This November, voters in rural Perry County, Md., will face the ballot with candidates for local offices: state senator, state representative and circuit judge; Two county commissioners, sheriffs and many more.
What they won’t face is the choice.
Each of the 17 down-ballot races in Perry County has just one candidate. Just to the south, Cape Girardeau County fares slightly better: Three of the 12 races have two candidates.
All candidates in uncontested races are Republicans. And in those few races where a Democrat is also on the ballot, Republican victories are a foregone conclusion in rural areas where voters overwhelmingly favor the GOP.
“There is strength in numbers,” said Perry County Democratic Party Organization Chair Kelly McKerrow. “And we don’t have that.”
Amid the fever pitch of an election often seen as crucial to the future of American democracy, Missouri tells a different story, repeated time and time again in a deeply polarized country where it seems futile to run as a Democrat or Republican in the other’s strongholds. In about half of all races for party partisan offices, candidates are elected — often multiple times — without opposition.
And although defending democracy was a dominant theme at last month’s Democratic National Convention, in the 2022 midterms, Democrats failed to field a single candidate for fully half of all partisan offices — more than triple the rate of Republican no-shows.
That analysis of electoral competition comes from three nonprofit groups that assembled a database of races for more than 29,400 partisan offices in the 2022 election cycle, from U.S. senators to local airport district board members. 14,450 of those offices had only one candidate.
No complete account of all the nation’s noncompetitive races exists, but other studies have yielded roughly similar results. An average of 58 percent across thousands of polls, says online database Ballotpedia It follows There is only one candidate. The 2022 election survey is more comprehensive, but some states cover fewer offices than others.
Compete in every raceA project of a progressive nonprofit Movement LabsUsing data to recruit Democratic candidates in areas where the party does not have a presence. That group and others, non-partisan Prepare the ballot and progressive Pipeline FundNo conditions are placed on the reporter’s use of data on the 2022 race.
Political pundits say the politicians were elected unopposed Vote less and introduce less legislationAnd those uncontested elections reduce voter turnout.
One-sided elections also lead to one-sided policies that are indistinguishable from political opposition, said Kiel Hunt, a onetime aide to former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, a Republican. Mr. Hunt, The Author of three books On the political history of the state, states that are overwhelmingly dominated by one party are seeing its impact across the country.
“You see extremist gerrymanders,” he said. “You see all these regulations affect how people live, banning schoolhouses and books and hospitals and abortion laws. You get this kind of extremism that only gets stronger if there’s never any competition.”
Uncontested elections are rarely limited to small-bore offices. On the November ballot, three of the four Georgia Supreme Court elections — Fulton County or not — appear almost certain to decide. Election interference case Former President Donald J. There is only one candidate – who will go against Trump. All three Nevada Supreme Court races are uncontested; So Oregon has all five.
In Wisconsin, the Online publication Bolt reportsSixty-seven of the 71 races this fall for county district attorney — the office that decides who is and isn’t charged with a crime — are uncontested. In Ohio, 73 of 88 county prosecutors Running unopposed. In Texas, only 31 of the 254 county sheriff races are contested.
It’s not just Democrats who fail to field candidates. Republicans do not run for state legislative seats in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City and other large cities. They lack candidates in isolated places like liberal California and Massachusetts, and the extremely poor and black parts of the Deep South.
But while the electorate is almost evenly split between the two parties, Democrats contest far fewer offices. One reason is that Republicans control more statehouses, which has pushed Democrats out of contention for legislative seats.
But much of the disparity exists because voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in rural counties with far fewer populations, but they have as many elective posts as larger ones.
“The distribution of offices does not align with the distribution of voters,” Barry C. Burden said Center for Election Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That means Republicans have deep roots in both rural states and states with large Democratic cities. For example, in Illinois, Chicago makes the state reliably Democratic in national politics, but a 2022 election survey found that Democrats failed to contest nearly 500 partisan offices, mostly in rural parts of the state, compared to 181 for Republicans.
In Missouri, despite large Democratic population centers in St. Louis and Kansas City, a 2022 survey found that 7 out of 10 partisan offices in the state were uncontested — and Democrats were absent eight times more often than Republicans.
That’s surprising because Democrats held most of Missouri’s major 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 decline. But Pam Munch, 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 predominantly Christian,” she said, emphasizing the party’s opposition to abortion. “They’re business owners, and they don’t want high crime. Look at big cities run by Democrats and see what they look like, so run down.
The counties hugging the Mississippi River south of St. Louis explain why lost rural political loyalty is so difficult to rebuild.
In Cape Girardeau, a river town of 40,000, J. Michael Davis, a Democrat, Navy veteran and Methodist pastor, is running against a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives. His yard signs give away his political affiliation. He is less a campaigner on issues than a common sense problem solver.
“I may not do better than anyone else has done in the past, but I hope I can do at least as well,” he said in an interview.
It almost certainly won’t be good enough. Andy Leighton, chairman of the county Democratic Party, says reviving the party’s fortunes is both moral and political. “Someone who lives in rural Missouri has to stand up and say ‘we can do better than this,'” he said.
But while rebuilding is not impossible, he said, it is very difficult. Mr. Leighton won 31 percent of the vote in his 2022 race for the same seat.
“If you do what you do to push the needle, that’s going to be a total of 35 percent of the vote 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.”
The lack of money, he said, was crucial. National party leaders pour dollars into states where races for federal offices determine national power. Democratic donors in Missouri cities aren’t making up the shortfall.
And even when there is money, getting the message across is challenging. Newspapers are dying, local television news is scarce, and the usual media diet can range from Facebook to Fox News. “Everyone is very scattered and in their own little echo chambers,” Mr. Leighton said.
“There’s an old adage in politics that you have to get the word out,” said Al Cross, a political analyst and former director of the Rural Journalism Institute at the University of Kentucky. “And once your base drops below 30 or 35 percent, you’ve lost the point. People who still identify with the Democratic Party are afraid to say so. And that is even more true in rural places because of the importance of personal contact.”
Dr. Perry County Democrats “I wouldn’t sign out the yard,” McCarrow said. “I mean, it’s a dead end. It’s not worth it.”
It makes potential candidates wary of taking on a hopeless race that may affect their social lives and even their professions. In southern Missouri, Democrats seeking office sometimes choose to run as Republicans.
“It’s a big commitment to put a ‘D’ after your name, risk your reputation, risk losing your job, knowing you’re going to get 35 percent of the vote,” Mr. Leighton said. The alternative — quitting work for the campaign and fundraising full time — “is really hard work,” he said.
Yet political pundits and strategists alike say running is the only way to win back lost voters. Ben Wickler, executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said the party recruits and advises rural candidates — and even offers cash stipends to guaranteed losers — because “if you don’t take a swing at it, you’re never going to get anywhere.”
One result: Democratic candidates for Wisconsin’s State Assembly and State Senate seats outnumber Republican candidates this November.
Lauren Gapford, vice president of Movement Labs, oversees efforts in each race to recruit and finance rural Democratic candidates. About four out of 10 go on to win, she said, but the benefits go beyond that.
“Our initial goal was to make sure everyone had a choice on their ballot,” she said. “But we’ve seen that when a Democrat runs locally it reshapes the political landscape. There are some counties that we’ve worked in over six years where you’ve seen them become steadily more Democratic.”
The contest encourages each race candidate to use yard signs and billboards to show local supporters that they are not alone. Some icons only show wordsRural strong,” on a logo depicting farmland—a sort of secret handshake binding like-minded voters.
“People think they can’t say they’re a Democrat because they’ll lose their friends,” Ms. Gapford said. “But when they find out that the person actually standing next to them at church, in the grocery store, was also a Democrat and doesn’t talk about it, that’s really powerful.”
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