ELECTION OBSERVERS of the House of Representatives have decried the decline of competition for U.S. House seats. Sam Hirsch notes that the number of incumbents reelected by over 20 points in the post-reapportionment election of 2002 was much higher than the average of other recent post-reapportionment elections.1 Noted political scientists Bernard Grofman and Gary Jacobson agree with this assessment. They show that the number of competitive seats has declined over the past 40 years when measured by the number of seats won by less than either ten or twenty percent. Like Hirsch, they note that congressional competition in 2002 was exceptionally low for a post-reapportionment election. Grofman and Jacobson suggest competition will reach record lows later in the decade if the pattern of declining competition post-redistricting in the 1980s and 1990s is followed.2 Much of the blame for the decline in congressional competition has been attached to the partisan and incumbent-protection redistricting processes and racial redistricting.3 The focus on congressional elections is natural due to the importance of the federal legislature but scholars ought to study competition in state legislative elections more closely. Partisan and incumbent protection gerrymandering and racial redistricting also occur during the redrawing of state legislative maps. If these factors explain declining competition in congressional elections, their presence should also be associated with lower levels of competition in state legislative elections. Moreover, redistricting arguably has even greater consequences in state legislative elections. Congressional redistricting occurs on a state-by-state basis so no single redistricting authority controls the national process. But power over redistricting at the state level influences the shape of the entire state legislature. The potential impact of partisan gerrymandering is therefore much greater at the state than the federal level. This paper takes a first cut at examining competition outside of the congressional election arena by exploring the aggregate level of competition in lower chamber state legislative elections in 37 states in 2000 and 2004. While this study is only a first step toward exploring competition in state legislative races, it should be highly useful to illuminate the level of competition in state legislative elections, and see whether theories of the impact of redistricting on electoral competition appear to hold water outside of the congressional arena from which they were abstracted. Before turning to the sta-