On Monday, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa was declared the winner of a drawn-out reelection battle. And with his victory, California regained a distinction with which it is quite familiar. For the fourth time in 12 years, not a single one of the state’s 50-plus congressional districts switched parties. Just as in 2010, 2008 and 2004, every single seat returned to the party that previously controlled it. And if you exclude the post-redistricting election of 2012, only two California districts have flipped parties since 2004. That’s two out of 314 individual races — 0.6 percent. (And one of the two was a fluke in which the GOP briefly held a blue-leaning seat thanks to two Republicans advancing to the general election in 2012.) So why do we bring this up now? Well, partly because it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be this way again. Before the last round of redistricting, Californians voted for a redistricting commission to take the process out of lawmakers’ hands.
It was a pet project of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), and it’s something other states could be looking at before the 2020 Census and the redrawing of the country’s lines that will follow it.
A big part of the increasing push for commissions and other redistricting reforms is the idea that these measures could root out gerrymandering — the partisan-inspired crafting of congressional district lines — and thereby increase competition and decrease partisanship in Congress.
But in the end, California might be Exhibit A in the limits of redistricting reform’s impact on competition. The state’s population is very segmented, and drawing competitive districts isn’t easy given the self-sorting that people have done.
Full Article: California just proved how cracking down on gerrymandering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – The Washington Post.