I’m not stunned by much anymore.
But the second number I present in this new whiteboard—58.6%—stunned me. That’s the percentage of the GOP legislators in Tennessee—the ones who voted to oust two of the “Tennessee Three” last week—who did not face contested elections from a Democrat last November. And almost all of those didn’t face a candidate at all.
Those numbers explain so much.
No wonder the GOP Tennessee legislators acted so arrogantly as the whole nation watched. No wonder they so comfortably ousted members of the statehouse who stand with the majority of Tennesseans who (as I wrote in my prior newsletter) want common sense gun reforms….while they stand with the minority who want to do nothing in the wake of endless violence.
Because these are people locked into power with no accountability back to the people.
And while gerrymandering makes the problem terrible to begin with, having no opponent makes it worse. Because come election time, no one is even knocking on doors or sending mailers or attending fora or debates explaining what the extremist incumbent has been up to. No newspaper is laying out opposing views, because there probably is no story about the uncontested “race” at all. And even voters who disagree with that incumbent have little motivation to say so, or do anything, since they are deprived of any choice anyway. All of which eliminates the final measure of accountability that an incumbent will ever face—and the only connection back to the people themselves. It’s a re-appointment, not an election at all.
Multiply that uncontested election across dozens of districts, and not only do you get dozens of legislators (and the majority of Tennessee’s majority) with zero accountability, but you get millions of Tennesseans who had no choice in their legislative election, and who receive little to no information about what the legislature and their representative are doing. And that anonymity only adds to the crisis that these unaccountable statehouses are already far too unknown as they do untold damage on our democracy.
But there’s another devastating impact when uncontested districts become the norm across a state. It’s an impact I didn’t really appreciate until I watched it play out here in Ohio.
And it will take a separate whiteboard to explain just how bad it is.
To be continued…
