Tomorrow morning, we will get the first 8 names of the 14 member redistricting panel.  The state auditor will randomly draw 3 Democrats, 3 Republicans, and 2 DTS/Others to serve on the panel. (Hey…look at that…it doesn’t match registration. Must be good to be a Republican and overrepresented by 20%.)  Those panelists will select the final 6 members.

The redistricting nominees, 36 of them in all, are a pretty interesting bunch.  You can find the all the details of the nominees here and a good summary of some of the notable names from John Myers here.  Myers points out what we had all been saying the entire time: it’s not going to be a very diverse group at all.

Demographically speaking, most remaining applicants are either white or Latino; most are in Los Angeles County; and most have an income between $75,000 and $250,000. (Capitol Notes)

After the first eight are selected, you have to imagine diversity will be a big part of the goals of grabbing the last six members.  But, beyond the question of ethnic diversity, the diversity of incomes is probably the more troublesome matter.  This panel will be a fairly well-off panel that doesn’t have the accountability that comes with having to scour for votes. That’s good and bad of course. However, missing the perspective of those who are not economically comfortable is a gaping whole in this process.

There are other holes to be found as well.  Notably, there is nobody from our largest city, Los Angeles.  Also, there is only one member of a minor party, (the Green Party), and no members of any of the other minor parties.

We’ll see what we come up with, but in the end, this whole process seems to be overblown and ridiculous. We’re spending an order of magnitude more money on this so that we can have “more square shaped districts”.  Seems like a waste of money.

Also, I’ll be waiting on Texas to do this as well.

Over at the San Berndardino Sun, they have what passes for an article on the redistricting situation.  It starts with one premise, other states saw electoral upheavel, and maybe California was the exception with a Democratic surge, but there should have been some seats changing hands. And that’s all the fault of gerrymandering.

“Other parts of the country have experienced electoral upheavals, and we have not,” said Derek Cressman, the Western states operations director for good-government group Common Cause. “Here in California, our Legislature has an approval rating of either 10 percent or 13 percent, depending on which poll you look at, and yet on (Election Day) not a single incumbent in the California state Legislature was unseated.”

Cressman and other political observers say there’s a clear reason California’s congressional and legislative seats seem nearly immune from political swings: gerrymandering, a problem that could disappear in 2012.(SB Sun_

Except, there is one big problem here. The good government groups and the media’s infatuation with the concept of redistricting reform and “gerrymandering” won’t change the simple fact of California’s shifting demographics. The reason only one legislative seat changed hands? Demographics.

Let’s be honest about this, rather than playing with some sort of grand vision about what Prop 11 will do.  First, let’s go back to the ranked criteria of Prop 11:

   * Districts shall comply with the US Constitution, including equal population requirements.

   * Districts shall comply with the Voting Rights Act.

   * Districts shall be geographically contiguous.

   * The geographic integrity of any city, county, or city and county, neighborhoods, or communities of interest shall be respected.

   * Communities of interest shall not be defined as relations with incumbents, candidates, or parties.

   * Districts shall be compact.

   * To the extent possible, after the above criteria have been satisfied, districts shall be nested.

Is competitive in there somewhere?  Did I miss it? Well, one could argue that excluding connections to parties or candidates means that there will be competitive districts, but the the first interest is that they are geographically tight.  And therein lies the rub, and the truth comes out that what some of these players in this movement, Schwarzenegger and the right-leaning Rose Institute really want was more Republicans in the legislature.

But Johnson said voters simultaneously elected Democrats and showed conservative tendencies, approving the Republican-favored Proposition 26, which makes it harder for lawmakers to raise fees.

“I think if we had more competitive districts, there would have been a number of Republican pickups,” Johnson said. “Republicans did better than they usually do, but the districts still protected Democrats.”(SB Sun)

But looking back at reality, voters gave large victories to every statewide Democrat, save one race that is still being processed. More noticeably, they rejected Meg Whitman’s outrageous spending to tell her flat out, her vision might be right for Texas, but California is different.  California voters generally lean progressive, but comparing Prop 26 to actual political leanings is expecting too much out of voters that just don’t have the time to figure out what it means.  Perhaps they might have voted one way or the other had they spent the time to understand what it really meant, but as it was, all the information that they were getting on 26 came from Chevron and Philip Morris.  That is hardly a bellwether of political leanings.

The underlying data just doesn’t support the argument of the Rose Institute’s Doug Johnson, or of Common Cause, or really any of the goo-goos.  The 800lb. gorilla that is being completely ignored is that Californians have clearly sorted ourselves. If you draw tight districts, you get districts that are strongly partisan. That’s the deal.  David Latterman at Fall Line Analytics has done some great precinct by precinct analysis of the state. And as you can see, this is a very iedologically segregated state.  The Progressives dominate the coast (where a majority of the state’s population resides, and it generally gets more conservative as you head east.

The net result will be maybe a few additional tossup seats, maybe up to 5 in the assembly and 3 or 4 in the Senate.  Congress would slot somewhere in between there.  In the net, the Bay Area and LA are going to keep electing progressive Democrats, and the Central Valley is going to keep electing right-wing Republicans.  And on the fringes there, you might make one seat that switches occasionally.  But we’ll continue to see incumbency (of candidate, not party) to reign supreme. Name ID holds great power in these races.  But Common Cause just spent years of its existence to change the composition of a small handful of seats, seats that, in the current political environment won’t make a huge difference anyway.

Congratulations on your big wins on 20 and 27.  I’d like to invite you to celebrate with the world’s smallest cupcake.

Incumbent Democratic Congress members Jerry McNerney and Jim Costa each had some very long election nights. But while it hasn’t been easy, the good money is now on both of them sticking around another two years.

McNerney:

“With the vast majority of votes tallied, the results are clear. Congressman McNerney now has an insurmountable lead,” McNerney campaign manager Doug Greven said in a news release. (IBA)

Costa:

Fresno Democrat Jim Costa declared victory Wednesday in a grueling battle to keep the 20th Congressional District seat after he took a 1,200-vote lead over Republican Andy Vidak, a political neophyte from Hanford.

“This has been a hard-fought campaign, obviously, but now it appears as if it is over,” Costa said at a news conference.

Costa made his announcement after Fresno County elections officials released an updated vote count that put him ahead for the first time.()

Of course, there are a few votes left to count in both of these districts, but the math is just rough on both Harmer and Vidak.  The votes left are likely to favor the Democrats, making those numbers up seems extremely unlikely.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF) is set to announce his candidacy for mayor in just a few minutes at San Francisco City Hall:

State Sen. Leland Yee plans to take out papers today for his likely run for San Francisco mayor.

Forming an “exploratory committee” will allow Yee to start campaigning and raising money for next year’s race. He just got through spending $1.2 million on his all-but-uncontested re-election campaign.

“We needed to keep people informed on what the senator had been doing,” said campaign manager Jim Stearn. (SF Chronicle)

With Gavin Newsom winning election to Lt. Governor, the big question now is who will become Mayor in January when Newsom moves up to Sacramento.   Apparently the process will be starting sooner than expected, with the Board of Supervisors already looking around for a replacement.

Going beyond the interim question, there is likely to be a fair bit of identity politics. There will be a few groups looking to make history, first Chinese-American mayor in SF, first gay mayor, etc. Oh, and there’s that lingering progressive – vs – moderate debate.  The interim mayor selection is just the beginning.

Barbara Boxer won by about nine points, but that’s not for lack of trying of the right-wing interests to boot her out. Over at California Watch, Chase Davis takes a look at the IEs against Boxer:

The Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling earlier this year helped major corporations and other interest groups spend more than $5 million on California’s Senate race without disclosing their contributors, according to independent spending reports analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Ten months ago, when the high court handed down Citizens United, effectively allowing businesses and trade groups to contribute unlimited sums to federal elections, the punditocracy was eager to predict an unprecedented flood of secret interest-group cash that would soon flow into competitive elections nationwide.

Many of those predictions have come true. In the months since, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has emerged as exhibit A in the ruling’s predicted consequences, contributing millions of dollars to primarily Republican candidates while taking advantage of new legal covers to keep the sources of its contributions secret. (CalWatch)

In all, there was about eleven million dollars of these direct campaign ads lobbed up against Boxer.  You can be the judge on effectiveness, perhaps they did move the needle a little bit. But in the end, I guess it is just as well that this money was spent in California, rather than other races.  The Chamber’s five million bucks in secret money are the most egregious, and there should be disclosure rules, but the money isn’t going to slow without some sort of constitutional amendment to bring our democracy back to, you know, democracy rather than plutocracy.

But in California we have essentially had the Citizens United Scheme for years now.  While we have a more robust disclosure system than the federal government now has, we have allowed essentially unlimited independent expenditures in state races.  This is of course the reason that you see many races where IEs outspend both major candidates. It is why we have been stuck with a legislature dominated by one interest group or another dating back to Hiram Johnson’s era.

It hasn’t worked particularly well in California, and Citizens United only added to the inordinate power of the wealthy.  With the DISCLOSE act flailing in Congress, don’t expect any major changes anytime soon.

Being that the only thing that is clear is that Speaker Pelosi will hand over the gavel to a slightly orange man from Ohio, there are many questions left to resolve.  While the common wisdom, both in DC and San Francisco, was that if she lost the gavel, she would retire in the near future, that doesn’t seem to be automatic at all.

David Dayen has a great post on the subject at FireDogLake wrapping up some of the tea leaves:

This doesn’t totally break precedent, Sam Rayburn stuck around after losing the Speaker’s gavel in 1947 and 1953, and he eventually got it back both times.

The only people who don’t want her back are some scattered Blue Dogs who don’t like the way she passes actual legislation and gets things done. Heath Shuler wants to run for Minority Leader against her, and Jim Matheson (D-UT) thinks she should step down. But the Blue Dogs are decimated after this cycle, and can’t really dictate the actions of the caucus.

The second interview Pelosi gave after the election was to Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post, which says quite a bit there. She said she has received a positive response from members who want her to stay on.

As Robert pointed out, while she hasn’t been able to accomplish everything we would have hoped, her record is stellar.  She pushed every major goal, with the exception of immigration reform, through the House. And honestly, by the time we got around to immigration reform, she had been burned by the Senate one too many times.

This is the Speaker that practically carried health care reform on her back. This is the Speaker that fought George W Bush, honestly but voraciously.  It’s hard to point to any other House member that can do what she has done for so long, so effectively.  In fact, when you take a look at the Democratic roster, it is hard to imagine anyone else being as effective as her.  2012 is a different environment, but Nancy Pelosi is our best choice to lead Democrats back to the majority.

DailyKos has a set up a petition to retain Speaker Pelosi in leadership.

UPDATE by Robert: Pelosi has indeed announced she will run for minority leader:

Driven by the urgency of creating jobs & protecting #hcr, #wsr, Social Security & Medicare, I am running for Dem Leader.

This is great news. She has almost certainly counted the votes. It’s a sign that the Democratic caucus plans to keep on its path instead of turning to the right as some idiots suggest.

I haven’t really discussed this very often, and maybe it isn’t the most critical item on the ballot this year, but Prop 21 has a special place in my heart.  Here’s what we said about it in our Endorsements:

Prop 21: YES This is as sensible a ballot proposition as we’ve ever seen. It increases the vehicle license fee by a mere $18/year, and in return Californians get to protect and improve their state parks, ensuring they remain open and that the maintenance backlog is finally address – as well as giving all Californians access to all state parks and beaches free of charge. Some people whine about “ballot box budgeting” but here’s the problem: as long as the 2/3rds rule exists for budget and taxes, the legislature will remain incapable of producing good budgets, and voters will have to step in from time to time to protect our priorities. Further, Prop 21 actually helps the general fund by freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars each year to fund other programs, since the state parks will now have their own funding source. This is also a smart way to show Californians that spending money for public services is a good idea, since they’ll get to see and enjoy the fruits of their $18/year VLF increase. Prop 21 deserves your yes vote.

I’ve been pretty much in love with our state parks system since the moment I set foot in the state.  I first spent a summer in Orange County while in law school, and I made it a point to visit as many of the local state beaches as possible.  I’ve done the same in Northern California.  Last year we drove both north and south along the coast with our dogs.  Our pugs experienced the pure joy they only seem to get from a trip to the beach, on the coast at spots from Malibu to Pismo Beach, Santa Cruz to Mendocino.  And I have always loved the mountains.  It is really hard to beat a hike in the foothills with the Sierras looming over you.  Well, looking down from the Sierras isn’t too bad either.

Only these days it is getting kind of sad.  Strewn across the parks are signs for campsites saying they are closed due to budgetary constraints, and restrooms with no service.  California is the most beautiful place in the world, and we are taking that away from our children, and from our selves.  With each cut, with each minor closure, we shut ourselves off from what Mother Nature has bestowed upon us.  Surely I’m not the only one who came here precisely because California is so beautiful.

And Prop 21 gives us more than just a chance to prop up our state park system for the long haul, which it will do, but it also opens up the door to millions of additional visitors.  While Californians had already paid for the state parks, there is no better way to take ownership of them than by supporting Prop 21.  Ballot box budgeting isn’t a great thing in the abstract, and it would be amazing if we could get beyond that.  But in the real world, we have a few opportunities to raise revenue for things that are important to all Californians.  

I hope we can come together tomorrow to tell those who say that we must cut back, that no, Californians understand that some things have more value than just a few bucks on a tax bill. And for me, our state parks are a gift that we should not surrender so lightly.

Please join me by voting Yes on Prop 21.