Here is the final of three guest posts from David Schleicher:

I live in Washington D.C., and we’re about to have an election to replace a controversial Mayor and most of the City Council to boot. But given the lack of coverage in the local media, the dearth of attack ads and the complete absence of any signs of campaigning, you’d hardly know it. We’re having an election, and no one cares.
The reason the race to replace Adrian Fenty has not generated much attention is because we already know who will win. Absent the success of a small write-in campaign not supported by the candidate, the Democratic nominee, Vincent Gray, will be elected Mayor, as will all the Democratic candidates for the Council. (In a wonderful nod to the inevitability of the result, Gray has already announced much of his transition team.)
On election day, political junkies around the country will focus on the most contested elections, trying to figure out which early race will tell you how things look for the Democrats in the House, or assessing which former pro athlete Republican will perform best, Jon Runyan, Chris Dudley or Sean Duffy. There will be some time spent discussing the most outlandish attack ads of the season (this and this are certainly among the most over-the-top) and seeing how the predictions of the various famous prognosticators fared.
But some of our attention should fall on the huge number of uncontested elections around the country. Where a seat in an otherwise-contested legislature is uncompetitive, it’s not a major problem (there are costs where there are too many, however). That some Congressional seats are safely Democratic or Republican is part of the nature of territorial districting.
However, when whole levels of government are uncontested by the parties — think about the Massachusetts Legislature, or the New York City Council — it is a major problem. Absent competitive general elections, there is little reason to believe that office holders will follow majoritarian preferences or will be held accountable for their decisions. That is, the elections are a failure.
But wait, what about the primaries? Didn’t DC have a highly contested primary, in which Fenty was defeated by Gray? Indeed it did. But primary elections and general elections are extremely different in one major respect — voters in general elections know a lot more about the candidates than they do in primaries. In general elections, votes have access to a high-value signal about candidates’ positions on the issues, the party label. At least for federal elections, the party label can tell us almost everything we need to know about a candidate to cast an at-least somewhat informed vote.
In primaries, candidates run with no label to distinguish them from their peers. Voters lack much information about candidates individually, and so where voters do not have access to an accurate well-known heuristic that is consistent across elections, they are forced to rely more heavily on non-policy variables, like name recognition, incumbency and the social status, race, ethnicity and gender of the candidates. Further, small groups frequently determine the winner of primaries through the power of organization in low-turnout, low-information elections, a point well made in Seth Masket’s excellent recent book. And, finally, the voters who do know something are the most radical, and are thus unrepresentative of the preferences of most party members.
Primary election competition simply cannot achieve the same thing as general election competition because, in primaries, most potential voters do not have the tools to make their preferences on policy issues known, as Chris Elmendorf and I will show in a forthcoming piece. The party’s silent majority stays silent, leaving the field to the loudest and best-organized voices among them.
This means that places like D.C., where there is no general election competition, are less well represented than they should be. And it also means that certain beliefs about districting — like the idea that bipartisan gerrymanders do not reduce responsiveness because primary elections can replace general elections in keeping representatives in line are probably wrong.

Read the rest of David’s interesting post, including the hyperlinks to the first part, at this link.