California’s Changed Political System, Essay Example

America’s states have historically been the seedbeds of political reform and harbingers of national movements. From the election of populist reformer Hiram Johnson as Governor in 1910, to acceptance of  the referendum, initiative, and recall in 1911, to Proposition 13 in 1978, to Proposition 11 in 2008, to Proposition 14 in 2010, to Proposition 20 also in 2010, California has periodically looked at itself and tried for either for major surgery or a makeover. Other states have done the same, but California’s electoral population and historical role as a leading cultural and business indicator have made its reforms and attempted reforms particularly significant, not only for itself, but also for the Western region, the nation, and the world. Changing demographics is one primary driver of these changes, and legislative reform is another, with the former sometimes requiring the latter. One question that would occur to anyone considering both is what, if any, important effects they will have on each other in the future.

At first this seems like a rather obvious point to raise: of course they will effect each other. Indeed they could hardly not effect each other, being as they are almost two sides of the same coin. The new districts are drawn specifically to influence primary and general elections, with the hope that the former will become more relevant to the voting public. This is a point I will return to later, but behind both forces, and behind all political reform movements, is a paraphrase of the late legislative boss Jesse Unruh’s famous maxim. It can be read simply by inserting reform after of in his pronouncement that money is the mother’s milk of politics.

This paper is about the latest incarnation of redistricting- and election-reform. I will discuss how, and how much, 2011’s new redistricting process and the passage of Propositions 11, 14, and 20 have changed California’s political system, and how these changes and potential changes may affect the state’s future. However, this paper is not a political primer or chronology of events. For reasons of space I have to assume on the part of my reader(s) a level of background knowledge of the politics and history of both redistricting and elections typically found in citizens with an active interest in those subjects.

Redistricting         

It is both ironic and revealing that, while so many reforms are in the direction of either increased direct democracy, or at least increased political control through expanded legislative powers, Propositions 11 and 20 went in the other direction: they tried to reduce, at least outwardly, the political control of a highly important and highly political process: the redrawing of assembly, state senatorial, and congressional district boundaries following the national census of 2010. Taking that power from the legislature (which had, like legislatures have traditionally done, used its collective power to gerrymander if necessary their incumbent members’ home districts) the voters instead created a panel called the California Citizens Redistricting Commission to make the process less political. The goal was to create more competitive districts — districts that included a broader mix of political opinions among the voting population, or at least a voting population not specifically filtered to reelect the incumbent.

California’s Democratic legislators, most of whom opposed the redistricting plan, brought this reform upon themselves (to be sure, with some Republicans’ legislative help). In fact the 2010 reform had been percolating for years, since 2001. That’s when the legislature engineered new yet classically gerrymandered district maps that met the technical requirements of the law but violated it in effect, as its purpose was the traditional one of protecting incumbents. This favored Democrats who, with the exception of one year in the mid-1990s, have controlled both houses of the California legislature for forty years. Fed up, the voters responded by taking the redistricting out of legislators’ hands. Or so they thought.

One thing should always be born in mind when thinking about reform politics: the opposition doesn’t necessarily go away, it just changes to meet the new conditions. According to ProPublica, California’s voters are pretty much back to where they started (Pierce and Larson).  The underlying problem — money again — was that the California Citizens Redistricting Commission was seriously underfunded to begin with. The selection process to get on the Commission was arbitrary, indeed random (it used a lottery-ball system) and counterproductive to its own interests: the ballot initiative specified that almost anyone with hands-on political experience was disqualified from the outset. Anyone who had donated $2000 per year to a candidate was disqualified. Anyone who had lived with a candidate for over thirty days was disqualified. But its opposing players within the Democratic party establishment were well paid and highly experienced politically. Charged specifically with biasing the redistricting to Democratic party guidelines, they were fully informed and equipped with the latest data-gathering software tools. By contrast, individual commissioners were operating on a comparative shoestring, maintaining their regular employment as best they could while earning $300 per day when working for the Commission. With thirty-five public hearing taking place over three months, individual commissioners faced a brutal work schedule, one claiming to have worked 18 hours a day with three days off during a five-month period. The map-drawing project itself was funded at a little over $1 million, a sum too small to include the hearing-transcription costs, so the transcription record is now incomplete.

Those hearings were key. As opposed to their covert Democratic opposition, commissioners had decided to bar any statistical data that would tell them how a proposed boundary change would effect a particular district’s candidate or party. Instead, the testimony collected at the hearings was the only information the Commission had and would use. It would base the new district-lines on testimony only from private citizens of those communities themselves — how they perceived a change or non-change in the lines would affect them personally and/or professionally. In sum, to avoid the taint of working openly with political parties and other influential entities, the Commission ended up working unknowingly for them, ignorant of the very census-data that would have warned them of potential conflicts. By carrying purity of execution to extremes, the non-partisan Commission played into the Democrats’ hands.

What they did with those hands was entirely predictable. Democratic legislators and their own operatives secretly arranged for both local and non-local residents to bear witness in favor of district lines that agreed with the needs of that district’s Democratic representative. These individuals did not disclose their ties to the Democratic party. In one particularly egregious example, one witness, raised in Idaho and living in Sacramento, testified about proposed boundary changes to “her” San Gabriel Valley district. All of this was due to the fact that the Commission did not have the authority to collect testimony under oath.

As a result (and census data to the contrary) there was no relevant demographic shift represented in the new districts. The Democratic incumbents got what they bought and paid for, and the Republicans were absent from the process, due mainly to the same lack of ability and insight that has kept them a minority party in the California legislature since Ronald Reagan was starring as Governor in 1970. My conclusion is that the new open primary system did not effectively change California’s political system at all, and that the redistricting process remains essentially out of the hands  of the voters. Barring an entirely unlikely change in our form of state government, redistricting probably always will be out of their hands.

Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act

California’s open primary tries to go in the other direction: instead of attempting to engineer a reduction in political influence, it deliberately seeks to increase it and spread it out. The technical method is to encourage higher levels of voting in primary elections, freeing registered voters of any party to vote for any candidate of their choice by giving every voter the same ballot instead of allocating ballots based on voter party affiliation. In other words, it effectively ends party primaries (Schrag). This clearly reduces the clout of political parties, who in consequence either dislike or actively “despise”  the change from the previous “modified closed primary” system (Cillizza). Their claim, not without legal foundation, is that some forms of the open primary infringe on their constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of association, and that California’s does as well. The courts have ruled that California’s does not, but future legal challenges on related grounds are certain. (A previous attempt at an open “blanket primary” system in California was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2000.)

Unlike the Redistricting Commission’s specific goal, the open primary has a wider ambition of electing more moderates to state senate and assembly posts, specifically in response to the 2009 budgetary stalemate. That stalemate was caused, in the opinion of many experts and laymen alike, by the intransigence of radicals on both sides of the political fence, which is to say the increasing radicalization of moderates within both parties compelled to chose sides in an increasingly ideological standoff with no solution in sight. (Students of the drama will recall during the last few years the reluctance of both state and national Democrats to cut spending and the reluctance of state and national Republicans to increase taxes and close loopholes.)

The goal is that open primaries will either — depending on your point of view — reduce the primacy of corporate and  big-donor contributions; or make it easier for the public’s own aggregate of smaller contributions to matter more, by ramping up reasons for more moderate voters to get involved in the first place. Harvesting young and first-time older voters via a new election process is one possible way to accomplish the latter, but it’s only half the battle. They must be harvested specifically for the new primary elections. That didn’t happen on Tuesday, June 5, when only a fraction of eligible voters showed up — as little as four million. One simply cannot draw firm conclusions about the future from so small a turnout. Engineering a new kind of primary will be useless, unless enough of a new kind of primary voter takes part in them.

The assumption, one that provided the major foundation for then-Governor Schwarzenegger’s support of the top-two open primary, was that there are in fact substantially more moderate voters to find, as indicated by various ongoing polls and demographic studies. But such numbers may turn out to be an ever-receding statistic mirage, depending on how the state’s most pressing problems of employment, budgets, and illegal immigration are handled in the months and years ahead, both at the state and federal level. If Sacramento and Washington continue to let events and trends spiral out of control, they may end up radicalizing the very moderates they seek to recruit, thus adding fuel to the flames of legislative intransigence.         “[Proposition 14] will not solve all the problems. But it will change a lot,” Schwarzenegger was quoted saying after Prop 14’s win (McKinley). But there is little evidence of that, at least so far.     In the June 9, 2012 issue of the Los Angeles Times, we can perhaps get a glimpse of what at least some of those changes will be, changes not anticipated by Schwarzenegger: delayed results due to fifteen unsettled contests, a significant jump from previous elections’ three of four (Merl). The increase is apparently due to the fact that now, post-reform, the gaps separating candidates’ tallies aren’t large enough to decide the outcome early on. Totals with 1- or 2-point differences have suddenly became more common.

This may be the first of what will be a series of unintended consequences, some relatively minor (like the above one) and some not. Regardless, we know that important national-scale events can prove decisive in state elections, primary or general, by their absence as well as their presence. If the recession gets worse in the U.S. because the European Union tanks and takes the Euro with it, then we may be sure that illegal immigration will not be the hot-button issue it once was in California. Unemployment will be the hot-button issue instead. Such forces are stronger than the techniques used to define home districts and micro-manage how people vote in them.

At the start of this paper I asked whether redistricting would affect the open primary system, pointing out that both are essentially two sides of the same coin. It seemed too obvious a point to mention. But, it turns out there are unintended consequences here too that are not at all obvious, at least in the view of one high-profile blogger (Singiser).

We know by now that money is at least as essential in reform politics as in the old fashioned kind. The fear among some Democrats is that the open-primary reform may reallocate funds that should go to Democrats running against Republicans. Instead of being constructively spent in such races, the money will instead be spent on Democrats running against Democrats. The case of the “Shberman Showdown” is cited, where two Democrats, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, are vying for the liberal and wealthy 30^th Congressional District, located on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The likeliest scenario is that both Berman and Sherman will emerge as the two leading candidates. They have spent more than $5.5 million to get where they are, and more will have to be spent to keep one of them there. That’s money that could have been contributed to other Democrats’ races. (It is evidently not likely that the same thing could happen to Republicans, at least for this year: the Republicans likely to meet head-on are contending for a district that requires very light funding, relatively speaking.) We can be sure of one thing: the open primary still requires big money, non-relatively speaking, to win, even if overall the number of primary voters is, for now, too low to be a predictor of general election success.

What Has Been Accomplished?

In fact nobody really knows what has been accomplished and the future cannot be predicted, except that in time these latest reforms will give rise to a new cycle of the-same-only-different policies. As for now, opinions vary widely (The Editors). The premise behind both the redistricting and open primary reforms is that they can make a fundamental difference to the way laws are made and the way that candidates get elected. But the public loses interest, and political parties and their operatives know this and count on it, which is clear from my discussion of the redistricting “reform” that has apparently already failed in its goal. The public imagined that, since equal population is the primary criteria for reapportioning electoral districts, the process of changing it should be fairly straightforward. They voted on a new procedure and then walked away, leaving the foxes to allocate the hens behind the scenes as always. Hope is blind.

It may be that the real problem is the way states like California are designed. The state is deliberately organized to be governed like a republic. Its success in that kind of governance is mirrored by how the Congressional impasse in Washington is mirrored by the state legislative impasse in Sacramento. But however it is organized, California has a fundamental dilemma: it must be rich to be what it is. Wealth defines its soul. So it has been since 1849, and so it is today.  Insoluble political problems like the ones we now face indicate that insufficient wealth is being created to overcome problems inherent in the republican model. Unless we can resume building vast new engines of wealth creation, all our procedural reforms will fail. We need another boom.

Sources Cited

Cillizza, Chris. “Political News and Analysis.” The Fix. The Washington Post, n.d. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

McKinley, Jesse. “Calif. Voting Change Could Signal Big Political Shift.” Politics. New York Times, 9 Jun 2012. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

Merl, Jean. “Second-place Finisher Still Undecided in Raft of Races.” LateExtra. Los Angeles Times, 9 Jun 2012. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

Pierce, Olga, and Larson, Jeff. “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission.”Redistricting. ProPublica, 21 Dec 2011. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

Schrag, Peter. “The Opinion Pages.” Will California’s ‘Top Two’ Primary Work? New York Times, 9 Jun 2012. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

Singiser, Steve. “Will this new system inadvertently screw Democrats?” Primary Day, and the brave new world of California politics. Daily Kos, 3 Jun 2012. Web. 10 Jun 2012.

The Editors. “Will California’s ‘Top Two’ Primary Work?” The Opinion Pages. New York Times, 9 June 2012. Web. 10 Jun 2012.