The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week tagged Rep. Dan Lungren as one of its prime targets in November, but the former GOP candidate for governor probably has more to fear from the state Legislature than from the voters in the Third Congressional District.
If Lungren does survive the election, look for the Democrat-controlled Legislature to paint a bulls-eye on his back in the redistricting that will follow this year’s census, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looking on approvingly.
Complaints – along with outright threats – from Pelosi and other California congressional leaders convinced backers of the Prop. 11 redistricting reform measure in 2008 to leave the congressional seats out of the initiative.
That means that while a pointedly non-political citizens’ commission will draw the new district lines for state legislators, it’s back to the same partisan drawing board when it comes to Congress.
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The chance to redistrict someone like Lungren out of his district is a matter of simple fairness, Democrats said when Prop. 11 was headed for the ballot.
“If you’re going to depoliticize the redistricting process for California, you ought to depoliticize it for (Republican-friendly) Texas and Georgia as well,” San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren said back then.
Translation: If we can use redistricting to carve out some more Democratic seats, well, that’s politics.
Lungren’s surprisingly narrow victory in 2008 virtually guaranteed he was going to face a serious 2010 challenge in the district, which snakes east from the outskirts of Vacaville through Elk Grove and Folsom in Sacramento County and then through Amador, Calaveras and Alpine counties to the Nevada border.
Tony Quinn, an expert on redistricting, suggested in this space last October that after this year Lungren could find his district redrawn to fill it with Yolo County Democrats, leaving him to fight it out with his GOP neighbor, Tom McClintock, for a Fourth Congressional District that could find itself with a bunch more Republicans than it has now.
If the Democrats’ two other California targets, Mary Bono Mack of Palm Springs and Ken Calvert of Corona, survive in November, they also could find themselves watching Democrats in the Legislature create modern art in an effort to draw lines that would make their districts much tougher to win.
According to a population study done by the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, Bono Mack and Calvert’s districts are the two largest in the state, which means they each stand to lose around 200,000 residents when the new district lines are drawn. Even in a Republican-friendly area like Riverside County and its environs, there are plenty of opportunities for partisan redistricting magic when that many people are being shuffled around a congressional district.
Of course, in an old-school redistricting like the California congressional map could see, protecting your friends is just as important as smiting your enemies.
For years, Republicans have steamed at the thought of Democrat Loretta Sanchez holding a congressional seat in the middle of the GOP stronghold of Orange County.
The Republicans also would like to oust Jerry McNerney from the Bay Area/Central Valley seat he took from seven-term Republican Richard Pombo in 2006.
Time’s running out, though. If the Republicans can’t figure out a way to dump Sanchez and McNerney in November, it’s a guarantee that the legislators in charge of drawing the new congressional map will make both seats as challenger-proof as possible for their fellow Democrats.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.