Control of the House is again up for grabs in this year’s elections. The fight will be fierce and expensive, but it will also take place on the narrowest of playing fields.

In the campaign’s final stretch, only 27 of 435 districts — 12 held by Democrats and 15 held by Republicans — are considered toss-ups based on the most recent assessment of a district’s political makeup and candidate strengths and weaknesses by election analysts at Cook Political Report. And just another 16 districts — 6 held by Republicans and 10 held by Democrats — are rated as either leaning Democratic or leaning Republican. In total, barely a tenth of all House seats are toss-up or lean districts this year.

This lack of competitive races is at least in part by design.

In the late 1990s, around 4 in 10 congressional districts voted within five percentage points of the national vote in presidential elections, as calculated using a metric known as the Partisan Voting Index. Researchers refer to these as bellwether districts because they follow national trends. In a country where the national vote for president has been close for decades, these bellwether districts also tended to have relatively close elections.

Flash forward three decades and a growing asymmetry has emerged. On the one hand, presidential elections continue to uniformly produce narrow, single-digit popular vote wins. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by fewer than five percentage points, and in 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two percentage points, though she lost the Electoral College.

However, it’s a very different story when it comes to congressional elections. Since the late 1990s, even as presidential elections continued to be close, the number of congressional districts where district-level presidential results more or less matched close national results has fallen by more than half. More than 80 percent of congressional districts are now decidedly red or blue.

In the vast majority of these congressional districts, the Democratic or Republican candidate for president — and almost always the prevailing congressional candidate — win by landslide margins. In 2020, for example, Biden carried 167 congressional districts by 15 or more percentage points, and Donald Trump carried another 149 districts by the same margin. These districts together make up a whopping 73 percent of all current House seats.

Unsurprisingly, the decline in the number of bellwether districts tracks the growth in single-party control of the........

© Truthout