book "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All
Politics," which examines these issues in depth.
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