Redistrict draft maps: Slight gain for Republicans

Orange County Register, The: Blogs (Santa Ana, CA) - Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Martin Wisckol, Politics reporter

LAST UPDATED June 15: The Public Policy Institute of California gives the gain to Democrats, but the difference with Kogan’s model is based on whether its a strong year for Republicans or Democrats. Details below. 

There’s been plenty of back and forth about which party benefits from California’s proposed redistricting maps, but political scientist Vladimir Kogan took both voter registration and results from the 2010 election into account, and found a slight edge for Republicans. 

Kogan projected that if the newly proposed districts had been in place for those contests: 

* Republicans would have won three more Assembly seats (31 rather than 28). 

* Democrats would have won one more state Senate seat (26 rather than 25). 

* Democrats would have won one more Congressional seat (35 rather than 34). 

“In the absence of a significant pro-Democrat shift in the electorate, the party will have a tough time winning the two-thirds majority it needs to approve new taxes without Republican votes even if the district boundaries proposed by the (Citizens Redistricting Commission) are adopted without further changes,” writes Kogan, who is a candidate for a Ph.D. in political science at UC San Diego. 

“Of course, the projections offer just one snap shot of the electoral context….” 

However, the Public Policy Institute of California reaches a different conclusion, showing Democrats gaining in the Assembly (55 after vs. 53 before), the Senate (29 after vs. 28 before), and the congressional delegation (38 after vs. 33 before). The PPIC model takes only voter registration into account. 

“Party registration may not translate into wins if: (1) Dems turn out less; (2) Dems cross over to vote for the other party more,” Kogan said in an email. “Both of these things are true. The gains under redistricting that I calculated are not just based on which way the district “leans” based on party registration, but rather on how party registration translates into votes (based on 2010 election). 

“So the key difference is that, even though Dems might have an edge in registration, Dems turn out less, and they cross over to vote for Republicans more, and all of these were probably even more true in the 2010 midterm.” 

Kogan also did an analysis gauging how the proposed boundaries would increase the number of competitive districts (including the addition of three in Orange County). I wrote about that Monday. The PPIC arrived at a similar conclusion. 

As for the partisan consequences of the proposed maps, Kogan notes: 

“California’s recent adoption of the top-two primary poses additional challenges for accurately predicting voter behavior in future elections. Research on California’s experience under the ‘blanket’ primary in the 1998 election, however, has shown that the vast majority of voters who cross-over to vote for the other party’s candidate in primary elections return to support their own party’s nominee in November, suggesting that the top-two primary will have only marginal consequences for the partisan balance of power in the state Legislature.” 

He also writes that the statistical method he used “can correctly predict the winner of an election about 90 percent of the time.”