A New Way to Understand America’s Congressional Doom Loop

Over the past generation, both parties have established a dominant grip on a wide arc of seats linked by common racial, educational and economic features.

From Boston to Boulder to Berkeley, the kind of districts held by most House Democrats now replicate each other in their underlying characteristics much more consistently than as recently as the 1990s. The same is true for seats held by Republicans from upstate New York through West Texas and the Rocky Mountain states.

Democrats now rely on a kind of upstairs-downstairs coalition of well-educated, usually affluent urban and suburban districts coupled with poorer and heavily minority inner-city districts. Republicans rely preponderantly on a single type of district: White, small-town, exurban and rural seats with fewer college graduates. Both sides have been reduced to a small remnant of seats on the terrain that mostly favors the other. In effect, they have partitioned the nation into antithetical, and almost impregnable, spheres of influence.

This relentless re-sorting has increased unity within the parties, reduced cooperation between them and, above all, left control of the House on a knife’s edge: In each of the past three sessions, the party controlling the House has held a majority of 10 seats or less. The House hasn’t been so narrowly split for so long since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.

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The House’s demographic re-sorting helps explain why neither side can command a large majority. In the past, wave elections have often decimated members in mismatched seats — Democrats in White working-class districts or Republicans in upscale suburban ones. Now there are simply fewer of those mismatches for either side to target. “The parties have shaken the board to the point” where few seats are still genuinely competitive, says David Wasserman, senior elections analyst at Cook Political Report.

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If the demographic re-sorting has contributed to smaller House majorities, it has also made those majorities easier to manage. Demographically mismatched members historically were the most likely to break from their party on key votes, especially on the Democratic side. Fewer mismatches mean fewer party rebels.

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The continental drift between the parties means it is now harder to construct bipartisan agreements. [Former Republican Representative Charlie Dent] Dent says it was easier to find areas of agreement when each party was a “broad-based coalition” that incorporated a wider range of ideological and demographic interests that overlapped more than they do now. “That had a moderating impact on our politics,” he says.

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