Wednesday, Jun. 11, 2008

Why June is busier than November, and why that’s bad

BY THE time primary day comes around, I always feel like I’ve just run two marathons — simultaneously.

The first is the action-packed final few weeks of the legislative session, when all the important efforts of the session are either coming together or falling apart, when if you blink you miss that major new initiative that someone just slipped into an unrelated bill that’s only a step away from the governor’s desk.

On top of that, election years bring endorsement interviews with the candidates in primaries. This year we started early — our first local House candidate came in on April 9 — but still it was a mad dash by the end to squeeze in meetings with 49 of the 54 candidates whose names were to appear on the ballots in Richland and Lexington counties.

By contrast, the fall is a stroll through the mall. The Legislature’s long gone, and the general election ballot is much roomier. This year, it looks like we’ll have fewer than half as many major-party candidates — 22 — to talk to in the run-up to the November election. And even in several legislative contests, the challenger really has no chance of winning.

If only those numbers could be reversed.

Unfortunately, they’re not going to be anytime soon. In fact, the pattern is extremely unlikely ever to change unless we have either a major realignment of political preferences — in which case the change will be quickly “corrected” by the new majority party — or else we find a way to take the politics out of the process of drawing election district lines.

The fact that some primary contests attract more than two candidates plays a role, to be sure, but the main reason we’ll always have fewer candidates and fewer contests in the fall is that incumbents get to draw their districts — in effect, choosing who their voters will be rather than leaving it up to voters to choose who their representatives will be, or at least which party their representatives will represent.

You might think this process would lead to more contested general elections, as the Republicans try to draw the districts in a way that makes it more likely that their candidates will be able to unseat Democratic incumbents. And that did happen back in the early ’90s, resulting in a surge of Republican victories. But once that new equilibrium was reached, it became extremely difficult to create more contested districts without putting a lot of Republicans at risk.

Here’s why: Say you have two adjacent districts, one where 63 percent of the voters have a solid Republican voting history, the other 60 percent Democratic. You could move enough Republicans into the Democratic district to get the GOP number up to 50 percent, but that drops the Republican district down to 53 percent — and most incumbents find that a little too close for comfort. The self-preservation instinct always trumps party loyalty.

Much easier and more pleasant — particularly with increasingly sophisticated mapping software and voter history data — for everyone involved to draw a lot of “safe” Republican districts and “safe” Democratic districts.

Sometimes, this doesn’t take a lot of work. Lexington County is so heavily Republican, for instance, that it probably would require more gerrymandering to draw competitive districts than to draw all those safe districts. That’s reflected in the countywide offices, none of which is contested in November.

No matter how difficult it was to get here, though, we’re here: This year there will be general election contests in barely more than a third of the Senate districts (18 of 46) and just less than a third of the House districts (38 of 124). By contrast, there were primaries in half the Senate districts and 50 of the 124 House districts.

This is bad for me, in terms of time management and work flow. But it’s far, far worse for our democracy, because the result is that voters have very little say about the direction their government takes.

Now, many of the differences between the parties are artificial, most of what our Legislature does it does unanimously, or nearly so, and some of the most contentious disputes — government restructuring tops the list — break down along divisions that have little or nothing to do with party.

But there are real differences in the policies generally favored by Republicans and those generally favored by Democrats.

With the exception of those few cases in which Gov. Mark Sanford and his libertarian friends are trying to purge the Republican Party of incumbents they say are too “liberal,” it’s hard to find policy differences among primary opponents. The choice nearly always comes down to style, emphasis, experience, knowledge and occasionally (but not always) priorities.

Those are important considerations when selecting a candidate. But in terms of whether taxes get raised or lowered, whether lawmakers favor the agenda of the Baptist Convention or the ACLU, whether our state intervenes aggressively in the market to discourage energy consumption or takes a lighter-handed approach, it’s not going to matter a lot whether voters elect a bunch of political novices or stick with seasoned veterans of the same party; those topics probably weren’t even part of the debate.

A general election contest, by contrast, is likely to revolve around such differences, and the outcome will have a significant effect on the direction our state takes. Whether we like the current direction or want to turn 180 degrees, surely that’s a debate we should be engaging regularly.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com.