The Intelligence Pool
State of Dysfunction: California Lurches Closer to Fiscal Anarchy
Part Five
Structural Problem # 5 – Gerrymandering
Another major structural reason for California’s predicament lies in the increasingly sophisticated art of gerrymandering. While state legislative districts had always been subject to political manipulation, by the late 1980s the microcomputer revolution made it possible to analyze voting patterns more accurately than ever before. Expert political consultants sold their services to the two political parties, and this has enabled legislators to produce the most partisan legislative districts in history.
In 1990, however, a Republican governor held a veto threat over the redistricting plans of the Democrats. Democratic Party ambitions had to be reigned in. But in 2000, with Gray Davis in the governor’s mansion, this was no longer true. The result was the most partisan redistricting in history.
Democrats deserve most of the blame for this, but both political parties had a powerful incentive to create “safe” districts. By grouping heavily Democratic voters and heavily Republican voters into separate districts, both parties benefitted by eliminating real competition.
The result of these gerrymandered “designer districts” is that state politics has grown extremely polarized. In order to win primaries in which partisan party activists play a critical role and moderates play no role at all, candidates must toe the radical Republican or radical Democrat line. Once they win the nomination of their Party, they don’t need to expend much effort in the general election, which becomes a foregone conclusion.
This results in general election races that are boring and alienating. Most candidates have already won by winning their primaries. As a result, general elections in California are stultifying. There are few close races, no sharp debates, no real competition. California often seems to have no political life at all.
Once elected, Senators and Assemblypersons cannot be unseated by a candidate of the opposite party. The uneven voter registrations in their gerrymandered district make that outcome exceedingly unlikely. They therefore cater to the most partisan interest groups, the groups they must rely on to raise money for their re-elections – the hard-core Party activists.
This produces a lot of rabid leftists and quite a few rabid rightists in the state legislature. These two groups, blinded by their ideologies, talk at each other but do not actually communicate. California’s extreme partisanship is the result of careful, scientific gerrymandering that produces Senate and legislative districts tailored to keeping one party in power in each district as long as possible.
Legislators have little incentive to cater to moderate swing voters – voters whose livelihood depends on a stable economy and who therefore care about a fiscally-responsible state government – small businesspeople and professionals and entrepreneurs and bankers and others who make their living by selling goods or services. (And that’s a lot of people.) All of these people have been systematically disenfranchised by gerrymandering. The state is run for the benefit of Party activists.
In the legislature this distorted system has too often produced partisan deadlock, as it did this last winter, when California skated closer to fiscal anarchy than ever before.