Party leaders forgo costly campaigns
WASHINGTON (AP) – Gerrie Schipske came within a whisker of winning a Long Beach-based seat in Congress two years ago. She’s back for another try, but this time she has just a few hundred dollars in her campaign account and little more than a prayer of winning. The difference is redistricting, the once-a-decade redrawing of political boundary lines to account for population changes.
More specifically, Schipske’s changed circumstances are the result of an agreement between Democrats and Republicans to take California off the table in this year’s congressional elections.
Fifty incumbents are expected to win re-election, and the millions of dollars the parties would have spent in expensive California media markets can be put to use in other states where advertising is much cheaper.
Of the three districts with no incumbent running, only one – the Central Valley seat currently held by Rep. Gary Condit – is considered at all competitive.
“That was very much a calculation of ours, to have that money available to help in races around the country,” said Rep. Howard Berman, congressional Democrats’ point man on redistricting.
Rep. John Linder, R-Georgia, former chairman of the Republicans’ congressional campaign committee, pointed to races in the Dakotas, Georgia, West Virginia and the Southwest that Republicans could affect with the money they would have poured into California.
“$1 million in each of those races would be huge,” Linder said.
In 2000, candidates spent nearly $20 million in just three hotly contested California races – all Democratic victories over Republican incumbents. Schipske raised $700,000 in losing to Republican Rep. Steve Horn by 1,700 votes.
In that 1999-2000 election cycle, the national Democratic and Republican parties poured $16.5 million into California for campaigns, including the presidential, while the parties’ House campaign committees spent $10 million in the state, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In the current election cycle, the parties and House committees had spent $750,000 in California through the end of March. That spending typically increases as Election Day nears, but the total apparently will be down sharply from 2000.
California Democrats did better than they expected in 2000, gaining four seats.
Rather than try to pick off more Republican incumbents this year, they decided to push for new districts that would allow them to hold onto their 32 seats and pick up the new seat awarded California as a result of its population growth.
With Democrats in control of redistricting, they paid Michael Berman, the congressman’s brother and a redistricting expert, $640,000 – $20,000 a seat – to see that their desires were incorporated into the redistricting bill written by the California Legislature.
They got what they asked for. The Republican Horn was the only casualty of redistricting, and the Democratic portions of his district were used to help create a new Latino district and to improve Rep. Jane Harman’s re-election chances.
Horn retired, although the Democrats preserved the number of GOP districts by drawing up a new seat in the Fresno area with a significant Republican edge.
Schipske was thrown into a more Republican district and a contest against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach.
Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, said voting history and party registration numbers in the new district give Schipske “no dream of knocking off Rohrabacher.”
The candidate is somewhat more hopeful but said she has been frustrated in appeals for campaign money. “Last time, we actually raised money in spite of assessments that we couldn’t win,” she said. Party leaders have directed donors to give elsewhere this time, “and if that nod isn’t forthcoming, it’s very hard to crack that circle of donors,” Schipske said.
Both parties were served in California’s redistricting, Jacobson said. “The Democrats thought they had maxed out on what they could get and keep. Republicans, since Democrats had full control of the process, thought they’d get hurt even worse,” he said.
The result is that California has the largest congressional delegation in the country and a distinct absence of competition that some critics of the state’s redistricting argue will only increase voter apathy.
Allowing lawmakers to draw their own districts, or influence the process, is a “hindrance to a full and strong democracy,” said Ben Bycel, vice president of Common Cause and former executive director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. “It’s no secret that we really have one political party in America and it’s called incumbency.”