Dan Walters: UC study demonstrates how new districts can be competitive

Sacramento Bee, The (CA)

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

Voters may have rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's scheme to redraw the state's 173 legislative and congressional districts in mid-decade, but the bipartisan gerrymander of those districts in 2001 remains a stain on democracy - and one that worsens the Legislature's chronic inability to function.

The aim of the gerrymander was to fix the party ownership of every district, thus eliminating competition for seats, and it has been 98 percent successful in the two election cycles since. None of the 53 congressional districts has changed partisan hands and voters have ignored the gerrymander in just three of the 120 legislative districts.

The effect has been a Legislature increasingly driven by the ideological extremes, with moderates an endangered species and independent voters effectively disenfranchised.

Democratic legislative leaders who opposed Schwarzenegger's redistricting ballot measure have pledged to enact their own reform that would take political mapmaking out of politicians' hands and place it in those of an independent commission after the 2010 census. Whether they intend to make good on that promise, or are just emitting hot air, remains to be seen.

Would legislative and congressional districts drawn by some independent body be more competitive? An exhaustive new study of California redistricting by the University of California 's Institute of Governmental Studies - directed by a one-time redistricting consultant to the Legislature's dominant Democrats - concludes that plans drawn without regard to partisan impact would create a substantial number of competitive districts, i.e. those that could conceivably be won by either party.

The study, co-directed by Bruce Cain and drawing on the institute's extensive database, found that about a dozen congressional districts and, depending on the criteria, one to two dozen of the Assembly's 80 districts could be competitive without violating the other redistricting criteria, such as compactness and protection of minority rights.

The study notes that even with more competitiveness, it's likely that Democrats would retain control of both the Legislature and the congressional delegation - but that observation misses the point. The purpose of redistricting reform isn't to change partisan balance, but to give voters the opportunity to elect whomever they want without the outcome being dictated by politicians themselves.

The study, moreover, ignores the influence of legislative term limits, under which about a third of the Legislature's members are turned out of their seats every two years. Term limits have accelerated the impact of the 2001 gerrymander, and would also accelerate the impact of a non-gerrymander plan by diminishing the power of incumbency. In other words, the vacancies mandated by term limits would give voters even more opportunities to change partisan ownership of their districts.

Furthermore, the real effect of party-neutral redistricting would not lie in how many Democrats or Republicans are elected, but what kind of people win legislative and congressional seats (although the latter would change more slowly without term limits).

The present system, as noted above, produces bumper crops of very liberal Democrats and very conservative Republicans because primary elections, dominated by party activists, are the only elections that count, leaving only a handful of moderates. This ideological schism generates stalemate on major political issues - most obviously on whether to raise taxes or cut spending to reduce the state's chronic budget deficit. The Legislature's few true moderates seek compromise, but are reduced to flailing around aimlessly, ignored by the jihad warriors of both parties.

More competitive districts would mean more moderates. That's what happened when the Supreme Court did a party-neutral redistricting after the 1990 census and that's what would happen again. And having more moderates in the Capitol could break the stalemate and allow a centrist governor such as Schwarzenegger to forge a governing coalition. That's what he had hoped would result from his failed redistricting initiative.

What's wrong with that? Nothing. What's wrong with the status quo? Everything.