GOP’s Bad News Isn’t Terrible--and That’s Good

California Republicans might regard the next few years as a good news-bad news-good news joke.

The good news is that Al Gore seems likely to carry the state by a modest margin. If that doesn’t sound so great for the Republican Party, consider the alternative. In the last two presidential elections, and in the 1998 gubernatorial race, California gave Democrats huge top-of-the-ticket victories. The result each time was an electoral riptide that drowned GOP candidates for Congress and the Legislature. This fall, a single-digit edge for Gore would leave Republicans with a fighting chance elsewhere on the ballot.

The title of a 1966 book sums up the state party’s status in 2000: “Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me.”

After the relatively good news is some absolutely awful news. Every 10 years, after the census, each state redraws district boundaries for its legislature and U.S. House delegation. In most states, the Legislature itself does the remapping, subject to the governor’s veto. Currently, every other big state has a Republican governor and at least one legislative house with a GOP majority--a situation that probably will persist next year. However, in California, Democrats control the governorship and both chambers of the Legislature. Unless Republicans score upset victories in November’s legislative elections, Democrats will have complete command of redistricting.

That’s a dreadful prospect for the GOP, because Democrats could use this power to wipe out Republican-held seats. “Cracking” and “packing” would be their major weapons. In “cracking,” the party in power takes an area that supports the other side and splits it among several districts, thereby diluting its voting strength. In “packing,” it crams the other side’s remaining votes into as few districts as possible.

The Democrats last controlled redistricting after the 1980 census. Before the remap, they held a 22-21 advantage in House seats. Thanks to cracking and packing (plus two additional seats that the state gained because of population growth), the new map resulted in the election of 28 Democrats and only 17 Republicans.

Here in Orange County, the next redistricting might not have a radical effect. Democrats hold one seat each in the state Senate, Assembly and U.S. House, and their map makers will probably look for ways to solidify the party’s hold on each of these districts. If anything, that process will make the surrounding Orange County constituencies slightly more Republican. Elsewhere in the state, the Republican future looks grim. Several GOP House members, including Jim Rogan of Glendale and Brian Bilbray of Imperial Beach, have won narrowly in the past, and Democrats surely plan to map them into oblivion. And with some clever draftsmanship, they also could augment their legislative majorities, currently 47-32 in the Assembly and 25-15 in the state Senate.

Amid the gathering clouds, Republicans tried to get an initiative on the March ballot to take redistricting out of the Legislature’s hands. As a “sweetener” for additional voter support, the measure would also have cut state lawmakers’ pay. The ploy backfired. The state Supreme Court struck the initiative from the ballot because the state Constitution bans multi-issue initiatives. Some Republicans then hoped to get a “clean” redistricting initiative on the November ballot but dropped the idea, realizing that it would have little public appeal.

Looking ahead to the coming decade, would-be GOP candidates might conclude that they must either switch parties or move to Arizona.

Nevertheless, Republicans may find glimmers of good news after all. Under term limits, Assembly members and state senators now have less of a stake in their own chamber’s long-term party balance, because they must leave in a few years anyway. If they are ambitious, they have more interest in other offices. Next year, then, we will see a bewildering array of battles, with Assembly members fighting over state Senate districts, senators fighting over Assembly districts, and both seeking to draw U.S. House districts that they can win. With individual lawmakers fighting for themselves, it will be tough to draft maps that maximize the Democratic Party’s advantage.

In the past, strong party leaders could bring discipline to the process. But members no longer have to fear what leaders may do to them far down the road, because term limits have cut that road quite short. And whereas leaders once had a monopoly on the data and hardware necessary for redistricting, computer technology now enables anyone to draw a plan. Organizations representing various demographic groups will use this technology in an effort to put group interests ahead of party interests.

The Democrats still will come out ahead, of course, but not by as much as they would like. For Republicans, the good news is that the bad news is not as bad as it could have been.