Dan Walters: Stage set for battle on districts

By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee.com

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When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and political reform groups enacted a ballot measure to shift legislative redistricting from the Legislature to an independent commission, they purposely left congressional redistricting in lawmakers' hands.

Congressional leaders and members of both parties had left little doubt that were they included in redistricting reform, they would raise and spend millions of dollars to defeat it.

It's still uncertain how California's largest-in-the- nation congressional delegation will fare when 435 House seats are divvied up after the 2010 census. The range appears to be from a net loss of one seat to a net gain of one, depending on how the census settles a long-running dispute – involving about a million persons – between federal and state demographers.

Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.

A pending ballot measure proposes to take congressional redistricting away from the Legislature as well, but the next governor and state lawmakers probably will decide how those seats are configured.

That means many term-limited state legislators will try to carve out new careers in Congress if they can. Throw in some new rules that Schwarzenegger's initiative imposed on redistricting, some interregional rivalries, some demographic shifts and, of course, the ever-present factor of ethnicity, and the stage is set for some hardball insider politics circa 2011.

A new statistical analysis by Rose Institute of State and Local Government, part of Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, sets the statistical stage for the forthcoming bloodletting.

Were congressional redistricting to follow changes in population during this decade, the Rose study determined, it would shift some seats from slow-growing Democratic urban areas along the coast to fast-growing, Republican-leaning inland regions such as Riverside and San Bernardino counties in Southern California, and the Central Valley.

Democratic legislators would be unlikely to do that for obvious reasons, and with a compliant Democratic governor, they'd probably do just the opposite, shrinking the Republican ranks (now 19 of 53 seats) by clever mapmaking. So that's one potential conflict.

Another is that although the state's Latino population has grown dramatically to well over one-third of the state, Latinos hold just six of the 53 current congressional seats. African Americans, with less than 7 percent of the population, have three.

Preserving black representation while accommodating the surging Latino population might require cutting into the districts of long- serving white Democratic congressional members in Southern California. Some Latino activists are still bitter about the incumbent-friendly gerrymander of congressional districts after the 2000 census that held Latino seats to a minimum.

All in all, congressional redistricting should be quite a political show.