Politically drawn district maps may be helping the Republican Party maintain its grip on Georgia’s legislature heading into Tuesday’s general election.At a time when the GOP now far outnumbers Democrats under the Gold Dome, only 21.6 percent of General Assembly seats are being contested, according to an Oct. 17 report from the College of William and Mary’s Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy.“Redistricting appears to have played a role in the decreased competition, though its impact is not consistent from state to state,” states the report, which shows Georgia as being the “least competitive” in terms of state legislative races across the U.S.“In some cases, news reports indicate that (it) may have discouraged competitive legislative races, as the party in control of drawing legislative maps used their power to create smaller numbers of swing districts and more safe party seats.”Charles Bullock, political scientist at the University of Georgia, said that redistricting — the redrawing of constituent boundaries, driven by U.S. census numbers — is a major reason for the partisan shift as it applies to congressional and state legislative races.“Once these districts flipped, Democrats were unprepared for it,” he said. “They still remain weak organizationally, weak in terms of having candidate development and recruitment, and Republicans have been building toward this for years.“Going back into the late 1980s, Republicans have been targeting individual state legislative districts, where, even though they were electing Democrats, they were voting for Republicans (in presidential races). ... Those things helped position them once they began to get favorable maps.”Mike Berlon, Georgia’s Democratic Party chairman, said Democrats are working more strategically in this legislative election cycle.“Instead of trying to recruit someone to run in every single race statewide, which we’d love to do, we just didn’t see the wisdom of putting up candidates ... we just knew were absolutely going to lose, no matter what the circumstances are,” he said.“So, with the limited resources that we have, because we’ve been out of power now for about 10 years, we decided with the House and Senate leaders that we were going to target specific races to try to maximum our resources.“We felt like we need more resources in fewer races in order to do what we could to blunt the Republican constitutional majority at the state level.”Still a one-party stateDouglas Young, a political science professor at Gainesville State College, said he believes several other factors may be affecting a “low rate of partisan competition in Georgia.”“Historically, Georgia has been a one-party state,” he said. “With the exception of presidential races, until the 1980s, the only elections that mattered in most of Georgia were Democratic primaries.“Now that most of our state lawmakers are Republicans, perhaps this tradition is continuing to a lesser extent, albeit with a different dominant party.”Young also said he believes voter apathy is at play.“Most Americans could not name their state representative or state senator,” he said.