Midcycle Redistricting

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting -- much in the news now because of looming gerrymanders in Texas and California.

DrewSeSilver at Pew:

Texas Republicans, at the urging of President Donald Trump, have redrawn their state’s congressional districts to give the GOP an advantage in next year’s midterm elections. The effort has led to a countermove by California to redraw its districts to give Democrats an edge. Several other states reportedly are considering similar moves.

Midcycle redistricting efforts like the ones in Texas and California have, up to now, been extremely uncommon. Since 1970, only two states – Texas in 2003 and this year, and Georgia in 2005 – have voluntarily redrawn their congressional maps between censuses for partisan advantage, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.


When midcycle redistricting occurs, it’s usually because courts have thrown out the previous maps for violating state or federal law. In fact, 36 of the 40 midcycle redistricting changes since 1970 have either been made in response to a court order (20) or imposed by a court itself (16). In addition to Texas and Georgia, California is also an exception: After the 1982 elections, lawmakers passed a revised version of the congressional map that voters had rejected in a referendum earlier that year.

World War G

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.

Laurel Rosenhall at NYT:

California leaders on Thursday approved a sweeping plan to elect more Democrats by redrawing congressional districts, delivering an immediate counterpunch to the gerrymandered map that Republicans in Texas are passing at the request of President Trump.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two redistricting bills that the Democratic-controlled Legislature sent to him earlier Thursday. He also declared a special election on Nov. 4 that will ask voters to grant final approval to the newly drawn congressional districts.

The moves will immediately thrust California into a feverish campaign with national implications as Democrats and Republicans vie for control of the House of Representatives through an extraordinary effort to redraw political maps in the middle of a decade. They will also put Mr. Newsom, a potential presidential candidate, at the forefront of a partisan fight against President Trump heading into the midterm election cycle.

Measuring Gerrymandering

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting -- much in the news now because of looming gerrymanders in Texas and California.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer at NYT:

After months huddled around a whiteboard with a sharp graduate student, Richard Holden, fueled by too much bad Harvard Square coffee, we created a measure we call the “Relative Proximity Index.”

Picture every voter as a dot on the state map. First, we pin down the geometric minimum — the most compact way to bundle those dots inside the state’s jagged borders into its exact number of congressional districts, each with equal population, whether that means wrapping around Florida’s panhandle or hugging Georgia’s slanted shoulder. Then we compare the map the legislature actually draws to that floor. The ratio is the Relative Proximity Index. An R.P.I. of 1 means you’ve hit the geometric ideal; an R.P.I. of 3 means voters within a district would live — on average — three times as far apart than necessary.
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Since compactness isn’t the only legitimate redistricting criterion, we shouldn’t expect maps to hit 1.0. Lawmakers need room to respect county and city lines, comply with the Voting Rights Act and keep real neighborhoods intact. But compactness should be the starting point because it is neutral, measurable and easy to audit.

It subsumes contiguity (tight districts are, by construction, connected), discourages gratuitous splits of counties and cities, and helps protect genuine communities by forcing mapmakers to justify every detour. Start with the tightest lawful plan; if you deviate, say why, in public. As a rule: the bigger the R.P.I., the heavier the mapmaker’s thumb on the scale.

Our 50-state census of the 106th Congress — from 1999 through 2001 — turned up five of the least-compact maps: Tennessee (R.P.I. = 2.91), New Jersey (2.27), Texas (1.90), Massachusetts (1.87), and New York (1.83). To see what a strict maximal compactness rule would change, we looked at seat-vote curves — a standard political science tool showing how a party’s share of the statewide vote translates into seats — comparing current maps with compact redraws in California, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

World War Gerrymander

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.

Joan Biskupic on the Rucho case:

The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas, with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states, was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court, declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.

Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts – drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests – to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against challenges to partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting.

“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” dissenting justices warned in 2019, “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”

That decision in Rucho v. Common Cause has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy. The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court’s decision last year in Trump v. United States, which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines).

And speaking of Common Cause...

Cameron Joseph at CSM:

The nation’s most prominent anti-gerrymandering organization is in the midst of a tense internal debate over whether to modify its position opposing all partisan redistricting, a remarkable development in response to a gerrymandering war that has broken out across the nation.

It’s a sign that after two decades of hard-won progress against partisan line-drawing, the movement is facing an existential crisis.

Common Cause has fought to bar gerrymandering through laws, referenda, and constitutional amendments for decades, battling both Democrats and Republicans in red and blue states to adopt measures to restrain lawmakers from drawing district lines that advantage their own party.

But on Monday night, after a meeting by the organization’s national governing board, the group’s president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón emailed organization leaders asking them not to make any new statements on gerrymandering until the board issued further guidance, which she said would come later this week. The request to stand down comes as Democrats in California are pushing to temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission to allow them to draw five or more new Democratic-leaning House districts. The move – which would undo anti-gerrymandering reforms that Common Cause helped make law in 2010 – is a response to Republicans’ aggressive mid-decade push to redraw state maps in Texas and elsewhere in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“While IRCs [independent redistricting commissions] remain our gold standard and will continue to be our position, the board is currently considering options as to how we will respond under these highly unusual circumstances,” Ms. Solomón wrote in an email to the group’s leaders that was read to the Monitor by two separate sources who had received it.

“It’s certainly an inflection point for our organization,” one Common Cause staffer told the Monitor.

Counting Students and Prisoners

 Paul Mitchell at The Redistricting Report notes that the Census Bureau needed to count college students just as the pandemic emptied campuses.

It appeared to be a problem, but the Census Bureau assured college students they’d be all counted together at their respective campuses through a process called Group Quarters whereby the bureau receives manual tallies of the populations of college dormitories, nursing homes, and prisons based on the records kept for those facilities instead of direct interviews with the census enumerators or self-responses. You can really geek out on how this process is performed by reading the Census Bureau’s blogpost about it.

And for many this was confusing. What if a student was living off campus, not in the dorms? Would they be counted in the group-quarters or would they have to report themselves as living in their off-campus apartment? What if their parents already put them on their census form – would they be in trouble if they got double-counted? This was something that colleges were email blasting students about as they wanted them to report as living in their college community.

The census has a process for de-duplicating in a case where someone is accidentally, or purposefully reported being in two places at once. They also have processes for imputing populations where there was no reporting at all – which could have been significant in a once-bustling college town that turned into a ghost town overnight.

And that’s where the Republican lawsuit comes in. The GOP harbors some doubt about how those headcounts were arrived at and they’re suing to find out exactly how the Census arrived at the numbers of students who will be counted at college campuses, which often carry significant heft in the drawing of electoral districts.

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Similarly, in the increasing number of states like California that are confronting the “prison gerrymander,” Group Quarters plays a part as well. These states are planning to count prison inmates in the communities they resided in at the time of arrest instead of where they were incarcerated on April 1. For California, that’s an estimated 116,000 people statewide that would be removed from the headcounts in the largely rural communities in the Central Valley and desert communities, depleting them of that redistricting currency in the upcoming redraw. A higher prison imputation by the Census Bureau in Kings County’s prison facilities, for example, means that county will have that many more individuals removed from their population base in the maps drawn for Congress, Assembly, and Senate.

Apportionment and Population

From the Census Bureau:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that the 2020 Census shows the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2020, was 331,449,281.

The U.S. resident population represents the total number of people living in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The resident population increased by 22,703,743 or 7.4% from 308,745,538 in 2010.
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The new resident population statistics for the United States, each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are available on census.gov.

• The most populous state was California (39,538,223); the least populous was Wyoming (576,851).
• The state that gained the most numerically since the 2010 Census was Texas (up 3,999,944 to 29,145,505).
• The fastest-growing state since the 2010 Census was Utah (up 18.4% to 3,271,616).
• Puerto Rico's resident population was 3,285,874, down 11.8% from 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census.

In addition to these newly released statistics, today Secretary Raimondo delivered to President Biden the population counts to be used for apportioning the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In accordance with Title 2 of the U.S. Code, a congressionally defined formula is applied to the apportionment population to distribute the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the states.

The apportionment population consists of the resident population of the 50 states, plus the overseas military and federal civilian employees and their dependents living with them overseas who could be allocated to a home state. The populations of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are excluded from the apportionment population because they do not have voting seats in Congress. The counts of overseas federal employees (and their dependents) are used for apportionment purposes only.

After the 1790 Census, each member of the House represented about 34,000 residents. Since then, the House has more than quadrupled in size (from 105 to 435 seats), and each member will represent an average of 761,169 people based on the 2020 Census.

Texas will gain two seats in the House of Representatives, five states will gain one seat each (Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon), seven states will lose one seat each (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia), and the remaining states’ number of seats will not change based on the 2020 Census.

Upon receipt of the apportionment counts, the president will transmit them to the 117th Congress. The reapportioned Congress will be the 118th, which convenes in January 2023.

“Our work doesn’t stop here,” added acting Director Jarmin. “Now that the apportionment counts are delivered, we will begin the additional activities needed to create and deliver the redistricting data that were previously delayed due to COVID-19.”

Redistricting data include the local area counts states need to redraw or “redistrict” legislative boundaries. Due to modifications to processing activities, COVID-19 data collections delays, and the Census Bureau’s obligation to provide high-quality data, states are expected to receive redistricting data by August 16, and the full redistricting data with toolkits for ease of use will be delivered by September 30. The Census Bureau will notify the public prior to releasing the data.

The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court

Jeffrey Rosen at WSJ:

Justice Clarence Thomas invoked the Declaration in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage. “Since well before 1787,” he wrote, “liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits.” Other conservatives now cite the Declaration to lay the groundwork for a Supreme Court challenge to Roe, which they claim violates the God-given right to life. When Alabama legislators recently passed a law banning abortion, they cited the Declaration, saying that “from conception … all men are created equal” and possess a fundamental right to life.

And just last week, Justice Elena Kagan quoted the Declaration in her dissenting opinion from the Court’s decision that partisan gerrymandering is a question for legislatures rather than for courts. “Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” she asked, citing the Declaration’s insistence that governments derive “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

Whether you are persuaded by Justice Thomas or Justice Kagan, it’s striking that the debate between conservatives and liberals on the Court continues to revolve around how to read the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration. How are we to balance its sometimes conflicting “self-evident” truths? That is the ongoing question of American politics and constitutional discourse.

SCOTUS on Gerrymandering and the Census

Adam Liptak at NYT:

In a pair of decisions with vast implications for the American political landscape, the Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a victory to Republicans by ruling that federal courts are powerless to hear challenges to extreme partisan gerrymandering but gave a reprieve to Democrats by delaying the ... administration’s efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.

The key parts of both decisions were decided by 5-to-4 votes.

In the gerrymandering case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined his usual conservative allies. In the census case, he broke with them to vote with the court’s four-member liberal wing in preventing, for now, what advocates have argued would be a deterrent to immigrants from participating in the once-a-decade count.
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Since 1950, the government has not included a question about citizenship in the forms sent to each household, but the administration was confident it would prevail before a court it views as generally sympathetic to its assertions of executive power.

But court rejected the administration’s stated reason for adding a question on citizenship to the census, leaving in doubt whether the question would appear on the forms sent to every household in the nation next year.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said the administration’s explanation for adding the question “seems to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

Unintentional Gerrymandering

At NYT, Emily Badger reports on the work of political scientist Jonathan Rodden:

In the United States, where a party’s voters live matters immensely. That’s because most representatives are elected from single-member districts where the candidate with the most votes wins, as opposed to a system of proportional representation, as some democracies have.

Democrats tend to be concentrated in cities and Republicans to be more spread out across suburbs and rural areas. The distribution of all of the precincts in the 2016 election shows that while many tilt heavily Democratic, fewer lean as far in the other direction.

As a result, Democrats have overwhelming power to elect representatives in a relatively small number of districts — whether for state house seats, the State Senate or Congress — while Republicans have at least enough power to elect representatives in a larger number of districts.

Republicans, in short, are more efficiently distributed in a system that rewards spreading voters across space.

This helps explain why Republicans have controlled the Pennsylvania State Senate for nearly four decades, despite losing statewide votes about half that time. It explains why Republicans are routinely overrepresented in state legislatures, even in blue states like New York. It explains why Hillary Clinton carried only three of eight congressional districts in Minnesota — districts drawn by a panel of judges — even as she won the whole state.

In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way. Legislators are elected from larger districts, each with multiple representatives, granting parties proportional power. If a party wins 50 percent of the votes, it doesn’t matter much if those votes are evenly spread around or tightly clustered.

Britain, Australia and Canada, unlike much of Europe, have the same majoritarian system the United States does, and urban-rural divides appear there, too.

Underrepresentation of the left, Mr. Rodden argues, is a feature of any democracy that draws winner-take-all districts atop a map where the left is concentrated in cities.

Citizenship and the Census

At Fox and Hounds, Tony Quinn discusses a US Justice Department request to the Census Bureau to add a citizenship question to the 2010 census.

Democrats oppose adding this question to the census because they suspect, with good reason, that non-citizens, especially illegal alien non-citizens, will simply refuse to be counted in the census rather than reveal their citizenship status.

This may also be a problem for legal immigrants, those in the United States on a visa or green card, because people do overstay their visas; a large percentage of the illegal population in America came in legally and has simply overstayed their visa. So the fear of Democratic and liberal groups is probably very well founded; certain few illegal persons are going to want to admit it on a census form and many legal immigrants may skip the census as well.

If millions of non-citizens refuse to participate in the US Census, the Democrats will take massive political beating. That’s because electoral districts must be drawn based on population. The non-citizen population resides in heavily Democratic areas; if they are not counted, those areas will not have sufficient population to support Democratic congressional and legislative districts, especially in the big cities. Democrats could lose dozens of districts just due to too few people being counted.

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Early in our history the census began asking a whether the individual being enumerated was born in the United States. After the Civil War, with the huge boom in European migration, the census asked whether the person was a citizen eligible to vote. Beginning in 1880, the census asked the place of birth not only of the enumerated person but of the parents as well.

With the 1890 census the question was asked: are you a naturalized citizen or not. The year of immigration of a foreign born person as well as the year of naturalization (if naturalized) was asked in the 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950 censuses, in other words for the first half of the 20th Century.

However, in 1960 the question was dropped and the Census Bureau explained why: the great migration had long since ended; very few non-citizens lived in the United States so the question was no longer relevant.

Districts are Too Big, Legislative Bodies Too Small

Joe Mathews at Fox and Hounds:

You may have heard about efforts like “Run For Something,” which encourage younger folks – mostly Democrats – to stop complaining and start running for office. Because we need new blood in politics in these very difficult times.

That’s a good point. But in California, the Run for Something idea faces a practical problem. There isn’t that much something to run for.

That’s because our elected legislatures and councils are way too small. In other states – and especially in other countries – city councils in small places are often relatively big: 40 or 50 seats. That allows regular folks who care about their community – instead of the professionally or politically ambitious – to run for office and serve locally.

But in California, running even for local office is a production. Cities typically have just five seats. Developers and unions tend to handpick candidates. School boards also are similarly small. And counties have fewer than 10 supervisors.

And in bigger cities, forget it. Los Angeles, with 4 million people, has just 15 council members.

And if you’re interested in state office? Forget it.

John Cox, the Republican candidate for governor, is easy to mock for his neighborhood legislature proposal that might elect 10,000 people. But he has a point. A state of 40 million people needs a much bigger legislature than the 120-person body that was established in 1879, when California was home to a million people.

But you can’t run and win for legislature without professional help and big-money backing.

You can’t just Run for Something.

So now is the time to focus on expanding representation – larger city councils, larger school boards, larger boards of supervisors, and a larger legislature – to fit a much larger California. If the idea is to give more people a seat at the table, we’re going to need more seats.

A couple of examples:

• A single state senate district in California has about 981,000 people on average.  That is more than the entire population of South Dakota.
• A single Los Angeles County supervisorial district has 1.97 million.  That is more than Nebraska. 

Redistricting Does Not Have to Rest on Eligible Voters

Adam Liptak reports at The New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that states may count all residents, whether or not they are eligible to vote, in drawing election districts. The decision was a major statement on the meaning of a fundamental principle of the American political system, that of “one person one vote.”

As a practical matter, the ruling mostly helped Democrats.

Until this decision, the court had never resolved whether voting districts should contain the same number of people, or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places that have large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally — including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants, children and prisoners. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic.

Had the justices required that only eligible voters could be counted, the ruling would have shifted political power from cities to rural areas, a move that would have benefited Republicans.

The court did not decide whether other ways of counting were permissible. “We need not and do not resolve,” JusticeRuth Bader Ginsburg wrote for six justices, whether “states may draw districts to equalize voter-eligible population rather than total population.”
The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, was a challenge to voting districts for the Texas Senate that was brought by two voters, Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger. They were represented by the Project on Fair Representation, a small conservative advocacy group that successfully mounted an earlier challenge to the Voting Rights Act.

One Person, One Vote

Lyle Denniston reports at SCOTUSblog:

The Constitution has been understood for the past half-century to require that no individual’s vote count more at election time than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday, for the first time, to clarify how that concept of equality is to be measured, when legislatures are drawing up election districts.

 The Court took on a case challenging the 2011 redistricting of the thirty-one seats in the Texas Senate, focusing on what measure of population should be used to judge whether the “one-person, one-vote” mandate has been met. That mandate originated in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964. The new case of Evenwel v. Abbott will be heard and decided next Term, as will two new criminal cases the Justices also agreed on Tuesday to hear.

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The Justices’ move into the Texas Senate redistricting case comes fourteen years after Justice Clarence Thomas, in Chen v. City of Houston in May 2001, was the sole member of the Court who went on record in favor of sorting out “what measure of population should be used for determining whether the population is equally distributed among the districts.”

The usual choice considered by legislatures is to make districts more or less equal by dividing up shares of the state’s total population, or, as an alternative, to draw lines based upon some measure of the voting members of the population — such as the numbers actually registered to vote.

Two Texas voters, who wound up in state senate districts where they say their votes will count less than the votes in another district even though each of those districts has about the same total number of people, argued that this contradicts the “one-person, one-vote” guarantee of voter equality. Their votes would have counted equally, they contended, if the legislature instead had used voting-age population as the measure.

The voters, Sue Evenwel, who lives in Titus County in Senate District 1, and Edward Pfenninger, who lives in Montgomery County in District 4, said their votes were diluted because of the disparity between the two measures as applied to those districts, where more of the people vote proportionally. Both districts are rural. Other, more urban districts have proportionally fewer registered voters, so the redistricting plan based on actual population is said to give those who do vote more weight — that is, fewer of them can control the outcome.

“A statewide districting plan that distributes voters or potential voters in a grossly uneven way,” the two voters told the Court, “is patently unconstitutional under Reynolds v. Sims and its progeny.”

The voters do not argue that legislatures should be forbidden ever to use total population as the districting measure, but only when it results in the kind of disparity, compared to a plan based on voters’ numbers, that resulted in Texas.

At the theoretical core of this dispute is the theory of representation that a legislature should follow. Texas, supported by the lower court in the new cases, argued that this is a question of how to define democracy, a question that it said should be left to the people’s elected representatives, and not decided by the courts. The state also contended that the Supreme Court had said explicitly in a 1966 decision (Burns v. Richardson) that the choice of population measure was a matter for legislatures.

Waxman and Polarization

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has announced that he will not seek reelection.  Many pundits have commented favorably on his long career, but at Fox and Hounds, Tony Quinn offers a different view, saying that few other lawmakers "have contributed more to the partisanship, extremism and dysfunction of Congress."

Waxman’s first contribution to dysfunctional politics won’t be mentioned in the fawning accounts of his career in the state and national media; his involvement in the arcane world of redistricting. Waxman was elected to the California Assembly in 1968 and became chair of the redistricting committee in 1971.

Redistricting could be partisan, but at least people were honorable. Waxman was not. His main objective in the 1971 redistricting was to create a seat for his fellow Democratic and an old pal, Howard Berman. That’s fine, but in Waxman’s case he just rolled over the Republican opposition since his scheme required collapsing Republican seats. This set off a two year long redistricting war the likes of which California had never seen and out of that grew the partisan hatreds that colored life in the California legislature for decades

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Over his decades in Congress, Waxman was well known for showing utter contempt for his political and policy opponents, never willing to admit that they may have a legitimate argument once in a while. That attitude led him to reshape the investigating committees which he chaired in the 1990s into star chambers, most notably when he harangued tobacco executives at a famous 1994 hearing.

Anti-tobacco liberals and Democrats loved that of course. But now Rep. Darrell Issa (R-San Diego), the current chairman of the main investigating committee, does exactly the same thing to his political enemies Waxman once did, and left wingers and Democrats decry his behavior. Well, maybe they should look at who started using Congress like a tool for personal inquisitions, Henry Waxman.

Polarization and House Elections

In the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats increasingly represent districts that tilt strongly to their own side, which complicates bipartisan compromise.  Politico reports:

The numbers tell the story. According to the Cook Political Report, the widely respected political handicapper, just six Republicans – around 3 percent of the House GOP Conference — will occupy districts whose overall voter makeup favors Democrats. That figure is down from 22 Republicans that resided in such Democrat-friendly districts in 2012.

That unusually high number of House Republicans occupying deeply red districts has intensified the fear of a primary — not general — election threat. And that means no deals with a president, who in most cases, lost those members’ districts resoundingly.
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The polarization was exacerbated by the just completed, once-a-decade redistricting process. Both parties — but particularly Republicans, who swept control of statehouses across the country in the 2010 conservative wave — redrew district lines to shore up House members politically.

But House watchers say it’s also owed to three consecutive wave elections from 2006 and 2010, which had the effect of sweeping out moderate members from both parties who occupied swing districts. When the next Congress convenes in January, it will contain just a handful of Northeast Republicans. The ranks of conservative Blue Dog Democrats, meanwhile, have been decimated to just over a dozen members — down from more than 50 in 2008.

The polarization isn’t just limited to the Republican side of the aisle. Just 18 Democrats will occupy Republican-friendly seats, down from 20 in the 112th Congress, according to the Cook Political Report.

“The House is well-aligned right now,” said Brock McCleary, outgoing National Republican Congressional Committee deputy executive director and founder of the survey firm Harper Polling. “As of today, it’s kind of a parliamentary body.”

California: Effects of Redistricting and the Top-Two Primary

In 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure transferring responsibility for redistricting from the State Legislature to an independent commission. Two years later, they approved another measure giving the commission responsibility for drawing lines for the US House. Also in 2010, voters approved the "top two" primary system, in candidates for Congress, the legislature, and state offices appear on one ballot and only the top two vote-getters in the primary election – regardless of party preference - move on to the general election. The idea behind the process was to foster moderation by encouraging candidates to build cross-party coalitions in the primary.

So what happened in 2012?  Republicans had long advocated redistricting reform as a way to overcome what they saw as Democratic gerrymanders.  Under the new lines, however, Democrats won "supermajorities" (more than two-thirds) in both houses of the legislature. Time will tell if the top two process will lead to more moderation. 

In the House races, the most obvious effect of these changes was to create general election contests pitting members of the same party against each other.  And with redistricting, some of these contests involved two incumbents. 

• CD30 (San Fernando Valley): Longtime Democratic incumbents Brad Sherman Howard Berman ran against each other.  Sherman won, mainly because redistricting tilted the new district in his direction.  The race also confirmed the old wisdom that civil wars can be the nastiest:  at one point, the confrontation got physical.
• CD44 (Compton/L.A. Harbor):  Representative Janice Hahn beat Rep. Laura Richardson both in the primary and the general.  Richardson's main problem consisted of ethics problems and sloppy personal finances.
• CD15 (East Bay): This is perhaps the clearest case of "top two" fulfilling its goal of fostering moderation.  Representative Pete Stark was a nasty piece of work, known for vile, bigoted comments against nearly everyone.  In a closed primary, he would probably have held his seat.  But in the general election, Eric Swalwell was able to gain Republicans and decline-to-state voters to rid Congress of Stark.
• CD35 (San Bernardino County): incumbent Joe Baca lost to state Senator Gloria Negrete McLeod.  She is actually more liberal, but many Republicans supported her because they hate Baca for personal reasons.  (He once called a top local GOP figure a "political pimp.")  Michael Bloomberg also ran ads against Baca, but it's not clear why Baca was the target.
• Two Democratic incumbents ran against token Democratic opponents: CD40 (East L.A. County) - Lucille Roybal-Allard vs. David Sanchez, and CD43 (South L.A. County) – Maxine Waters vs. Bob Flores.
• CD8 (San Bernardino County): Thirteen candidates ran in the primary for this open seat.  The top two vote-getters were Assemblyman  Paul Cook, who received 15% , and Gregg Imus, who received 16% of the vote. Imus is, well, a Minuteman nut. The GOP establishment backed Cook, but Imus won 42%.  In a closed primary, it's possible that he might have outpolled Cook, so this district is possibly another win for top two.
• CD31 (San Bernardino County): Incumbent Gary Miller beat state Senator Bob Dutton.  This district illustrated how top two can have unanticipated consequences. It leans Democratic, but Democratic candidates split the vote in the primary, allowing Republicans  to get the top two slots.

Gerrymander!

Reid Wilson writes at National Journal:

Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry was the first politician to take advantage of rules that allow one party to draw maps to its own advantage. Two hundred years ago this month, after Gerry signed into law a map of state Senate districts that would favor his Democratic-Republican Party’s candidates, the Boston Gazette offered its satirical take on one such district, around Gerry’s home base of Marblehead, just north of Boston. The meandering district, which curved north and east around a Federalist Party stronghold, looked like a salamander, the newspaper said, coining a new word to describe the tortuous political mapmaking: gerrymandering.

Gerry might have been proud of the past year’s round of redistricting. Both Republicans and Democrats have continued the tradition he started, carving up districts to play to their electoral strengths—and, in the process, redrawing the lines party strategists will obsess over for the next decade.

The Case Against a District System

An earlier post looked at a Pennsylvania proposal to adopt the district system for allocating electoral votes. At the Morning Call, Professor Christopher Borick of Muhlenberg College argues against the idea:

Herein lies the problem: The congressional district system that serves as the heart of the proposed election system is about as rotten of a core as you will ever find. Congressional districts are generally designed with a single purpose — preservation of party dominance in that district. The gerrymandering of congressional districts has successfully killed off real competition in a vast majority of districts throughout the state and nation. In only a handful of districts do you see real and regular competition between Democrats and Republicans.

Yet even with the failings of congressional districts glaringly apparent to even the most casual observer, the proposal floated by Republican leaders in Harrisburg, such as Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, seeks to make such districts the foundation upon which presidential elections in Pennsylvania will be built. In the parlance of card players, Harrisburg is considering doubling-down on a very bad hand, and the ability of Pennsylvania's voters to cast meaningful votes for president is at stake.

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If Pennsylvania turns to a system where Electoral College votes are chosen district by district, you will ensure that most of the state's electoral votes will be determined before the race even begins, much in the way that a majority of Pennsylvania's members of Congress are currently selected. Of course, presidential candidates will spend neither time nor money campaigning where the outcome is pre-ordained; it makes no sense to use precious resources on done deals.

California as a Case Study

Our chapter on elections and campaigns discusses direct democracy. Our federalism chapter analyzes the impact of state tax laws. And our interest groups chapter looks at the ways in which corporations try to move public policy. A story from The Sacramento Bee illustrates all three points:

Amazon.com, in a fresh attack on California's new online sales tax law, is pushing a ballot referendum to have the law repealed.

The Internet retailer Monday called it "a referendum on jobs and investment in California." The effort comes two weeks after the law was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. It requires online merchants to collect sales tax on goods purchased by Californians.

Amazon hasn't been collecting the tax. The Seattle retailer responded the day the law took effect by severing ties with its 10,000 California affiliates – individuals, businesses and nonprofits that earned commissions by referring customers to Amazon. Dozens of other online merchants have done the same.

A ballot referendum takes the California-vs.-Amazon fight to another level. Unlike the more commonly used initiative process, a referendum effort can produce much quicker results.

Referendums are used to overturn laws passed by the Legislature, and the new sales tax law would be suspended once the Amazon effort qualifies for the ballot, said Chip Nielsen, a lawyer working on the referendum. The next statewide election is scheduled for February, but a pending bill would move it to June 2012.

At Fox and Hounds, Tony Quinn argues that the state's redistricting commission has failed miserably, highlighting issues of government tranparency and political fairness:

Running out of time, beset by rebellious consultants, and manipulated by partisans, the Citizens Redistricting Commission has decided to exclude citizens from the process. The Commission is going dark.

On Saturday, the Commission voted not to release a second set of draft redistricting maps to the press or the public on July 14 as promised. They also voted not to post maps of the districts they are drawing on their own redistricting website. Despite a $3 million budget and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to their consultants, the consultants told them they had no time for public maps. Outside groups are being recruited for that task.
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So what needs to be done with these districts? A referendum must be qualified against these plans if the final districts look anything like they do now. Fortunately for the citizenry, the referendum law was changed by the voters last fall, and all that any group has to do is to collect enough signatures to trigger a referendum and the issue goes immediately to the California Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court staff has already begun making discrete inquiries as to how it might proceed if come this fall redistricting drops into its lap. The law provides plenty of time for the Court to draw districts for the 2012 election.

Having made their process impenetrable to substantive criticism, ignoring meaningful public input or even simple common sense, this Commission has sadly invited upon itself the need to move redistricting to an impartial judiciary.

California Redistricting: First Official Draft

A few days after a staff draft, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission has produced its first official draft of House district lines.

Richard Simon writes at The Los Angeles Times:

David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, said the maps could boost the Democrats’ numbers in the state’s 53-member House delegation by four seats, identifying as among the biggest losers in the remapping proposals Dreier, of San Dimas, and fellow Republicans Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Gary Miller of Diamond Bar and either Brian Bilbray of Carlsbad or Jeff Denham of Atwater.

Congressional staffs and party officials pored over the maps today, scrambling to crunch the demographic and political numbers in order to get a better understanding of their political prospects.

The new maps promise to cause political migraines for a number of incumbents, including one of Los Angeles’ most enduring Democratic politicians, Howard L. Berman.

Berman could face a challenge from a well-known Latino if he runs in a more Latino east San Fernando Valley district carved from a chunk of the congressman’s current district, or a possible race against fellow Democrat Brad Sherman in a new district that includes Berman’s home and extends through the west San Fernando Valley.

Virtually all of state’s House members gain new territory, forcing them to make themselves known to new potential voters fast before the 2012 election. Some are likely to have to go shopping for a new home. House members are not required to live in their districts but could face charges of carpetbagging if they don’t move into the districts where they run.

"It certainly means there will be a lot of battlefields in California," said Sherman, whose district was extended westward through the west San Fernando Valley into Ventura County to include territory he previously represented.

Old lines.........................................................New Draft Lines