https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/us/missouri-uncontested-races-elections.html
A Democracy With Everything but a Choice
A new analysis of American elections finds that in half of all races for partisan offices, a candidate runs unopposed. Democrats are the biggest no-shows.
Michael Wines reported from Cape Girardeau and Perry Counties in southeastern Missouri.
This November, voters in rural Perry County, Mo., will face a ballot with candidates for a bevy of local offices: state senator, state representative and circuit judge; two county commissioners, sheriff and many more.
What they won’t face is a choice.
Each of the 17 down-ballot races in Perry County has only one candidate. Just south, Cape Girardeau County fares only slightly better: Three of 12 races have two candidates.
All the candidates in the uncontested races are Republicans. And in those few races where a Democrat also is on the ballot, Republican victories are foregone conclusions in a rural area where voters overwhelmingly favor the G.O.P.
“There’s strength in numbers,” Kelly McKerrow, the chairwoman of the Perry County Democratic Party organization, said. “And we just don’t have them.”
Amid the feverish handicapping of an election often called crucial to the future of American democracy, Missouri tells a different story, repeated time and again across a deeply polarized country where it can feel futile to run as a Democrat or Republican in a stronghold of the other party. In half of all races for partisan offices, candidates are elected — often multiple times — without opposition.
And though defending democracy was a dominant theme of the Democratic National Convention last month, in the 2022 midterms, Democrats failed to field a single candidate for fully half of all partisan offices — well over three times the rate of Republican no-shows.
That analysis of electoral competition comes from three nonprofit groups that assembled a database of races in the 2022 election cycle for more than 29,400 partisan offices nationwide, from U.S. senator to members of local airport district boards. Of those offices, 14,450 had but one candidate.
No complete accounting of all the nation’s uncontested races exists, but other studies have turned up roughly similar results. The online database Ballotpedia says that, on average, 58 percent of the thousands of elections it follows have a single candidate. The survey of 2022 elections is more extensive, but covered fewer offices in some states than in others.
Contest Every Race, a project of the progressive nonprofit Movement Labs, is using the data to recruit Democratic candidates in places where the party lacks a presence. That group and the others, the nonpartisan BallotReady and the progressive Pipeline Fund, placed no conditions on a reporter’s use of data on the 2022 races.
Political scholars say that politicians elected without opposition cast fewer votes and introduce less legislation, and that no-contest elections depress voter turnout.
One-sided elections also lead to one-sided policies untempered by political opposition, said Keel Hunt, a onetime aide to the former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, a Republican. Mr. Hunt, the author of three books on the state’s political history, said the repercussions are playing out nationwide in states overwhelmingly dominated by one party.
“You see extremist gerrymanders,” he said. “You see all these rules affecting how people live, from the schoolhouse and banning books to the hospital and abortion laws. You get this kind of extremism that only reinforces itself if there’s never any competition.”
Uncontested elections are hardly limited to small-bore offices. On November’s ballot, three of four elections to the Georgia Supreme Court — which seems almost certain to decide whether the Fulton County election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump will proceed — have but one candidate. All three Nevada Supreme Court races are uncontested; so are all five in Oregon.
In Wisconsin, the online publication Bolts reports, 67 of 71 races this fall for county district attorney — the office that decides who is and is not charged with a crime — are uncontested. In Ohio, 73 of 88 county prosecutors are running unopposed. In Texas, only 31 of 254 county sheriff races are contested.
It is not only Democrats who fail to field candidates. Republicans don’t contest state legislative seats in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City and other big cities. They lack candidates in places as different as liberal California and Massachusetts and overwhelmingly poor and Black parts of the Deep South.
But while the electorate splits roughly equally between the two parties, Democrats contest far fewer offices. One reason is that Republicans control more statehouses that have gerrymandered Democrats out of contention for legislative seats.
But much of the disparity exists because voters have left the Democratic Party in many rural counties that are sparsely populated, but have as many elective posts as larger ones.
“The distribution of offices does not align with the distribution of voters,” said Barry C. Burden, who heads the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That means Republicans have deep roots both in rural states and states with big Democratic cities. In Illinois, for example, Chicago makes the state reliably Democratic in national politics, but the 2022 elections survey found that Democrats failed to contest nearly 500 partisan offices, largely in the rural parts of the state, compared to 181 for Republicans.
In Missouri, despite big Democratic population centers in St. Louis and Kansas City, the 2022 survey found that seven in 10 partisan offices in the state went uncontested — and Democrats were absent eight times more often than Republicans.
That is striking because Democrats held most major Missouri offices, including governor, U.S. senator and secretary of state, barely a decade ago.
There is no shortage of opinions on the reason for that collapse. But Pam Muench, a 67-year-old real-estate entrepreneur who was elected last month to the Perry County Republican Central Committee, said it comes down to one word: values.
“Republicans are mainly Christian,” she said, stressing the party’s opposition to abortion. “They’re business owners, and they don’t want high crime. Look at the big cities that are run by Democrats and how they look, so run down.”
The counties hugging the Mississippi River south of St. Louis illustrate why rebuilding lost rural political allegiances is supremely difficult.
In Cape Girardeau, a river town of 40,000, J. Michael Davis, a Democrat, Navy veteran and Methodist pastor, is running against a Republican incumbent in the State House of Representatives. His yard signs omit his political affiliation. He campaigns less on issues than on being a common-sense problem solver.
“I might not do any better than anyone else has done in the past, but I hope I do at least as good,” he said in an interview.
That almost certainly would not be good enough. Andy Leighton, the chair of the county Democratic Party, says resurrecting the party’s fortunes is both a moral and political calling. “Someone who is living in rural Missouri has to stand up to say ‘We can do better than this,’” he said.
But though rebuilding is not impossible, he said, it is very hard. Mr. Leighton won 31 percent of the vote in his 2022 race for the same seat.
“No matter what you do to push the needle, it’s going to be a 35 percent vote total for you,” he said. “People want to invest in winners. And when you know you’re going to get 35 percent, no matter what, it’s hard to invest in that.”
A shortage of money, he said, is crucial. National party leaders pour dollars into states where races for federal offices determine national power. Democratic donors in Missouri cities do not make up the shortfall.
And even when there is money, getting a message out is challenging. Newspapers are dying, local television news is sparse and a typical media diet can range from Facebook to Fox News. “Everybody’s so scattered and in their own little echo chamber,” Mr. Leighton said.
“There’s an old saying in politics that you’ve got to get the talk right,” said Al Cross, a political analyst and former director of the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. “And once your base gets below 30 or 35 percent, you’ve lost the talk. People who still identify with the Democratic Party are afraid to say that. And that’s much more true in rural places because of the importance of personal contact.”
“I won’t put a yard sign out,” said Dr. McKerrow, of the Perry County Democrats. “I mean, it’s a dead end. It’s not worth it.”
That makes potential candidates wary of undertaking hopeless races that could affect their social lives and even businesses. In southern Missouri, Democrats seeking office sometimes choose to run as Republicans.
“It’s a big commitment to put a ‘D’ behind your name, risk your reputation, risk losing your job, knowing that you’re going to get 35 percent of the vote,” Mr. Leighton said. The alternative — quitting work to campaign and fund-raise full-time — is “a really hard act,” he said.
Yet political scholars and strategists alike say running is the only way to claw back lost voters. Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said the party recruits and counsels rural candidates — and gives even guaranteed losers a cash stipend — because “if you don’t take a swing at it, you never get anywhere.”
One result: Democratic candidates for seats in Wisconsin’s State Assembly and State Senate this November outnumber Republican ones.
Lauren Gepford, a vice president at Movement Labs, oversees the effort by Contest Every Race to recruit and finance rural Democratic candidates. About four in 10 go on to win, she said, but the benefits extend beyond that.
“Our initial goal was to make sure that everybody has a choice on their ballot,” she said. “But we’ve seen when a Democrat runs locally it reshapes political terrain. There’s some counties that we’ve worked in for six years now where you’ll see that they’ve become consistently more Democratic.”
Contest Every Race encourages candidates to use yard signs and billboards that show local supporters they are not alone. Some signs display only the words “Rural Strong,” over a logo depicting farmland — a sort of secret handshake binding like-minded voters.
“People think that they can’t say they’re a Democrat because they’ll lose their friends,” Ms. Gepford said. “But when they find out that actually the person standing next to them in church, in the grocery store, was also a Democrat and not talking about it, that’s been really powerful.”
Kirsten Noyes and Jack Begg contributed research.
Michael Wines is a national correspondent, writing about voting and election issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. More about Michael Wines
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