Term Limits: Advantage for the GOP

Democrat Dick Floyd’s Assembly district has a peculiar shape to it, like the front half of a horse.

The torso rests awkwardly along Pacific Coast Highway, near Wilmington. The head reaches several miles northwest to around Hawthorne, pointed in the general direction of Hollywood Park race track.

I’m telling you about this oddly shaped district because it illustrates an important, but little-discussed, side effect of a pair of term-limit proposals on the Nov. 6 ballot, Propositions 131 and 140. District boundaries are drawn by the politicians and for the politicians--or, to be more precise, by and for the politicians in power.

Voter approval of term limits eventually will topple the existing Sacramento power structure. Depending on your party preference, the measures can be described as either boosting Republican efforts to take control of the Legislature or breaking a Democratic stranglehold on the Statehouse.

I know that’s not part of the term-limit debate. Proponents are shouting reform, not partisan advantage. But I’ve talked to political scientists and politicians and they agree that term-limit approval would help the GOP win legislative elections.

Dick Floyd’s district shows how it would work.

As they began the 1981 legislative reapportionment, Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and other Democratic powers faced an unpleasant political reality. The state was becoming more Republican. While the governor, Jerry Brown, was Democratic, the party’s registration edge was shrinking.

And so, as politicians do, they fell back on the technique devised during the early 19th Century Administration of Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, when party leaders gained political advantage by drawing a district in the shape of a salamander. It came to be called a gerrymander.

In Floyd’s 53rd District, widely separated working-class neighborhoods in Carson, Gardena, Lawndale and Hawthorne were bundled together. The boundaries had no relation to neighborhoods or communities. The lines simply followed Democratic registration in a free-flow manner, creating a district where 60% of the voters would be Democrats. Rather than a salamander, they produced the front end of a horse--a fortunate outcome, given the alternative.

Contrary to popular belief, such gerrymandering doesn’t automatically produce victory in California. That’s because the state has an element known as The Disloyal Democrats. These are Democrat constituents who often don’t vote along party lines.

You counter disloyalty and shrinking party registration by finding candidates who appeal to local tastes. Hometown heroes, so to speak. In Floyd, the Democrats found someone perfect for this Joe Sixpack district.

Rebellious and irate, union man Floyd is the guy who’d tell the foreman to take that job and shove it. But the foreman probably wouldn’t fire him. For Floyd’s also a jokester, the kind of legislator who wanders the Assembly floor sharing stories with his colleagues and shouting wisecracks across the room.

As long as he keeps telling stories--and telling off the bosses--Floyd has a job.

There are a lot of local heroes like Floyd among Southland Democrats. They can be found from Riverside to Long Beach. You can tell the local heroes by the way they always outstrip Democratic presidential candidates in their districts.

Their entrenched presence, combined with the gerrymandering, gives the Democrats a huge advantage regardless of how the nation might be tilting politically at the time.

So for the Republicans, the only way out is to get rid of the locals and everyone else, and start fresh: Term limits.

Republicans compare the present situation to playing football on a field that runs uphill. Trying to remedy the situation, they’ve backed voter initiatives to take reapportionment out of the hands of the Legislature. But the measures have been defeated.

Wilson’s winning the governorship would help. He could veto the Democrat’s once-a-decade reapportionment bill.

But the Republicans’ real hope is getting rid of incumbents like Dick Floyd. Then, when the Republicans win the Legislature, they can do their own gerrymander.

That’s a strong reason for Republicans to like term limits. That support was clear last Friday when I was on a panel interviewing Vice President Dan Quayle on a cable talk show.

Quayle invoked the image of the team forced to play uphill. Asked about the advantages a term limit would have for the GOP, he said “It would level the playing field.”

A level playing field for the Republicans, political death for Dick Floyd--and, quite possibly, for the Democrats’ decades of majority rule.