CAPITAL JOURNAL / DANIEL M. WEINTRAUB : More Competitive Races May Be a Mirage

SACRAMENTO — A funny thing seems to have happened on the way to more competition in California’s legislative elections.

Would-be reformers have been saying for the past decade that state legislators, drawing the boundaries of their own districts, have crafted a maximum number of safe seats for incumbents of both major parties. As a result, they argue, there are too few “competitive districts” in which Democratic and Republican candidates have a fair shot to win.

This dearth of competition is blamed for everything from the partisan bickering now common in the Legislature to the state’s failure to address a crisis in automobile insurance and keep the budget balanced. Complaints about entrenched incumbents played an important role in the voters’ decision last year to slap term limits on legislators.

The solution? Allow an independent panel of outsiders to draw the lines without regard to the desires of incumbents. Now, at last, we have just such a set of districts. They were drawn by three retired judges named by the state Supreme Court to break a deadlock between the Legislature and governor.

And guess what? The new districts may end up being even less competitive than those drawn by lawmakers.

That’s not the spin being put out by various Republican state officials, from Gov. Pete Wilson to Assembly GOP Leader Bill Jones to Atty. Gen Dan Lungren. Echoing the others, Wilson told reporters that the court plan will produce “truly competitive districts for the first time in a decade.”

It is true that the districts are more favorable to Republicans than those drawn by Democratic lawmakers in 1982 and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. In fact, the lines will give Republicans their best shot since 1970 at taking control of at least one house of the Legislature.

But that doesn’t mean the districts are more competitive.

Although there are as many ways to measure competitiveness as there are politicians, the most common method is to look at the number of registered Democrats and Republicans, taking into account political geography and the voting habits of members of both parties.

Ed Costantini, a political science professor at UC Davis, has used this party-ratio formula in a fairly exhaustive study of “safe” and “competitive” districts in California, examining 1,435 races for the Assembly, Senate and Congress between 1972 and 1990. Not surprisingly, he found a clear relationship between the percentage of voters in a district who are registered Democrats and the chances of a Democrat winning the seat.

When the Democrats’ share of the voters registered to one of the two major parties exceeded 67%, the seat was safely Democratic. When the Democrats’ share of registration fell below 50%, the seat was a lock for the Republicans. In these safe districts, the underdog managed to win just 15 of 691 races.

In-between, there were seats leaning Democrat and seats leaning Republican, where the party with the advantage won more than 85% of the time.

Finally, in the middle of the spectrum, Costantini isolated the registration numbers that produced competitive races: When Democrats accounted for between 56% and 61% of the registered voters, the race was a tossup.

The current plan, drawn by lawmakers, produced 16 such districts in the Assembly in 1990. In the state Senate, there were eight districts that matched that definition.

The new plan, using the same standards, will have just seven competitive Assembly seats and six in the Senate.

A closer look at the maps shows that this analysis is more than just a statistical exercise. Taking into account the shape of the districts, their location and the political players involved, one would be hard-pressed to predict more than a dozen or so close races in 1992 or 1994.

There might be a few more competitive races in 1992 than the numbers alone suggest, however, as incumbent Democrats fight with everything they’ve got to hang on to districts that are turning Republican. Democrats, who have held majorities in both houses since 1970, may well change their message and their campaign strategy in an effort to keep their power, and those changes could change how we define a competitive district.

But by today’s definitions, and by the standards upon which the reformers criticized the plans drawn this year by the Legislature, the plan now before the court is by no means guaranteed to produce more competitive legislative races in the 1990s than there were in the 1980s.