The way we elect House members is rigged in a way that fosters polarization and dysfunction.




Out of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, only about 10%, or fewer than 50, are truly competitive. The other  districts heavily favor one party over the other, meaning that party almost always wins the general election and voters have no real choice. In 2014, 30 members of Congress ran unopposed and 95% of all incumbents won reelection.

Democrats would need to pick up 30 seats this year to regain majority control of the House, and that’s almost impossible due to gerrymandering. According to analysis by, the Democrats would need to win by at least 8% more votes to achieve a House majority. Another model posits that Democrats would have to win 10 million more votes than Republicans to hit the 218-seat House majority mark.

In the last two congressional elections, Democrats did win more votes than Republicans, but not more seats. In 2012 Democrats won 1.1 million more votes, 50.6% of the votes cast, and 46% of the seats. In 2014 they won 47% of the votes but just 43% of the seats.

That’s because Republicans have skillfully gamed the system. After their 2008 presidential and congressional losses, they focused on winning state legislative districts and governorships. That gave them control of the redistricting process after the 2010 census in big swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina.

The GOP reaped the benefits in 2012. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won about half the popular vote but Republicans took three-quarters of the state’s congressional seats. The pattern was the same in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.

Gerrymandered legislative districts dominated by one party lead not only to a lack of competitiveness and one-party rule but also to more political polarization. Politicians in these districts never have to meet or talk with voters who disagree with them. All they need to do to assure reelection is win their primaries, so voters in the other party don’t matter. That’s why Congress is so polarized and dysfunctional: it is dominated by conservatives and liberals who don’t need to appeal across the aisle.

Take Florida, one of the two or three most pivotal states this year.  According to the Florida Secretary of State, there are more than 4.8 million registered Democrats, about 4.5 million registered Republicans, and 3 million independents in Florida. And yet, 17 of the state’s 27 congressional districts are represented by Republicans, most of them from safe seats.

The heavily gerrymandered congressional redistricting plan drawn by the Republican-controlled Florida legislature after the 2010 census was the subject of four years of legal challenges until the Florida Supreme Court ruled it violated the state constitution and approved a new redistricting map. Courts have also ruled against Republican drawn legislative maps in Virginia and North Carolina on grounds of racial and partisan gerrymandering. On Dec. 5 the Supreme Court will hear arguments in both cases.

So what can be done? Residents of Arizona and California cut politicians out by creating independent commissions to draw legislative districts in a more fair and competitive way. Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature fought the reform plan all the way to the Supreme Court but lost on a 5-4 ruling in April.

Activists in Illinois and Colorado collected more than half a million signatures for redistricting initiatives this year, but state Supreme Court rulings blocked both measures from qualifying for the ballot.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media 

This all may sound overly wonky in an election year dominated by talk of sexual harassment, potential tax fraud and classified emails, but redistricting reform really does matter. Changing the way lawmakers get elected and making it a more fair system could go a long way toward addressing Americans’ distrust of politicians and dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Politicians would have to talk with and represent voters who disagreed with them in order to get elected, and that could mean they would also have to work with each other to get things done for the nation.

President Obama has said that when he leaves office, he plans to spend time helping a new group called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee led by former Attorney General Eric Holder. The group’s goal is taking back state legislatures and the redistricting process for Democrats.

Redistricting reform is badly needed and presidential leadership to raise the profile of the issue would be terrific. But if it’s just another partisan effort to try to advantage one party over the other, that is not real reform.

Linda Killian is executive director of Independent Americans United and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Her most recent book is The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents. Follow her on Twitter @lindajkillian.


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