Avoiding the Burtonmander - importance of state elections in legislative redistricting

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by Susan Mandel

WHEN MARSHALL COLEMAN and Jim Courter lost the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, they lost more than two governorships. They also lost a few Republican seats in Congress, seats the GOP will now have little chance of capturing for the remainder of this century. That's because Democrats will now control the post-Census redistricting in both states and are bound to continue the gerrymandering that helps guarantee their 35-year-old majority in the House. The 1989 and 1990 state elections are crucial for this reason: the victors will draw the lines for congressional elections beginning with 1992.

Creative redrawing of the electoral map in 1981 was the biggest factor in preserving the Democratic majority in the House. In the 1982 elections, Republicans had expected to gain at least six seats because of migration from the inner cities of the Northeast to suburbia and to the conservative Sunbelt states. But blatant gerrymandering neutralized this factor and, along with the recession, was responsible for the catastrophic loss of 26 seats.

"If you control the line-drawing process, to a large degree you can control the outcome of congressional elections," says the director of strategic information for the Republican National Committee, David Winston. The Democrats controlled that process in 1981, and they played hardball.

Nowhere did they play more ruthlessly than in California, the state with the most seats in Congress. An hour before he was to turn his office over to a Republican on January 2, 1983, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed a redistricting plan essentially the same as the one voters had just rejected in a referendum, with a few cosmetic changes made by the legislature. The mastermind behind this effort was Congressman Phil Burton. [See John Fund, "Beware the Gerrymander, My Son," April 7, 1989.

The upshot was that in the 1984 elections Republican candidates won a majority of the votes but only 40 per cent of the state's seats in Congress. Of the 135 congressional races in California since 1982, although the GOP has spent $20 million, only one seat has moved back from the Democratic to the Republican column. It's another example of how the voter can be removed from the political process. "The most influential person in California is still Phil Burton even though he's been dead several years," says David Winston.

RNC Chairman Lee Atwater has made redistricting the RNC's numberone priority, and the party is pouring money into state races. Despite losing the Virginia governorship, for example, the GOP did pick up five or six new seats in the Virginia House (the final number is hanging on a recount). That gives the party nearly 40 per cent of the legislature's seats.

Nevertheless, Republicans nationwide are not in a good position to force a compromise. In states where they have any power it's only by their fingertips, usually controlling only one body of the state legislature or holding the governorship. The party must, at a minimum, hang onto Republican governorships in California, Florida, Texas, and Illinois and State Senate majorities in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa-all states that stand to gain or lose seats in the upcoming reapportionment.

Were the GOP to lose any of these branches of state government, Democrats would have a free hand to carve out Burtonian gerrymanders. This is why the White House is livid with Senator Pete Wilson, who is running for governor of California next year. He has just co-sponsored an extreme pro-abortion bill in the Senateeffectively legislating Roe v. Wadewhich will bring a primary challenge next year and may alienate enough pro-lifers to bring about the same kind of defeat Republicans saw in both Virginia and New Jersey. If he loses, Republicans can say goodbye to about eight seats in the House.

THE POINT hasn't been lost on the companies that sell redistricting software. This is the latest gadget, given an airing at a recent meeting of the National Conference of State Legislators in Newport Beach, California. The software would give legislators who are far less adept than Phil Burton the technology to redraw their state districts on the California model. It takes much of the guesswork out of gerrymandering, with programs sophisticated enough to show how moving a district line by just one block can alter the ethnic breakdown, income level, and voting record of the entire district.

Democrats will need all the state-ofthe-art help they can get to counter Republican population gains, even more pronounced today than a decade ago. But there's no lack of will. "Democrats are quite capable of drawing bizarre districts that will increase their numbers in Congress in a lot of states," says the co-chairman of the House Republican Conference's task force on redistricting, Bill Thomas (Calif). "Don't sit back and think the Democrats can't do it-they can. Democrats aren't going to give up real political power. It has to be taken away from them." This will involve, among other things, challenging Democratic excesses in the courts.