The nation surely has never seen anything quite like it. Three Utahns are running for newly drawn congressional districts where they do not live and have no plans to move to.
Another three say they are running in districts they currently live outside of, but intend to move into sometime before the election. A seventh candidate is running outside his district, with plans to move only if he wins.
 |
Join the Discussion |
 |
Post a Comment |
So much for following the age-old political axiom that it is usually folly to run from outside a district because voters want representatives who live among them. In fact, in all U.S. history, it appears that only three Congress members served in districts where they clearly were not residents.
One of the three happens to be Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, whose home in Alpine is about 2.5 miles outside his current Utah County-based district, which he has represented for two terms. His success appears to have changed the rules and views in Utah about who is and isn’t seen as a carpetbagger.
"Chaffetz showed that it can be done," said Kelly Patterson, director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University. "In Utah, districts aren’t all that different from each other. So you can tell people you essentially are like them, even if you don’t quite live with them. In other states, the differences between districts are bigger — so that isn’t as easy to do."
Patterson warns that running outside one’s district generally gives up "the friends and neighbors effect, where candidates tend to do best in their own neighborhoods among their friends, and do worse the farther away they get."
Chaffetz could pull it off, Patterson said, because he is "a particularly skilled and eloquent politician." Even so, he pressed for a boundary change in the recent redistricting that would allow him to run in a redrawn 3rd Congressional District that now includes his home.
That same redistricting, though, has prompted Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, to skip a re-election bid in the 2nd Congressional District where he lives and run instead in the newly created 4th Congressional District. He does not plan on moving into the new area.
A recent Deseret News poll found 71 percent of voters in the 4th District said they believed a member of Congress should live in the district he or she represents. But only 11 percent of the respondents knew that they resided in the newly drawn district.
Elsewhere in congressional races, Republicans Cherilyn Eagar and John Willoughby are running in the 2nd District, but each lives in the 3rd District and, similarly, do not plan to move.
State Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, is running in the 4th Congressional District but lives in the 3rd. Sandstrom, though, said he intends to move into the 4th District after the 2012 legislative session ends. Republicans Chuck Williams and Howard Wallack are running in the 2nd District from homes in the 3rd District, but both have said they are planning to move into the 2nd District soon.
Republican Jeramey McElhaney lives in the 3rd, is running in the 2nd — and says he will move there only if he wins. The contractor explains he owns a business in Moab, and could afford to move away from it only if he lands a new job as a congressman.
All these politicians have listed a variety of reasons for running outside of districts where they now live.
Matheson, for example, contends that Republican legislators gerrymandered the 2nd District where he lives, carving out many of his traditional strongholds and making it more Republican as they "basically blew it up."
He said he has decided to run in the new 4th District because 85 percent of it is concentrated in Salt Lake County and contains "areas I grew up in my whole life along the Wasatch Front, and I represented the majority of those communities in my career in Congress."
Eagar cites similar reasons for her decision. She previously lived in the 2nd District that she hopes to represent, understands it well, and lives just outside of it in Holladay. "I don’t think it matters as long as I live close to the district," and she pointed to Chaffetz’s example as proof.
Willoughby, who lives in Draper which is in the redrawn 3rd District, says he has lived in several places in the 2nd District, so he considers himself "a 2nd District boy." He adds that he doesn’t want to run in the district where he lives because he admires incumbent Chaffetz there, and likes Republican Carl Wimmer, who is running in the 4th District.
McElhaney said he is running in the 2nd because a majority of its residents actually live in rural areas, as does he, as opposed to the more urban 3rd District where he does live.
With so many candidates running outside their districts, Utahns may not realize how unusual it is. A review of historical records by The Tribune and congressional researchers found only two instances — besides Chaffetz — of House members serving in districts where they clearly did not live. The finding could be imprecise, however, because no comprehensive academic research on the topic could be located.
One of the out-of-district Congress members was Rep. Parren J. Mitchell, D-Md., who served from 1971 to 1987. He was the first black person elected from that state. His true home district was only 20 percent African American, and he chose to run in a neighboring Baltimore district that was about 50 percent black — and where he had worked as a poverty director.
The other case was Rep. William McCreery from Maryland, who served from 1803 to 1809. He was elected by a Baltimore district — where he had lived for years — but moved to a rural area just before the election.
His election was contested because Maryland had passed a law saying its representatives must live in the district they represent. But the House seated him anyway, ruling that a state law cannot trump the U.S. Constitution, which says members need only inhabit the state where they are elected.
Next Page >Copyright 2012 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
