When Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last month to end (in California, at least) the incumbent-protection racket that is congressional and legislative redistricting, some Democrats accused him of a Texas-style power-grab for more Republican seats.
But it turns out that California’s Republican congressional delegation overwhelmingly opposes the Republican governor’s plan. He wants to shift the power to draw congressional districts from the Democratic-controlled state Legislature to a panel of retired judges in time for next year’s elections. The Republican House members prefer the status quo, by about 16 to 4.
According to a February 8 article in The Los Angeles Times, these Republican incumbents fear that nonpartisan redistricting could jeopardize Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s also possible, of course, that Republicans would gain House seats, narrowing the current 33-20 Democratic majority in the California delegation. But most Republican incumbents don’t want to gamble on any change in the system of bipartisan gerrymandering that now guarantees them safe seats.
How safe? Not one of California’s 53 House seats, and not one of the 100 state legislative seats that were up for grabs, changed parties last year, thanks to collusive line-drawing by Democrats and Republicans in the California Legislature after the 2000 census. "What kind of democracy is that?" as Schwarzenegger asks.
The opposition of so many Republican incumbents should put to rest Democratic claims that Schwarzenegger’s proposed amendment to the state constitution is a power grab resembling the partisan gerrymander that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay orchestrated in 2003. That one enabled Texas Republicans to take House seats from five Democratic incumbents last November.
Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, is trying to make elections more competitive. This proposal might end up helping or hurting Republicans. It would surely help candidates who share Schwarzenegger’s own moderate centrist views, which also happen to be the views of most votersMore good news on the redistricting-reform front comes from a February 4 article in The New York Times, reporting that campaigns to end the political gerrymandering of election districts are also under way in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Arizona’s voters shifted power over redistricting to a commission five years ago. Iowa has had a somewhat similar scheme since 1981, with highly competitive elections. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., may support Schwarzenegger’s plan and seek to make nonpartisan districting a national issue.
He should. Redistricting reform could do more to foster competitive elections than campaign finance regulation — which helps to entrench incumbents — has ever done.
Elections for the House and for most state legislatures have become less and less competitive in recent decades, as computer technology has made it possible for a legislature’s line-drawers to manipulate the partisan composition of election districts with exquisite precision, the better to promote the political agendas of the line-drawers. Instead of voters choosing their legislators, the saying goes, legislators now choose their voters.
Typically, this involves "gerrymandering" bizarre shapes. Partisan gerrymanders manipulate district lines to take seats away from minority-party incumbents, usually by putting as many minority-party voters as possible into a small number of districts. That’s what Republicans in Texas did in 2003. Bipartisan gerrymandering is collusion by Republican and Democratic legislators to preserve the status quo by drawing safe seats for themselves and their allies in the U.S. House. That’s what California’s Legislature did in 2001.
Both kinds of gerrymandering have helped shrink the number of competitive House districts, from 151 in 1992 to 57 in 2004, according to The Cook Political Report, and have enabled 99 percent of House incumbents to win re-election in 2002 and again in 2004. Until recently, the vested interests of incumbents seemed sure to perpetuate this corrupt system and its Politburo-like re-election rates.
The Supreme Court has been no help. It has so far declined to restrict even egregious partisan gerrymanders. Indeed, for reasons of their own, the justices have for decades made things worse by destroying the traditional redistricting criteria that once restrained gerrymandering. (See my October 30, 2004, column.)
But suddenly, Schwarzenegger’s star power and a growing grassroots rebellion hold out the possibility of making redistricting reform a popular cause. States whose constitutions allow voters to bypass their legislatures and adopt reforms by referendum, including California, may lead the way toward reviving the competitive elections that are essential to a healthy democracy.
More competitive elections would not only force representatives to be more faithful to the views of the majority of voters. Redistricting reform would also remove a major cause of the bitter ideological polarization of our political discourse.
This is because partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering alike produce such heavily Republican and Democratic districts that incumbents face real competition only in primary elections, if ever. The 10 percent of voting-age citizens who vote in Republican primaries and the 8 percent who vote in Democratic primaries tend to be the most conservative of Republicans and the most liberal of Democrats. They choose nominees like themselves, who have no need to appeal to moderate swing voters. So moderate centrists have almost disappeared from the House and from many state legislatures.
This ideological polarization breeds bitterness and distrust, making it difficult to reach pragmatic compromises. Worse, it makes the "people’s House" unrepresentative of the people, most of whom fall near the center of the ideological spectrum. In surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, for example, more Americans identified themselves as independents (39 percent) than as Democrats (31 percent) or Republicans (30 percent).
Take House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who is well to the right of the Republican Party’s center, and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who is well to the left of the Democratic Party’s center. Assuming most independents to be relatively centrist, that puts Hastert to the right of roughly 85 percent of the American people (most Democrats and independents, plus at least half of the Republicans) and Pelosi to the left of roughly 85 percent of the population (most Republicans and independents, plus at least half of the Democrats).
With representatives like these, it’s not surprising that Americans "divide evenly in elections or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center, while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes," as political scientist Morris Fiorina wrote last year (with two collaborators) in Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized AmericaNonpartisan redistricting would not usher in a golden age of political moderation all by itself, of course. Most political activists these days are more driven by conservative or liberal ideology than are most other citizens, thanks in part to the decline of party bosses focused on winning elections, and the rise of single-issue groups and political donors who care most about ideological purityBut nonpartisan redistricting would at least give a greater voice to moderate centrists, especially if combined with other reforms designed to encourage broader political participation, such as opening up more primary elections to independent voters. Schwarzenegger supported a ballot measure of that kind last year. But it went down amid furious opposition and obfuscation by most Republican as well as Democratic legislators. The governor should try again.
Some who support Schwarzenegger’s redistricting proposal caution against his goal of having new districts drawn in time for next year’s election. They want to wait until after the next decennial census in 2010. The midcycle redistricting that DeLay engineered in Texas in 2003 is "a dangerous trend, threatening a new front in partisan warfare as district lines become subject to change whenever the political balance shifts," in the words of a Washington Post editorial.
I disagree. The cost of waiting — six more years of unrepresentative representatives and a loss of momentum for redistricting reform — would be too high. And once a truly nonpartisan redistricting process is in place, a shift in party control of the state legislature would create no opportunity for partisan gerrymandering in any event.
Meanwhile, opponents of Schwarzenegger’s proposal say that it will never catch on with voters because it would not reduce traffic congestion, improve the schools, hold down housing costs, or make any other concrete changes in people’s lives.
That’s true, at least for the short term. But these self-protecting pols may underestimate Schwarzenegger’s ability to get voters excited about junking a system of political self-dealing that is (in his words) "rigged to benefit the interests of those in office and not those who put them there."