New Districts To Shift Calif. Political Landscape

SACRAMENTO (AP) — When California voters took a gamble on a new plan to draw the state's political maps, they were promised competitive electoral districts without the backroom deal-making from politicians trying to protect their own interests.

It's yet to be seen whether the districts the California Citizens Redistricting Commission approved Friday will be any more competitive over the long run than the current ones, but the new maps immediately created opportunities for would-be candidates and challenges for incumbents. They also upset the state Republican Party.

GOP officials planned to spend the weekend reviewing the maps and avenues for possible challenges -- likely in the form of a ballot referendum on the congressional and state Senate maps, state party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro said. He said the commission split cities and towns into some unnatural pairings in its effort to accommodate various interest groups.

"They were divvied up according to different criteria, and that's troublesome, and I don't think that's a fair way to do things," Del Beccaro said.

Incumbents in the state Assembly and Senate, as well as those in Congress and on the state Board of Equalization, will face new groups of voters as they fight for re-election next year. Some will face fellow incumbents from their own party or a new set of voters, without the same registration advantage they have become used to.

The maps appear to give Democrats a slight edge in their goal of capturing two-thirds of state Senate and Assembly seats, which would give them the authority to raise taxes. They also give Democrats opportunities to boost their congressional representation. The 53-member delegation currently includes 19 GOP lawmakers.

How that plays out depends on where candidates opt to run.

Ironically, it was Republicans who supported the ballot initiatives that took the once-a-decade redistricting responsibility away from the Legislature. Voters created the independent citizens commission in 2008 and expanded its authority to congressional districts in 2010.

Individuals or groups can challenge the maps in court or opt to pursue a ballot referendum, but the chances of a successful legal challenge to the plan are "zero," said Tony Quinn, a Republican who has been involved in redistricting cases for 45 years.

He said courts already are reluctant to get involved in redistricting challenges and are likely to be even more wary of reviewing decisions made by a voter-approved panel of residents selected through an independent, non-partisan process.

If any group secured enough signatures for a referendum, however, any maps that are challenged would not be used in 2012. The state Supreme Court would appoint special masters, likely retired judges, to draw the boundaries until voters could weigh in.

"The only way that you engage the court is through the referendum. You can go bay at the moon all you like that you don't like the districts," but judges are unlikely to get involved otherwise, Quinn said.

In the decade since politicians last drew the 177 legislative, congressional and Board of Equalization seats, California's political allegiances have shifted to the left.

There are nearly 500,000 more registered Democrats than a decade ago, 7.6 million in all, and 5.3 million registered Republicans, a drop from 5.4 million a decade ago. Partisanship in both major parties has pushed many more voters to the middle, and a fifth of all registered voters now say they are not affiliated with any political party.

Democrats argued during the ballot campaigns in 2008 and 2010 that the commission promoted by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was nothing more than a power grab.

AARP, the California Chamber of Commerce and the NAACP's California chapter were among other supporters of creating the independent redistricting process. Voters agreed with those groups and decided to gamble on letting a panel of 14 residents figure it out.

The commissioners were chosen after an extensive review overseen by the state auditor's office and include five Democrats, five Republicans and four independent or minor-party voters.

For the first time, the process of drawing new political lines was mostly open and transparent, marking a shift from the redistricting process that had been done behind closed doors by politicians. Judges have drawn the lines in decades past, taking over after legal challenges to the Legislature's maps.

The commission's mandate forbids members from considering incumbency or party registration in drawing the boundaries. Instead, it tried to group communities by geography, ethnicity and economic interests.

Among the most heated public debates were those centered around race, which the commission was required to consider under the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act.

Latino, Asian and black groups were upset after the commission released its first set of draft maps in June because they split communities that traditionally acted as a racial voting bloc.

Critics said the commission addressed those concerns before voting on the final drafts Friday, preserving black voter influence in three Southern California congressional districts, despite a decline in their voting numbers.

Those districts fairly reflect "where our churches are, where we shop, where we socialize, where our social services are," said Erica Teasley Linnick, coordinator of the African American Redistricting Collaborative, which was formed to advocate for black voters and draw community attention to the redistricting process.

There also are more districts that reflect California's growing Hispanic population, but not as many as activists had pushed for.

Stephen Ochoa, national redistricting coordinator for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said the commission "could have done better" in creating stronger Latino-dominated districts, and the group is not satisfied with new Senate boundaries in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley.

"In a whole host of other places, they could have drawn `opportunity' districts, but chose not to," Ochoa said.

His group also was poring over the maps to decide whether to challenge any of them. The commission has until Aug. 15 to approve or reject the maps, which will be open for public review until then.

The maps complicate the political futures for some state lawmakers and members of Congress, some of whom will face each other. The new district boundaries, combined with the first widespread use of California's top-two primary system, create an entirely different playing field for next year's elections.

The political fireworks are most likely in congressional races.

Just weeks after she was elected to a Los Angeles-area seat, Rep. Janice Hahn could be forced to choose which fellow Democrat to compete against. She complained in a press release Friday that her "district was taken away from me and split into three very different districts."

Four Republican congressmen -- David Dreier, Dan Lungren, Elton Gallegly and Jeff Denham -- are in or are likely to compete in predominantly Democratic districts.

Some state Senate districts around Sacramento stretch all the way to the Oregon border or south to Death Valley, creating challenges for any politician seeking the office.

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