Kevin Richert wrote in his blog earlier in this week about the number of state legislative candidates who are unopposed for the upcoming election cycle. He was working off the information provided by Jim Hansen and The United Vision for Idaho. Looking at these numbers in the abstract makes them difficult to comprehend. I hope to provide some context to better understand “The Unopposed.”

Hansen notes there are 35 candidates, of course all incumbents, who will have no competition in the primary or general election. If you only include the major parties, there are actually 37 incumbents who are unopposed as one is challenged by an Independent and the other by a Constitutional Party candidate. As an independent or minor party candidate has not been elected to the state legislature for generations, I consider the 37 number as more reflective of the unopposed.

So how does the number of unopposed incumbents compare to prior years? It is not the worse but there is a disturbing trend. The worse year in this decade for unopposed was 2000 when a whopping 42 seats were uncontested. That is a full 40 percent of the state legislature. Actually the following cycle was the best with only 14 uncontested seats. That number has been increasing steadily to this year’s 37.

These unopposed seats are not consistent across the board either. Twenty-one out of the 35 total legislative districts have at least one unopposed seat with seven having two seats uncontested and three districts having no legislative seat being challenged. The three districts with no state legislative contests are District 5 (rural Kootenai County), District 27 (Cassia, Power and Oneida Counties and a small portion of Bingham County) and District 28 (Bingham County); they are all represented by three Republicans. The Democrats do have nine incumbents who are not being contested.

When there are at least two candidates on the ballot, the race is officially contested but is the race competitive? I believe that is the more important question. One cannot tell in foresight whether a race will be competitive but it can be studied in retrospect. Political economists categorize elections where the winner receives less than 55 percent of the vote as competitive. If 5 percent or fewer of the voters have to change allegiances for there to be a change in results, then the race is considered competitive. So, how many competitive races in the general election for the state legislature have we had recently? Not many.

Again, like with uncontested races, 2000 was the low water mark for competitive races in Idaho. Only 5 out of the 105 state legislative races saw the winner receive less than 55 percent of the vote. No race for the state senate that year was competitive. The competitive races reflect the uncontested in other years. The highest number of competitive campaigns was in 2002 with 24, dipping to 19 in 2004 and dropping even lower in 2006 to 14 or only a little over 13 percent of all of the seats in the state legislature were competitive.

What can we expect this year? Based upon the last three elections, around 25 percent of the contested elections are competitive. Since there are 68 contested elections (my number of 37 uncontested subtracted from the 105 legislative seats), we can estimate that 17 state legislative races will be won by a candidate receiving less than 55 percent of the vote. These races, if historical trends are followed, will be concentrated in a few districts with many districts not having any competitive state legislative races.

Just looking at whether there is more than one candidate in a race does not tell the observer much on whether there is a realistic opportunity for the incumbent to be unseated. Many of the candidates listed on the ballot provide merely token opposition and are not a threat to the incumbent.

Go Yotes.

Dr. Jasper M. LiCalzi
Professor
Department of Political Economy
The College of Idaho