California political junkies spent the weekend poring over the draft maps released Friday by the Citizens Redistricting Commission, handicapping the odds that politicians will be re-elected and that political parties will gain or lose power.
How will your electoral districts change? Does the commission's first draft of your congressional, state senate and state assembly districts make sense? I looked up my address on the cool interactive maps that the Los Angeles Times has created and compared the shape of my current districts with those proposed by the commission. Result? The new lines certainly change the map, but on reflection it makes sense. My urban community on the shore of the San Francisco Bay is lumped with other similar cities, rather than hopping over the hills to the inland suburbs. Check out your own location.
It looks like the new maps may create a few more competitive districts, which could elect either a Democrat or a Republican, but not many more. The Sacramento Bee analysis suggests that there could be five swing districts in the Assembly, up from two now, and two swing districts in the Senate, up from just one. That's not much.
But as commissioner Maria Blanco told KNBC, the commission's mandate wasn't about drawing competitive seats, it was about keeping districts equal in population, geographically compact, contiguous, reflecting "communities of interest," and respecting the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act to ensure that minority voting strength not be diluted. "We were specifically forbidden in the process of drawing the lines, of looking at the political registration of a particular district," she said.
As Arizona State University political science professor Jennifer A. Steen remarked Monday on the Zocalo Public Square blog Nexus, "competitive elections can be tricky to engineer through mapping." And given that California's redistricting process doesn't mention "competitiveness" but focuses on geographic and community integrity,
if California’s goal is reduced partisanship and more competition, then all of this adds up to a pretty self-contradictory effort. It’s like saying you want a more comfortable house, but you don’t want it to have electricity, a roof, or running water.
In fact, it's looking like the new maps may lead to more seats going to Democrats in an already Democratic state. That's because of Californians' tendency to live near like-minded folks. As the liberal blog Fire Dog Lake suggests, it could even give Democrats the two-thirds majorities in both the state senate and assembly that would allow Dems to raise taxes and make other big policy changes that have long been stymied by the minority Republicans in the legislature.
If that occurs, it will be the result of a transparent, independent process, rather than one controlled by incumbent legislators. As The California Report's John Myers remarked the other day, "the only losers are incumbents. They were shut out of the process."
It's worth remembering that in most places across the country, redistricting is still controlled by incumbent state legislators.
