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Posted on 09/27/2005 1:00:57 PM PDT by SmithL
A hotly disputed study of Proposition 77's likely effects concluded Monday that California's redistricting initiative would produce an additional 11 competitive seats in the Legislature and 10 in Congress.
The Rose Institute study, likely to become a centerpiece of debate over Proposition 77, was immediately touted by supporters of the initiative as a boost to their campaign and by opponents as one-sided propaganda.
The 36-page study, using computer modeling, predicted that passage of Proposition 77 in the Nov. 8 election would boost the number of competitive seats in California politics to:
* Ten in the U.S. House of Representatives, compared with none today.
* Seven in the state Assembly, compared with three today.
* Eight in the state Senate, compared with one today.
Proposition 77 supporters say competition would make politicians less secure and force them to be more responsive to constituents. None of 153 legislative or congressional seats on the 2004 ballot changed party hands.
Redistricting also would produce a majority of Latino voters in congressional districts currently represented by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Mission Hills, and Bob Filner, D-San Diego, the study concluded.
The Rose report marks the first attempt by an academic institution to assess the likely impacts of Proposition 77, which would remove from the Legislature and give to a three-member panel of retired judges the power to draw political boundaries.
. . ."By these numbers, neither party would clearly benefit - but the voters certainly would," Johnson said.
The vast majority of California's legislative and congressional seats would remain strongly tilted toward one party, however, in a state where large cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles are strongly Democratic and suburban regions tend to be Republican.
The Rose study found that neither the GOP nor the Democratic Party would be affected inordinately in changing
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Since this is California, my guess is the Democrats would hold their five seats that became competitive and pick up the five GOP seats that became competitive.....
On the Congress level, that cartoon is nonsense. The Democrats could've picked up no less than three and probably five seats if they had passed an aggressive redistricting scheme. They didn't. They just passed on incumbent-protection map so no one would ever have to go through the bother of really campaigning for reelection.. :)
Actually, it was because they didn't want it to go to a referendum, which would've happened if there weren't a supermajority (I forget how much of a supermajority) in the legislature.
The only reason for Republicans to support this redistricting initiative is on principle, because the GOP will probably lose seats if it passes, at least on the Congress level.
" the GOP will probably lose seats if it passes, at least on the Congress level."
BTW, The Rose Institute are the same folks who are tracking down any judges that might qualify to serve as "Special Masters" for redistricting, as the Judicial Council, who is responsible for nominating the 24 candidates, apparently didn't know where they were or how many might be living or dead. See this post.
With respect, I disagree. California's statewide vote was 44% Republican, measured by the Presidential vote. But under the Democrat-gerrymandered districting, that 44% GOP statewide vote translated into 20 out of 53 seats, or 37.7%
It seems very unlikely that redistricting in a party-blind manner, as Prop 77 seeks to do, could make this worse. On what do you base your contrary conclusion, namely that it IS likely to make matters worse?
The Davis seat has enough liberals in it (62.5%) to make both neighboring GOP seats toss-up districts. Cunningham's district is only 54% GOP and Hunter's district is 57% GOP. There is no way you are gonna draw a Dem seat out of the San Diego area these days with a non-partisan map.
The others are all possibilities, although the Sanchez seat is a rather distant one (it's very unlikely that a Dem-leaning seat wouldn't be somewhere in the vicinity of that current district).
The Dem seats are almost all packed with supermajorities of 60%+, if not 70%+. If you start evening out the lines, they've gotta go somewhere, and the most likely places are the Pombo, Cunningham, Gallegly, Calvert, and Rohrabacher districts.. (in no particular order).
The GOP districts in California tend not to be nearly as packed.
The Democratic districts in California tend to be more heavily packed than the Republican districts. When you shift to nonpartisan maps, it seems to me the less heavily packed districts are the more likely to become marginal. They have less room for maneuver before they become toss-up districts.
PS. And I am speaking exclusively of the Congressional districts. I don't know anything about the legislative districts. That might be a whole 'nother story.
Looks like you slashdoted their little server.
It still works ok for me.
Here is a (non-PDF) link where you can get to the press release and executive summary.
http://rose.claremontmckenna.edu/redistricting/redistricting.asp
"The Davis seat has enough liberals in it (62.5%) to make both neighboring GOP seats toss-up districts."
There will be a core district in Orange County: that is the Cox district. There will be three other districts in Orange County. One will lean Dem (i.e., Sanchez) though probably not as much as the 47th does now. I'm not sure who the two others would be, but odds are that Calvert's district will lose all of Orange County and Rohrabacher's will be recentered in southeastern Los Angeles County. The four Orange County districts will be: Cox, Royce, Miller, Sanchez or less likely Cox, Royce, Rohrabacher, Sanchez.
Pombo's district will almost certainly become the whole of San Joaquin County and the western half of Alameda County. You are correct it'll be about an even partisan split.
Yes, Cardoza and Costa would almost certainly end up with more marginal districts. I agreed about that before.
Of course this all presumes that the initiative passes, and I sure wouldn't bet on that right now.
OK, I went and looked at the statistics (next time I should do that before I comment..) and it's Miller that would more likely get pushed out of Orange County, rather than Rohrabacher. (Calvert would almost certainly get pushed entirely into Riverside County).
Yes, Imperial would probably be placed with Eastern SD County, as I hinted when I said that it would probably be placed in Hunter's CD. And as I said, voter turnout in Imperial County is so low (largely due to the fact that it is majority Hispanic, and a lot of its residents are either non-citizens or are otherwise not registered to vote) that adding those 152,000 people back to Hunter's CD won't make much of a partisan difference.
The inner-city SD district would certainly be overwhelmingly Democrat, a lot more Democrat than either the current Filner or Davis CD. I still think that Davis wouldn't be able to survive the loss of her inner-city precincts---when she had a smaller number of such precincts in 2000, she barely won, and if the district becomes entirely suburban she would be facing a much more difficult race than in 2000.
"it's Miller that would more likely get pushed out of Orange County, rather than Rohrabacher"
Just bear in mind that any redistricting would be non-partisan. I had difficulty getting that point across to someone with which I discussed this before.. Just because Schwarzenegger is advocating the initiative doesn't mean it would result in a GOP-tilted map (which would be a whole 'nother story).
Also, it's important to keep in mind the requirements for compactness & non-dividing of political units. It's actually not too difficult to put together the new map if they actually follow those guidelines.
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