PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : The GOP Is Chasing a Mirage : The party needs more than another Sun Belt population shift to gain seats in Congress. It needs winners.

If there is any hope as forlorn as the one that looks toward the election of a Democratic President in 1992, it is the one that places faith in the census as the instrument that will deliver the House of Representatives to the Republicans. Predictions that the census results will trigger a shift of seats from the states of the Northeast and Midwest are certainly accurate. What is less defensible is the prediction that such a shift will work out to the advantage of Republican House candidates.

The legions of commentators who see reapportionment as a boon to the GOP--a group every bit as large and confident as the soothsayers who predicted a massive Republican gain after the 1980 census--view reapportionment in an overly simplistic and mechanistic light. This leads them to forecast a political upheaval of the magnitude of earthquake when the most likely outcome is mudslide.

It is important to recognize that the translation of census data to partisan gains and losses in the House is a complicated and not very neat process. Indeed, it is not a single process at all but two: reapportionment of seats among the states and redistricting within the states. Redistricting may occur even in a state that has neither lost nor gained House seats, but has experienced a population shift within the state. And since the Supreme Court has ruled that there can be virtually no variance in population among a state’s congressional districts, state legislatures must juggle district lines.

Redistricting is one of the most purely political activities in American politics. And it has produced some wondrous acts of political cartography. The New Jersey General Assembly came up with a map in which one part of a district was accessible to another only at low tide. The gerrymanderer laureate, however, was the late Rep. Phil Burton of San Francisco, who engineered the present district map of California into baroque contortions that ensured an overwhelmingly Democratic congressional delegation.

Creative machinations aside, those who tout a big GOP gain in the 1990 census buy into the notion that when a seat moves from the Northeast to the Sun Belt, it automatically falls on the Republican side of the ledger. Their logic assumes, incorrectly, that a traditionally Republican electorate will always vote Republican, and that the local GOP will field the most attractive candidate.

Voters no longer mindlessly choose candidates on the basis of party affiliation. The remarkable success of the Watergate class of Democrats elected in 1974 from nominally Republican districts demonstrates that an incumbent can survive and even thrive in politically inauspicious terrain. Even in open-seat elections in the Sun Belt in which there has been no incumbent, Democrats have fared remarkably well.

It is the second flaw in the deterministic view of reapportionment that may be the most significant. In House elections, Democrats have consistently fielded better contenders. They are longer on experience in elective office, which gives them a built-in advantage in terms of name recognition over someone coming out of the private sector.

It is in this critical area of political recruitment that Democratic congressional candidates may be beneficiaries of a legacy from a very unlikely source: Ronald Reagan. The former President’s eight years of anti-government contumely must have persuaded many winnable Republicans to stick to their desks at the bank and real-estate office. The hard-edged ideological politics of the early Reagan era even had the effect of prompting some moderate Republicans in Congress to call it quits. Democrats, as a group, do not regard government as odious.

There are more strings to the Republicans’ bow than the census results. There is already under way a well-orchestrated campaign to limit the terms of members of Congress in order to break the Democrats’ 26-year hold on the House. This effort to cap the terms of incumbents is an even drearier prospect than political salvation through a population shift.

In the unlikely event that term limitation were imposed, the GOP would face the challenge of having to come up with even larger numbers of candidates from a pool that seems habitually shallower than the one from which the Democrats draw theirs.

What works at the highest level against the Republicans’ chances for an early recapture of the House is that although Congress as a collectivity may be held in contempt by citizens, the voters love their individual House members. The fact that the vast majority of these beloved individuals who inhabit the despised institution of Congress are Democrats does not augur well for Republican hopes that the House will soon fall into their hands.