This
spring, a group of California Democrats gathered at a modern, airy office
building just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The meeting was House members
only — no aides allowed — and the mission was seemingly impossible.
In previous years, the party had
used its perennial control of California’s state Legislature to draw district
maps that protected Democratic incumbents. But in 2010, California voters put
redistricting in the hands of a citizens’ commission where decisions would be
guided by public testimony and open debate.
The question facing House
Democrats as they met to contemplate the state’s new realities was delicate:
How could they influence an avowedly nonpartisan process? Alexis Marks, a House
aide who invited members to the meeting, warned the representatives that
secrecy was paramount. “Never say anything AT ALL about redistricting — no
speculation, no predictions, NOTHING,” Marks wrote in an email. “Anything can
come back to haunt you.”
In the weeks that followed,
party leaders came up with a plan. Working with the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee — a national arm of the party that provides money and support
to Democratic candidates — members were told to begin “strategizing
about potential future district lines,” according to another email.
The citizens’ commission had
pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves,
not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats
surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and
community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with
the party’s interests.
When they appeared before the
commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did
not disclose their ties to the party. One woman who purported to represent the Asian
community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in
rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento.
In one instance, party
operatives invented a local group to advocate for the Democrats’ map.
California’s Democratic representatives
got much of what they wanted from the 2010 redistricting cycle, especially in
the northern part of the state. “Every member of the Northern California
Democratic Caucus has a ticket back to DC,” said one enthusiastic memo written
as the process was winding down. “This is a huge accomplishment that should be
celebrated by advocates throughout the region.”
Statewide, Democrats had been expected to
gain at most a seat or two as a result of
redistricting. But an internal party projection says that the Democrats will
likely pick up six or seven seats in a state where the party’s voter
registrations have grown only marginally.
“Very little of this is due to
demographic shifts,” said Professor Doug Johnson, a fellow at the Rose Institute in Los
Angeles. Republican areas actually had higher growth than Democratic ones. “By
the numbers, Republicans should have held at least the same number of seats,
but they lost.”
As part of a national look at
redistricting, ProPublica reconstructed the Democrats’ stealth success in
California, drawing on internal memos, emails, interviews
with participants and map analysis. What emerges is a portrait of skilled
political professionals armed with modern mapping software and detailed voter
information who managed to replicate the results of the smoked-filled rooms of
old.
The losers in this once-a-decade
reshaping of the electoral map, experts say, were the state’s voters. The
intent of the citizens’ commission was to directly link a lawmaker’s political fate
to the will of his or her constituents. But as ProPublica’s review makes clear,
Democratic incumbents are once again insulated from the will of the electorate.
Democrats acknowledge that they
faced a challenge in getting the districts they wanted in densely populated,
ethnically diverse Southern California. The citizen commission initially
proposed districts that would have endangered the political futures of several
Democratic incumbents. Fighting back, some Democrats gathered in Washington and
discussed alternatives. These sessions were sometimes heated.
“There was horse-trading
throughout the process,” said one senior Democratic aide.
The revised
districts were then presented to the commission by plausible-sounding witnesses
who had personal ties to Democrats but did not disclose them.
Commissioners declined to
discuss the details of specific districts, citing ongoing litigation. But
several said in interviews that while they were aware of some attempts to
mislead them, they felt they had defused the most egregious attempts.
“When you’ve got so many people
reporting to you or making comments to you, some of them are going to be
political shills,” said commissioner Stanley Forbes, a farmer and bookstore
owner. “We just had to do the best we could in determining what was for real
and what wasn’t.”
Democrats acknowledge the
meetings described in the emails, but said the gatherings “centered on” informing
members about the process. In a statement to ProPublica, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, head
of California’s delegation, said that members,
“as
citizens of the state of California, were well within their rights to make
comments and ensure that voices from communities of interest within their
neighborhoods were heard by the Commission.”
“The
final product voted on by the Commission was entirely out of the hands of the
Members,” said Lofgren. “They, like any other Californian, were able to comment
but had no control over the process.”
“At
no time did the Delegation draw up a statewide map,” Lofgren said. (Read Lofgren’s full statement.)
California’s Republicans were
hardly a factor. The national GOP stayed largely on the sidelines, and
individual Republicans had limited success influencing the commission.
“Republicans didn’t really do
anything,” said Johnson. “They were late to the party, and essentially
non-entities in the redistricting process.”
Fed-up voters create a commission
The once-a-decade redistricting
process is supposed to ensure that every citizen’s vote counts equally.
In reality, politicians and
parties working to advance their own interests often draw lines that make an individual’s
vote count less. They create districts dominated by one party or political
viewpoint, protecting some candidates (typically incumbents) while dooming
others. They can empower a community by grouping its voters in a single
district, or disenfranchise it by zigging the lines just so.
Over the decades, few party
bosses were better at protecting incumbents than California’s Democrats. No
Democratic incumbent has lost a Congressional election in the nation’s most
populous state since 2000.
As
they drew the lines each decade, California’s party bosses worked in secret. But
the oddly shaped districts that emerged from those sessions were visible for
all to see. Bruce Cain, a legendary mapmaker who now heads the University of
California’s Washington center, once drew an improbable-looking state assembly
district that could not be traversed by car. (It crossed several impassable
mountains.)
Cain proudly
told the story of the district, which was set up for one of the governor’s
friends. Cain said he justified the odd shape by saying it pulled together the
state’s largest population of endangered condors. “It wasn’t legitimate on any
level,” Cain recalled.
The 2010 ballot initiative giving
the citizen commission authority over Congressional districts was sold to
voters as a game changer. Not surprisingly, it was
strenuously opposed by California’s Democrats, who continue to control the Statehouse.
No fewer than 35 Democratic politicians —
including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — and their allies spent a total
of $7 million to campaign against the proposition. The effort included mailings
from faux community groups that derided the commission’s $1 million annual budget
as “bureaucratic
waste.” Despite this effort,
Californians voted 61 percent to 39 percent to wrest federal redistricting from
the hands of state lawmakers.
Immediately, Democrats began
organizing to influence the citizen commission. There were numerous opportunities.
According to civics textbooks,
the aim of redistricting is to group “communities of interest” so that
residents in a city, neighborhood or ethnic group wield political power by
voting together. The commission took an expansive view of this concept, ultimately
defining a “community of interest” as anything from a neighborhood to workers
on the same commute, or even areas sharing “intense beach recreation.”
This gave savvy players an
opening to draw up maps that benefited one party or incumbent and then find —
or concoct — “communities of interest” that justified them.
Democrats
set out to do exactly that.
On
March 16, members of the California delegation gathered at Democratic Party
offices to discuss how to handle redistricting. They agreed that congressmen
from the various regions of California — North, South and Central —
would meet separately to “create a plan of action,” according to an email recounting
the day’s events by Alexis Marks, the House aide. Among the first tasks, Marks
wrote, was determining “how to best organize communities of interest.”
Democrats were already working
“BEHIND THE SCENES” to “get info out” about candidates for the job of
commission lawyer who were viewed as unfriendly. “I’ll keep you in the loop,
but do not broadcast,” Marks wrote.
“The CA delegation has been
broken down into regions that will be discussing redistricting at the member
level,” read another party email from late March. “Members will be asked to present ideas on
both issues” — communities of interest and district lines — “and
will be asked to come to some consensus about how to adopt a regional strategy
for redistricting.”
Over the next several weeks,
California Democrats huddled with Mark Gersh, the party’s top mapmaking guru.
Officially, Gersh works with the Foundation for the Future, a nonprofit whose declared goal
is “to help Democrats get
organized for the fight of the decade; the fight that will determine Democratic
fortunes in your state and in Washington, D.C. for years to come:
Redistricting!”
The foundation is well funded
for this fight. Its supporters include longtime supporters of the Democratic
Party: the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees as well
as the American Association for Justice (previously known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of
America). The
foundation was launched
in 2006 when Nancy Pelosi’s office worked
with both groups to start it.
Neither Gersh nor participants would describe in detail what was discussed at the meetings. But from Marks’ emails and other sources, it is clear that California’s Democrats sat down together to discuss mutually agreeable districts that would protect incumbents.
The value of coordinating efforts to influence the commission cannot be overstated. If each Democrat battled separately for the best district, it was likely that one Congress member’s gain would harm countless colleagues. Creating Congressional districts is a lot like a Rubik’s cube: Each change reshapes the entire puzzle. The Democrats’ plan was to deliver synchronized testimony that would herd the commission toward the desired outcomes. If it worked perfectly, the commissioners might not even know they had been influenced.
Over the summer, Marks sent out
more than 100emails about redistricting, according to multiple recipients of
the messages. According to House records, Marks earned $112,537 in 2010 in her
post as deputy director of the California Democratic delegation. That makes her
a federal employee. But although many of the messages were sent during the work day, a spokesman insisted Marks did so in her
after-hours role as a political staffer for Democrats. They were sent from a
Gmail account. Lofgren’s office did not make Marks available for comment, citing policy that staffers do not speak on the record. Instead, they pointed to Rep. Lofgren’s statement.
Federal employees are not
allowed to do campaign work on government time, or use government resources,
according to House ethics rules.
The emails alerted staff and
legislators when the commission was scheduled to discuss their districts and
they encouraged them to have allies testify to “community of interest” lines
that supported their maps.
Marks told members they would be
asked to raise money for a legal challenge if things didn’t work out. The
delegation, she said, was working with Marc Elias, who heads an
organization called the National Democratic Redistricting Trust. (The trust
shares a website with The Foundation for The Future.)
Last year the trust persuaded the
Federal Election Commission to allow members to raise money
for redistricting lawsuits without disclosing how the money was spent, how much
was raised, and who had given it.
The commission blinds itself
Back in California, the
commission was getting organized. Its first task was to pick commissioners. The
ballot initiative excluded virtually anyone who had any previous political
experience. Run for office? Worked as a staffer or consultant to a political
campaign? Given more than $2,000 to a candidate in any year? “Cohabitated” for more than 30 days in the past year with anyone in
the previous categories? You’re barred.
More than 36,000 people applied.
The state auditor’s office winnowed the applicants to a group of 60 finalists.
Each party was allowed to strike 12 applicants without explanation. Then, the
state used Bingo-style bouncing balls in a cage to pick eight commissioners —
three Republicans, three Democrats and two people whose registration read
“decline to state” (California-speak for independent). The randomly selected commissioners
then chose six from the remaining finalists to complete the panel.
The result was a commission that
included, among others, a farmer, a homemaker, a sports doctor and an
architect. Previous redistrictings had been executed by
political pros with intimate knowledge of California’s sprawling political
geography. The commissioners had little of that expertise — and one of their
first acts was to deprive themselves of the data that might have helped them
spot partisan manipulation.
The law creating the commission
barred it from considering incumbents’ addresses, and instructed it not to draw
districts for partisan reasons.
The commissioners decided to go
further, agreeing not to even look at data that would tell them how prospective
maps affected the fortunes of Democrats or Republicans. This left the commissioners
effectively blind to the sort of influence the Democrats were planning.
One of the mapping consultants
working for the commission warned that it would be difficult to competently
draft district lines without party data. She was overruled.
The lack of political data was
“liberating,” said Forbes, the commissioner. “We had no one to please except
ourselves, based on our best judgment.”
“I
think,” he said, “we did a pretty good job.”
The
commission’s judgments on how to draw lines, Forbes and
others said, was based on the testimony from citizens about communities
of interest.
“We
were provided quite a number of maps from various organizations,” said another
commissioner, attorney Jodie Filkins-Webber. If the groups were basing their
maps on political data to favor one party, “they certainly did not tell us
that.”
“Districts
could have been drawn based on voter registration,” Filkins-Webber said, “but we
would never have known it.”
The
commission received a torrent of advice — a total of 30,000 separate
pieces of testimony and documents. Records suggest the commission never
developed an effective method for organizing it all. The testimony was kept in
a jumble
of handwritten notes and computer files. The commissioners were often
left to recall testimony by memory.
The difficulties in digesting
and weighing the reams of often-conflicting testimony enhanced the value of
people or groups who came bearing draft maps.
“Other people offered testimony;
we offered solutions,” said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry
and Commerce Association, a powerful business group outside Los Angeles that
persuaded the commission to adopt its Congressional map for the San Fernando
Valley.
How Democrats locked
down Northern California
Redistricting is a chess game for people with superb spatial perception.
Sometimes, anchoring a single line on a map can make everything fall into
place.
According to an internal memo, Democrats recognized early on that they
could protect nearly every incumbent in Northern California if they won a few
key battles. First, they had to make sure no district crossed the Golden Gate
Bridge.Then, they had to draw a
new seat that pulled sufficient numbers of Democrats from Contra Costa County into
a district that included Republicans from the San Joaquin Valley.
The man with the most to lose
was Rep. Jerry McNerney, who represented an octopus-shaped district that had
scooped in Democrats from the areas east of San Francisco. McNerney’s prospects
seemed particularly dismal. Early in the year, he made The Washington Post’s national
list of top 10 likely redistricting victims.
Republicans
moved first, attempting to create a district that would keep San Joaquin County
whole and pick up conservative territory to the south. But then a previously
unknown group calling itself OneSanJoaquin entered the fray.
OneSanJoaquin
described itself as a nonprofit, but records show it is not registered as such
in any state. It has no identifiable leadership but it does have a Facebook
page, called OneSanJoaquin, created by the Google account OneSanJoaquin.
The
page was posted in early April, just as the commission began taking testimony. Its
entries urged county residents to download maps and deliver pre-packaged testimony.
On the surface, the OneSanJoaquin
page seemed to be serving Republicans’ interests. But Democrats were one move
ahead and understood that a united valley would inevitably lead to a
Democratic-leaning district. (Republicans apparently did not understand that federal
voting rights requirements ruled out their proposed district, since it would
have interfered with the Latino district to the south. That misconception was
encouraged by the maps on the OneSanJoaquin page, which were drawn to make this
look possible.)
In fact, the only way to make a
district with “one San Joaquin” was to pull in the Democrats in eastern Contra
Costa — the far reaches of San Francisco’s Bay-area liberals.
The author of OneSanJoaquin’s
maps was not identified on the Facebook page, but ProPublica has learned it was
Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant hired by McNerney.
Transcripts show that more than
a dozen people delivered or sent the canned testimony to the commission, which
accepted it without question. There’s no sign that commissioners were aware
some of the letters had been downloaded from the mysterious OneSanJoaquin page.
After the commission finished,
McNerney announced he was moving to the newly created San Joaquin district to
run for re-election. It was a huge improvement for him. In 2010, he barely won
his district, beating his opponent by just one point. If the 2010 election were
re-run in his new district, he would have won by seven points, according to the
Democrats’ internal analysis. (McNerney’s office did not respond to requests for
comment.)
Summing up the story, an
internal Democratic memo said the GOP had been decisively out-maneuvered “Their
hope was to create a Republican Congressional seat,” the memo said. “Their plan
backfired.”
“McNerney ends up with safer
district than before,” Mitchell’s firm tweeted, after McNerney announced his
candidacy in his new district. “Wow! How did he do that?”
An under-funded commission
While players attempting to
influence the process were well funded, the commission struggled with a lack of
time and money. They responded, in
part, by reducing citizens’ opportunities for input.
The budget for the whole map
drawing undertaking was just over $1 million. At first, the commission had its public
hearings transcribed — then the money ran out and they stopped.
The commissioners received $300 per day as compensation and were eligible for reimbursement of travel and out of pocket expenses. Most kept their day
jobs at the same time they tried to juggle their roles as commissioners.
It was a grueling schedule, with 35 public hearings taking place over just three months. “I had three days off between” April and August, said Commissioner Filkins-Webber, who maintained her legal practice while serving. “I was working basically on average18 hours a day.”
The
commissioners also had to deal with public anger. The Tea Party in California
decided to use the hearings as a forum to protest the Voting Rights Act, for
instance, and at one hearing got so rowdy that police intervened.
Experts
hired by the commission to actually draw the maps were also overworked and
underpaid. Half a dozen times the meeting transcripts contain references to map
drawers working overnight to prepare maps.
Overwhelmed
by the task at hand, the commission decided to essentially shut down public
participation halfway through the process. After the first round of drafts, which
were widely criticized and abandoned, the commission stopped releasing formal
drafts. More importantly, commissioners stopped holding hearings, which meant
the next draft was prepared without public input.
The
commission moved its meetings to Sacramento, not far from where party bosses
had once gathered in secret to set the lines. The commission’s meetings were
webcast to the public. But only those with the resources and time could
participate.
“You
have to ask yourself, who has the money to send people up to Sacramento like
that,” said Eugene Lee, voting rights project director
at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which was active in organizing
grassroots participation in the redistricting process.
“We
didn’t have the money to do that. No way.”
The
commission released no further drafts. In July, it made public a “draft final.”
Voters had two weeks to submit comments before it became final. Most of those
comments came from insiders who had been closely watching the Sacramento
meetings.
Southern California Democrats also win
For
those who could stay engaged, the Sacramento phase of the commission’s work proved
rewarding. One politician who benefited
was Southern California Congresswoman Judy Chu.
When
it appeared that Chu would get an unfavorable district late in the game, a
group with ties to the congresswoman went before the commission in Sacramento and
convinced the commissioners to draw a favorable map that included her political
stronghold, a town called Rosemead. Chu enjoyed broad support in Rosemead,
where she was first elected to the school board in 1992 and later served in the state assembly.
The
group, which called itself the Asian American Education Institute, worked with
Paul Mitchell, the same consultant who helped engineer the triumph of Northern
California Democrats.
Records show that crucial last-minute testimony in favor of Chu’s district was
delivered by Jennifer Wada, who told commissioners she was representing the
institute and the overall Asian-American community. Wada did not mention
that she lives and works as a registered lobbyist in Sacramento, 400 miles from
the district, or that she grew up in rural Idaho, where most of her family still
lives. Wada says she was
hired by the institute to “convey their concerns
about Asian and Pacific Islander representation” to the commission.
The second witness was Chris
Chaffee, who said he was a consultant for the institute and an employee of
Redistricting Partners, Mitchell’s firm.
Commissioners accepted this map
without asking a basic question: Who, exactly, was the
Asian American Education Institute representing?
The group’s tax records show it
had no full-time employees. Its website is barebones, and clicking on the “get
active” button on the home page
leads nowhere, simply returning users to the home page.
There’s another interesting
feature of the Web site: the domain name is registered
to a man named Bill Wong, a political consultant who has worked on multiple
Chu campaigns, as well as her husband’s successful bid for Judy Chu’s old state
assembly seat. Chu paid Wong $5,725 for consulting work in 2010, FEC records
show. Her husband, Mike Eng, donated $4,500 to the Asian American Education
Institute in 2010 and 2011.
The institute, said
Wong, “argued to keep communities of interest together. Since Rep. Chu has been
a strong advocate for Asian communities, it would make sense for her to
represent them.” Wong added that he “discussed
redistricting with a number of Asian-American
legislators.”
An email obtained by ProPublica
shows Amelia Wang, Chu’s chief of staff, telling Chu and Bill Wong about testimony
submitted by another Asian group, Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans for Fair
Redistricting, which also intervened at the last minute to offer similar maps.
In case that didn’t do the trick, Mitchell himself went before the commission,
urging the commissioners to accept the maps submitted by the institute (his
employer) and the coalition.
And that’s what the commission
did, incorporating proposed lines for both groups and drawing a map that included Rosemead in
Chu’s new district.
Wang told ProPublica that
Chu’s office and the institute “did communicate about keeping communities of
interest together, including Rosemead. However, Rep. Chu did not hire Bill Wong
for redistricting or to testify on her behalf before the commission.”
“Rep. Chu has
represented a united Rosemead city since 2001,” said Wang, “it would have been
a tragic mistake to divide it.”
Though
the process turned out well for Chu, it didn’t work out so well for the town of
South El Monte.
To
make room for Rosemead in Chu’s district, South El Monte — 85 percent Latino
— got bumped into another district across the mountains that is much less
Latino, and much more affluent.
The
town’s mayor, Luis Aguinaga, say the new lines “don’t make sense.” South El
Monte is now split off from sister communities in the San Gabriel Valley —
including North El Monte and El Monte.
“We’re
always on the same side, always fighting for the same issues,” Aguinaga said.
“On this side of the San Gabriel Valley we have a voice. If we’re apart it will
be much harder to be heard.”
Other communities lost, too.
Outside
Los Angeles, residents of what’s known as Little Saigon begged the commission
to undo what they saw as decades of discrimination and put the U.S.’s largest
Vietnamese community together in one district. Instead, the community was split
in two — a result of testimony by supporters of Rep. Loretta Sanchez,
including a former
staffer and one
of her wedding guests, to get her a safe district. A large section of Little Saigon ended
up in a district with Long Beach, a town that is 1 percent Vietnamese.
“Residents who live in Little
Saigon share the same needs, but if they’re in two different districts they may
not be represented,” said Tri Ta, a City Council member from the area.
“This district is characterized
by the Port of Long Beach,” the commission writes in its final report, “one of
the world’s busiest seaports and the area’s largest employer.”
“It does not make sense to put the
area known as Little Saigon in a district with Long Beach,” Ta said. “The two
areas are distinctively different.”
“Congresswoman Sanchez believed strongly throughout the redistricting process that the population growth of the Latino community should be accurately reflected in the newly drawn congressional districts,” said Adrienne Elrod, Sanchez’s Chief of Staff, in a statement, “She’s glad that members of the Orange County community shared her views, and as a result, was pleased to see them take an active role.”
Paul Mitchell, the consultant
whose work had such a large impact on the commission’s decisions, said voters
benefited from the work done by him and others deeply involved in the process.
The commissioners, he said, “knew some of the testimony
was being fabricated by outside groups. But what were they to do? They couldn’t
create a screen of all testimony and ferret out all the biases.”
The work he did on behalf of his diverse group of clients, he said, “created better maps
— regardless of if they came with the additional benefit of helping some
local city, union, or incumbent that was the client,” Mitchell said.
“My
only regret is that we didn’t do more.”
