CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA Republican Jim Leach of Iowa is the rarest of exceptions in the 2002 midterm election–a House incumbent facing a stiff challenge for reelection. In the first congressional election after reapportionment, you’d normally expect rough-and-tumble competition in House races. But 2002 is anything but normal, except in Iowa with its unique system of redistricting. Amazingly, Iowa has more competitive House contests than Illinois, California, and Texas combined. And this in a year when nearly as many Senate seats are up for grabs–maybe a dozen–as House seats. That’s a dozen out of 34 Senate seats at stake this year. All 435 House seats are up. The distinguishing feature of the 2002 election is shameless incumbent protection. More incumbents will probably lose in primaries than in the general election on November 5. Iowa alone has shaken up its entire House delegation. House seats were gerrymandered by Republicans in three states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan) and by Democrats in two (Georgia, Maryland). This will force a half-dozen incumbents out of office in 2002, while making virtually every seat safe for one party or the other in the next four House elections of the decade. In the other 44 states, incumbent protection has reigned. And it’s not because voters demanded House members be assured of easy reelection. Rather, politicians–in some cases, as few as two party leaders, one Republican, one Democrat–got together and protected their own. Voters and even state legislatures were not involved. The result: strikingly reduced competition in House races. This, of course, is exactly what House members sought, and so has the Bush White House, which is eager for Republicans to keep control of the House. The sharp turn toward incumbent protection represented a victory in another fight as well. For three decades, a populist campaign has been waged to inject into American politics more competition, more grassroots candidates, and more turnover of seats. Most incumbents, given their interest in keeping their jobs, are opposed. In the 1990s, they staved off the drive to impose term limits. Now, through redistricting, they’ve moved closer to giving themselves life tenure. What’s wrong with this? Almost everything. Money may be the mother’s milk of politics, but competition is the lifeblood of good governance, particularly conservative governance. Competition requires members of Congress to keep in close touch with their constituents, who in most states tend to be conservative. It produces new faces and hastens the flow of new ideas to Washington. It combats the tendency of incumbents to become representatives of Washington to their districts, rather than the other way around. It makes it harder for lobbyists and special interests to develop lifelong relationships with members of Congress. In short, it makes Congress more representative. Iowa, alone among the 50 states, has found a way to thwart this by maximizing competition for House seats. In the 1970s, the state legislature created the Legislative Research Bureau (LRB) to handle reapportionment every 10 years. Its rules allow only one factor to be taken into account–counties. They can’t be broken up. Party registration and history and incumbency–those don’t count. “It’s a change oriented, anti-incumbent oriented system, and that’s basically healthy and that’s why I support it,” says Leach, first elected in 1976, the only Republican to defeat an incumbent Democrat that year. The legislature can reject an LRB plan, and it did so with the first one for 2002. But the system is popular, and the legislature went along with the second version. The LRB produced five entirely new House seats for 2002. Iowa lost its sixth seat because of the census, but one incumbent, Republican Greg Ganske, is running for the Senate against Democrat Tom Harkin, so his seat was cannibalized. Of the five new districts, four are competitive this year, three with Republican incumbents, one with a Democrat. The fifth, in western Iowa, is safely Republican. Democrat Leonard Boswell had to move to Des Moines from rural Iowa, but no one was more affected than Leach. At the time the new lines were drawn last year, Leach was a power in Congress, having just stepped down as chairman of the House Banking Committee. His hometown of Davenport had always been in his district. Neither of these mattered to the LRB. Worse, he was thrown into a district with a Republican colleague, Jim Nussle, that contained 70 percent of Nussle’s old district and only 30 percent of Leach’s. Next door was a vacant district, but it had the most Democratic voting record of any in Iowa. George Bush got less than 43 percent there in 2000. “I had a choice of having a pretty tough primary, retiring, or moving,” Leach says. He moved to Iowa City, forcing his daughter to switch high schools. Leach, 59, is hardly a stranger in the district. He represented the new counties before the LRB drastically altered the districts after the 1990 census. But he has real disadvantages. He’s a top target of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He faces an attractive and well-known Democrat, Cedar Rapids pediatrician Julie Thomas, 57. Not surprisingly, she loves Iowa’s way of reapportionment. “It’s good to stir the pot every 10 years,” she says. “Incumbents have so much power that to get a new voice, a fresh face, it takes this kind of system.” She’ll outspend Leach, who doesn’t take PAC money or out of state contributions. Okay, now compare the districts in Iowa with those in neighboring Illinois (see maps). Iowa’s are compact and reasonably homogenous. They make sense. They’re honestly arrived at. In Illinois, the districts look like a collection of toads and snakes. They’re neither compact nor geographically logical. The nonpartisan Iowa system, says state Republican chairman Chuck Larson, “brings a higher degree of credibility.” That’s putting it mildly. The Illinois scheme smacks of insider dealing to protect the seats of incumbents. Indeed, that’s precisely what happened in Illinois. Two Illinois House members, Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert and Democrat William Lipinski, drafted the new map. The role of the governor, the state legislature, a special redistricting commission? Zilch. Hastert is a close friend of the state’s most powerful Democrat, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who handed redistricting off to Lipinski. The census took one seat away from Illinois, and initially it was to be Democrat Rod Blagojevich’s on Chicago’s North Side. Blagojevich is the Democratic nominee for governor. But Chicago, it turned out, had gained in population (Hispanics mainly), so the seat came out of southern Illinois, where Democrat David Phelps was forced to run against a GOP incumbent, John Shimkus, who’s favored to win. The new plan is the first bipartisan redistricting of House seats in Illinois. And you might think that’s a step forward. In fact, it simply means the fix was in. Incumbents in marginal seats got better seats. Republican Jerry Weller’s old seat voted 45 percent for Bush in 2000. His new one went 51 percent for Bush. Democrat Lane Evans, often a GOP target, got a slightly less Republican district–from 46 percent Bush to 45 percent. In California, incumbent protection was even more blatant. Karl Rove, the White House political director, was deeply involved. Rove told Jim Brulte, the GOP leader in the state senate, that Republicans would have a far better chance of holding the House in 2002 if all 19 Republican seats in California were protected. Brulte agreed. Republicans, fearing they’d otherwise lose 4 to 6 seats, proposed to cooperate with Democrats, who control the governor’s office and both legislative houses. Democrats seemingly had nothing to gain from this–except Republicans had a weapon, the referendum process. In the 1980s, they’d won voter approval of a referendum upsetting Democratic redistricting. If necessary, Rove told California Republicans, the White House would help on a referendum. None was needed. Democrats reluctant
ly went along. As in Illinois, a few pols approved a new map drawn by Democratic consultant Michael Berman. Republicans swapped a seat that had become strongly Democratic in voter registration, Rep. Steve Horn’s in Long Beach, for a safe GOP seat in the Central Valley. Horn retired. The endangered GOP seats of David Dreier, Mary Bono, and Elton Gallegly were made solidly Republican. The marginal Democratic seats of Jane Harman, Lois Capps, and Susan Davis got more Democratic. In the end, Republicans wound up with 20 seats, a gain of one, and an outcome helpful in keeping GOP control of the House. “By taking California off the table,” says Brulte, “we shrunk the number of competitive seats and minimized the chances of the other side gaining seats.” Virginia was the flip side of California: Republicans brushed aside a bold plan to gain a seat and instead protected incumbents. Former governor Jim Gilmore had talked about chopping up the heavily Democratic, inside-the-Beltway district of Jim Moran and shifting its parts to more Republican districts. Republicans, who held the legislature and governorship, balked. Instead, they fashioned for Republican Randy Forbes, who’d narrowly won a special election in a formerly Democratic seat last year, a district with a better GOP tilt. They did the same for Republican Jo Ann Davis. The fallout: Democrat Moran was not only spared, his district became more Democratic than ever. In Illinois, California, and Virginia, the outcome of the midterm congressional elections was decided the year before, and decided not by voters but by a few men in a room. It’s been argued that the return of incumbents insures an experienced, wise, and stable House next year. A better description might be cynical, compromised, and entrenched. The goal of the Iowa system, however, is to produce a different kind of House member, and maybe it will work. Leach, a moderate in a moderate state, is a slight favorite to win in his new district. Even if he’s returned to Washington, there’s one thing he won’t feel, and that’s entrenched. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
