Every 10 years, stats are required to redraw its congressional districts to account for shifts in population.
In New Jersey, it is done by a bipartisan panel that was created to avoid the kind of gerrymandering seen in other states, where the majority political party uses redistricting to entrench their own incumbents and limit the ability of their opponents to win seats.
And while this approach has been successful, as far as politics is concerned, no one can say that gerrymandering does not occur and that the process has not been created with specific outcomes in mind. In New Jersey, redistricting has become a bipartisan incumbent protection racket.
On Tuesday, voters — many of whom consistently tell pollsters they desire real change — sent 11 men back to Washington. The only incumbent who will not be in office come January when the new House of Representatives is sworn in is Steve Rothman, who got caught in the new electoral math — the state lost a seat in the House because of the shifting population nationally. Eleven of the remaining 12 served the last two years — at least — as members of the House of Representatives, a body that nationally has an approval rating down in the teens. (The 12th, Donald Payne Jr., is the son of the longtime Congressman from Newark, who died in March.)
And it’s not just that every New Jersey House incumbent won. They won big. The closest race — between first-term incumbent Jon Runyon and Democrat Shelly Adler — was not even all that close. Runyon won by 9 percentage points (53.8 percent to 44.8 percent). Six incumbents won more than two thirds of the vote and a seventh, Frank Pallone, nearly crossed that threshold. The others — all Republicans — won between 55 and 59 percent in their districts.
To me, this proves the redistricting process a failure. Many of the state’s Congressional representatives do a good job, but a healthy political system demands a legitimate competition among candidates and not the farce we have created that allows incumbents to hold their seats indefinitely with only token opposition every two years.
Hank Kalet 