Looking to Design a Fairer Map

Steve Kuykendall used to live in the 36th Congressional District, until one day four years ago.

He didn’t move; the district did. And with it went a sense of political fairness.

Through the 1990s, the 36th was a strip of beach-hugging cities stretching from Santa Monica to San Pedro, and Democrats and Republicans -- with nearly equal registration -- battled every two years to claim it.

It was the kind of district where “the Democrats always had to be very moderate and run to the center to try to win,” Kuykendall said. A Republican, he won the district in 1998; Democrat Jane Harman beat him two years later.

But in 2001, Sacramento politicians redrew the boundaries to excise Kuykendall’s conservative bluff city of Rancho Palos Verdes. Republican registrations in the 36th immediately fell by 25,000. And Kuykendall and his neighbors found themselves oddly tied -- by a freeway-wide thread that snakes along San Pedro Bay -- to a district centered in Orange County.

“You’ve got to drive through [Harman’s] district to get to each end of my [new] district,” Kuykendall said. “Otherwise, you’ve got to get a boat.”

It’s not just clean lines that have been lost in the 36th Congressional District. The competitiveness is gone too. Before redistricting, Harman beat Kuykendall by 4,452 votes. After redistricting, she won against another Republican by 37,870.

The Republicans who dominate Torrance, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach once had a fighting chance to elect their own to Congress. Now they don’t.

“A lot of Republicans said to me, ‘I voted in the last election but I don’t think my vote counted,’ ” said Redondo Beach City Councilman Gerard Bisignano. “Most of these cities lean Republican, yet it’s a fait accompli the district will go to the Democrat.”

In legislative and congressional districts throughout the state, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would like to turn back the clock. He wants to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians, as the state did in the 1970s and 1990s when retired judges were asked to step in because lawmakers and the governor could not agree.

Schwarzenegger’s ultimate goal, aides say, is to end gridlock in the Legislature by helping to elect a cadre of moderate lawmakers more interested in compromise than hewing to a strict Democratic or Republican line.

Though it is widely assumed that redistricting would help Republicans in the Legislature, it is unclear whether either party would gain or lose seats. Democrats hold firm majorities in the Assembly and Senate.

With California as a whole heavily Democratic, however, some experts worry that redistricting could make winning tougher for GOP congressional candidates. Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas) has told the governor he prefers that no boundaries change until the next census cycle.

To ensure that each politician represents a nearly equal number of people, the state and U.S. constitutions require redrawing congressional and legislative lines every 10 years based on new census data.

The rules require that districts be contiguous and respect geographical integrity as much as possible. But nothing says the districts must be balanced among Democrats, Republicans or any other party.

There’s a direct connection between district boundaries and partisan polarization in Sacramento, experts say: When districts lean too far left or right, politicians believe they don’t need to appeal to a cross-section of voters to get reelected.

“What we have now is a system that favors the wings of both parties and keeps them in power,” said Alan Heslop, a Republican and retired professor who has been involved in California redistricting battles since the 1950s.

Schwarzenegger is backing a bill by Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) that would have three retired judges draw political boundaries. It also would make party competitiveness a goal of mapmakers.

Schwarzenegger’s move fits a national trend. Thirteen states do not permit lawmakers to redraw both legislative and congressional boundaries. Most use bipartisan panels, typically made up of people appointed by legislative leaders of both parties. Iowa, an unusual case, gives the job to legislative staff. Three states -- Arizona, Idaho and Alaska -- have switched to commissions since 1991. An initiative is circulating in Massachusetts to make the change.

Talk of independent redistricting swirls in at least a dozen other states, said Tim Storey, a redistricting expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “I’ve certainly seen a marked increase in the calls I’ve been getting from the media, public interest groups and lawmakers.

“There are various reform efforts rumbling beneath the surface in a lot of places,” he said, “some of it related to Schwarzenegger and his initiative getting national attention.”

In Arizona, voters shifted redistricting to a bipartisan panel in 2000.

“The old system turned the Legislature into a bloodbath every 10 years,” said Dennis Burke, a former executive director of Common Cause in Arizona. The reform “made it a much more open and honest process.”

After a nasty redistricting fight in 1991, the Idaho Legislature ceded its authority to a six-member panel: three appointed by Republicans and three by Democrats.

“Before, the small and large cities in Idaho were divided up like a pizza pie,” said Senate Minority Leader Clinton Stennett, a Democrat who represents Sun Valley, Idaho. “Now the neighborhoods are more compact.”

Researchers at the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College recently studied election results in states where lawmakers don’t draw their own political boundaries.

“We did find that the districts are more compact, the districts are more competitive,” senior researcher Douglas Johnson said. “And also looking back at the ‘90s, there are many more districts that change hands over the decade than where the legislature draws the line.”

Some experts say no state cries out for such a change louder than California.

In the 1980s, Democrats who dominated the Legislature drew lines to give themselves a majority of voters in as many districts as possible -- a process, known as gerrymandering, that contorted some districts into weird shapes. The word dates to the salamander-like shape Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry made of Essex County in 1812 to favor a political candidate.

The late Rep. Phil Burton (D-San Francisco), who engineered the 1980s redistricting, quipped that the lines were his contribution to “modern art.” The congressional district Burton drew for his brother, former congressman and state legislator John Burton, jumped San Pablo Bay to connect San Francisco and Vallejo.

California’s current boundaries are a twist on the traditional gerrymander. In 2001, Democrats and Republicans struck an agreement ensuring that whichever party represented a district at the time would get or keep a registration advantage.

The sweetheart deal worked better than the drafters had expected. In 2002, only three legislative seats changed parties. Last November, not one of 153 congressional and legislative seats on the ballot switched from “R” to “D” or vice versa.

Heslop, a founder of the Rose Institute, called it “surely the most complete and effective bipartisan gerrymander in American history.”

“You look for another 153 political districts where the party doesn’t change hands,” Heslop said. “You’re not going to find it in the United States.”

In his State of the State speech, Schwarzenegger called an impartial redistricting necessary to “make California’s elections democratic once again.” But Democrats fear that the governor’s call for a historic mid-decade redistricting is not so noble.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said he is open to talking about a better way to draw districts, but doing so before the next census “has the smell” of “a political power grab by the party that’s not in power.”

Democrats point to Texas, where Republicans took over the Legislature in 2002 and redrew court-imposed congressional lines in 2003. Under the new districts, Republicans gained five seats and helped the national party keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Texas districts are under court review, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has been rebuked by the House ethics committee for his involvement in the redistricting fight.

Schwarzenegger’s aides say the governor is “hard-core” about getting California’s lines redrawn next year. They concede that new districts could help elect politicians more inclined to carry out his agenda.

Moderates have dwindled in the 120-member Legislature under the gerrymander of 2001. The number of pro-business Democrats and socially liberal Republicans can be counted on two hands.

The governor’s spotlight on redistricting has already triggered a flurry of initiative proposals to amend the state Constitution.

In the last few months, eight ideas have been drafted and submitted to the attorney general for legal review.

One is by an anti-tax activist, four are by a Democratic lobbyist, two are by a Republican consultant and one is by the California Chamber of Commerce. All would take redistricting from the Legislature, but they differ in details.

Schwarzenegger hasn’t endorsed any. Instead, he is focused on McCarthy’s bill, which would give the task to three retired judges and require new lines in 2006. The bill probably will die at the hands of Democratic lawmakers unless the governor wins more support by linking it to a loosening of term limits, as he has said he might be willing to do.

The governor has warned lawmakers that if they didn’t act, he would go to the ballot this year and ask voters to take the job from them. Though Schwarzenegger has proved his ability to win initiatives, four redistricting measures have been rejected at the polls since 1982.

Some observers say the time may be right, given Texas’ problems, Schwarzenegger’s salesmanship, a growing trend of Californians to shun major parties by registering as “decline to state,” and the rosy rearview glow of California’s judge-drawn lines in the 1990s.

“We had 10 years of really good districts, and people saw that it was possible for an unbiased source to draw [them],” said Johnson of the Rose Institute.

There is a limit to how many of California’s districts can be drawn to produce nail-biter elections. Republicans tend to live in suburbs, Democrats in the inner city. Also, mapmakers must abide by federal and state rules that say, for example, that cities should be kept whole where possible and that the strength of minority voters should not be diluted.

Experts say that perhaps six of California’s 53 congressional districts and 15 of 120 legislative seats could be easily redrawn to increase competition. But others would have to be contorted into a reverse gerrymander to corral equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.

“I don’t think the most dedicated Republican redistricter could get more than one more Assembly district out of the Bay Area,” said Paul McKaskle, a University of San Francisco law professor who was hired by the California Supreme Court in 1973 and 1991 to help draw new political boundaries.

Yet, there are some naturally competitive areas in California -- such as the San Fernando Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, parts of San Diego and Santa Barbara counties -- that politicians in 2001 carved into uncompetitive districts. Even just a few more competitive seats could change the tenor of campaigns, Johnson said.

Some experts say they welcome Schwarzenegger’s push to take redistricting from the Legislature, but they question whether retired judges would be the best reformers. No other state uses retired jurists.

“The transparency [of the process] is the big difference,” said redistricting expert Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

“If you go back to the 1973 and 1991 redistricting done by the courts” in California, he said, “they were done in relative secrecy. You didn’t have a lot of citizen input. The new technology is such that everybody is capable of drawing lines. There’s no reason it should be done in secret.”

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Pushing out Palos Verdes

The 36th Congressional District included the Palos Verdes Peninsula until state lawmakers redrew boundaries after the 2000 census. Predominantly Republican Palos Verdes was attached to a district in Orange County and the 36th became more Democratic.

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Voter registration in the 36th Congressional District

Before redistricting*

Democrats: 41%

Republicans: 39%

Others: 20%

*Oct. 10, 2000

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After redistricting**

Democrats: 46%, up 13,226

Republicans: 33%, down 25,187

Others: 21%

**Oct. 2, 2001

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Sources: California Secretary of State; ESRI; USGS.