GOP Hopes Next Census Brings Party New Muscle

Bracing for their toughest presidential election in this decade, California Republicans would like to believe that population trends will strengthen their party in its home state in the 1990s.

Census experts believe that population growth in California is laying the foundation for as many as five new congressional districts. Moreover, most of the growth is occurring in Republican areas of Southern California, feeding the party’s hopes that the new districts will be dominated by Republican voters.

The changes in California are part of a nationwide shift in population that is expected to lead to the transfer of 18 new congressional seats from states in the North and East to those in the South and West, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research company. The bureau, along with other research firms, expects California to pick up the most new seats.

Political Losses

California Republicans are reacting to these predictions with optimism. But they also remember how, in 1981, they saw promising growth patterns parlayed into political losses by a Democratic-controlled reapportionment process.

Reapportionment of congressional and state legislative districts is done every 10 years after results of the national census are published.

The Democrats held sway over the process in 1981 because they dominated the Legislature and because there was a Democratic governor. Republicans also argue that partisan influence extended to the state Supreme Court, whose rulings helped stave off Republican challenges to the reapportionment plan. At the time, a majority of the justices had been appointed by Democratic governors.

As a result of the Democrats’ plan, California Republicans found themselves casting roughly half the votes in 1984 and 1986 congressional elections but controlling only 18 of the state’s 45 congressional districts.

The Republicans think they will fare better in the next reapportionment, and the Democrats, shrewdly playing down their own chances, tend to agree.

“From a Republican point of view, it is good news,” said Bruce Cain, a Caltech political science professor who was a reapportionment consultant to the Democratic-controlled state Assembly in 1981.

Cain said that Republicans are very likely to pick up two congressional seats in Southern California and have a good chance for a third in the Central Valley--Republican areas that are experiencing rapid growth.

But Cain, who has written a book on reapportionment, cautioned against assuming that new districts necessarily take shape around the latest population bulges.

“Remember that in redistricting, imagination knows no cartographic bounds,” he said.

Republicans say their chances will be good for gaining a majority of the new seats if they are able to reelect a Republican governor in 1990 and if the current Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court stays in office.

Tony Quinn, co-chairman of the Republican Party’s task force on reapportionment, said the party also believes it can strengthen its hand by winning control of one house of the Legislature and by passing an initiative that would prohibit “gerrymandering” of the sort that went on in 1981.

Quinn said a fair reapportionment plan would create an equal number of strong Democratic and Republican seats along with 10 to 15 marginal districts that would be up for grabs.

According to U.S. Census Bureau calculations, areas of the state expected to reflect the most growth--in percentage change--are San Bernardino and Riverside counties, eastern San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, southern Orange County, northern San Diego County and San Joaquin County in the northern Central Valley.

Analysts in both parties agree that whoever dominates the next reapportionment will have to contend with a new variable--the growing independence of voters.

“You get out in the San Bernardino, Riverside area . . . and registration doesn’t always mean very much,” said one analyst. “You may think you have created a safe seat only to find that Democrats don’t vote for Democrats and Republicans don’t vote for Republicans.

GAINS IN CONGRESS FOR CALIFORNIA

More than any other state, California stands to gain in political clout from the 1990 census, according to a new report by private researchers. The Population Reference Bureau report projects that California will gain five new congressional seats. Overall, the report predicts that 18 seats in the House of Representatives will shift from Northern and Eastern states to the South and the West. Under the Constitution, House seats are allocated among states according to their populations, based on Census counts taken every 10 years. Because the total number of House seats is set by law at 435, any gain by one state means a loss for another. According to the private researchers, the states shown below can expect changes in their number of House seats.

CALIF.: +5 ARIZ.: +2 TEX.: +4 GA.: +2 FLA.: +3 N.C.: +1 VA.: +1 MONT.: -1 KAN.: -1 IOWA: -1 WIS.: -1 ILL.: -2 MICH.: -2 OHIO: -2 W. VA.: -1 PA.: -3 N.Y.: -3 MASS.: -1