Nobody Trusts Congress, but Americans Keep Reelecting the Same People

Increasingly like-minded communities make incumbent lawmakers safer than ever.

The 2024 election is a hotly contested contest, and not just for the presidency: Control of Congress is at stake, too. But for all the money and energy spent on the various House and Senate campaigns, chances are that few seats will change hands. That's because seats—especially in the U.S. House—have virtually become the property of one party or the other, with very few switching sides. Gerrymandering—the practice of drawing district lines to favor one party or another—has long played a role. But so does Americans' practice of clustering in like-minded geographical enclaves.

Job Security for Legislators

"In any given election, the vast majority of House districts are won by the party that already holds them," Pew Research's Drew DeSilver noted last week. "In 2020, for instance, 93% of districts were retained by the same party; only 18 of 435 districts (4%) flipped."

With a slim Republican House majority of 220 seats to 212 Democrats and 3 vacancies, that means control really is up for grabs. It also means that only a handful of seats are likely in play to determine who has the majority in the next Congress. The 2020 incumbent reelection rate was no outlier.

Looking at incumbent representatives (not parties) over the decades, OpenSecrets found the reelection rate for House members above 90 percent for the past decade. It hasn't dropped below 85 percent in at least 60 years.

Pew's DeSilver went back further—to 1922—and found much of the same. The high-water mark for competitive House races in which any given seat changed hands among political parties at least twice was between 1932 and 1942. During that period "there were 71 mixed-party districts, accounting for 21% of the 342 districts we analyzed."

In this year's election, DeSilver believes "only 40 or so of the 435 House seats are competitive." Those are where control of the House of Representatives will be decided.

By comparison, the Senate has a little more turnover. Well, for the third of it that's on the ballot in any federal election, that is. In the last 40 years (reelection rates were lower in the '60s and '70s), the lowest reelection rate was 75 percent, in 1988. Otherwise, it's been 80 percent (OK, 79.3 percent in 2000 and 2006) and above since. All incumbents running for reelection won their races in 2022. It was "the first time that no Senate incumbent has lost a general election since 1914," Jazmine Ulloa wrote for The New York Times.

That's impressive job security for an institution that draws rock-bottom levels of trust (32 percent, according to Gallup) from the American people.

Gerrymandering Helps Create Safe Seats

When discussing the House, a lot of critics point to gerrymandering as the culprit. That's the "practice of drawing electoral district lines to favor one political party, individual, or constituency over another," according to Ballotpedia. Such shenanigans have been indulged in by many political parties that control redistricting, with the name dating back to Elbridge Gerry, the then-governor of Massachusetts, who signed off on a particularly contorted map in 1812 to keep his allies in power.

"Most attempts to gerrymander can best be understood through the lens of two basic techniques: cracking and packing," explain Julia Kirschenbaum and Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice. "Cracking splits groups of people with similar characteristics, such as voters of the same party affiliation, across multiple districts. With their voting strength divided, these groups struggle to elect their preferred candidates in any of the districts. Packing is the opposite of cracking: map drawers cram certain groups of voters into as few districts as possible. In these few districts, the 'packed' groups are likely to elect their preferred candidates, but the groups' voting strength is weakened everywhere else."

Americans Self-Sorting by Politics Makes Seats Even Safer

These days, though, you might have to aggressively gerrymander to create competitive districts. That's because the "big sort" sees Americans voluntarily moving into communities that are increasingly politically homogeneous. The term "big sort" was coined by Bill Bishop, who wrote a 2008 book by the name. The phenomenon continues today, as noted in 2023 by PBS, which found that "Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip."

In an analysis published last week, Ronda Kaysen and Ethan Singer of The New York Times looked at the voter registration records of 3.5 million people who moved since the 2020 presidential election.

"Across all movers, Republicans chose neighborhoods Donald J. Trump won by an average of 19 percentage points in 2020, while Democrats chose neighborhoods President Biden won by the opposite margin (also 19 points)," they wrote. "In total, movers started in neighborhoods 31 percentage points apart; they ended in neighborhoods 38 points apart."

The result is that "in all but three states that voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, more Democrats have moved in than Republicans. The reverse is true for states Mr. Trump won — in all but one, more Republicans moved in." In addition, 36 states disproportionately lost members of the losing party who moved elsewhere. Yes, we're talking about California, but not just that state.

Interestingly, the analysis found that politics was only one factor in deciding where people moved. But lifestyle preferences correlate so closely to partisan ones now that walkable urban neighborhoods tend to become more Democratic while small towns and rural areas near wilderness become more Republican. People also like turning down tensions by relocating among like-minded neighbors.

Where some scholars once blamed gerrymandering for our increasingly fractious and hostile politics, this self-sorting may play a larger role.

"Districts themselves have undergone a 'sorting' that overwhelms any impact of gerrymandering," Peter Feuerherd observed in 2018 in a round-up of research for JSTOR Daily. "Liberals and conservatives are now far less likely to live close together. This clustering makes it easy to create more homogenous political districts."

And, of course, homogeneous political districts will tend to keep a House seat in the hands of the same party. Whole states becoming more clearly Republican or Democrat will probably do the same with Senate seats. Nobody trusts Congress, but we're more likely than ever to keep it in the same hands.