At the California Progress Report, there is a back and forth on redistricting between Bill Cavala and Frank Russo that seems to be a good summary of the dynamics in the current redistricting debate in Sacramento. Even better might be a recent online poll at the CA Majority Report which needed but one sentence to highlight the underlying assumptions made by the Democratic Party establishment, asking, “Should CA Democrats back redistricting, even if it means possibly losing majorities in the Capitol?”
But is this a false dichotomy construed from assumptions that have lost relevance, or at least primacy?
In the last redisticting, Democrats ratcheted back on the Phil Burton model with an incumbent protection plan that has resulted in the current stalemate in California, where a single district changing hands is seen as a major occurrence.
In 2006, this “truce” allowed the GOP to retain CA-04, CA-41, and CA-50 — despite outrageous corruption on the part of GOP incumbents. In 2008, for the first time with the current lines, there will be neither a gubernatorial nor senate race to drive GOTV. The lack of competitive congressional and legislative seats could force the Democratic Party presidential nominee to invest in California’s obscenely expensive political economy.
Politics in the next decade will be far different from the Davis/Schwarzenegger years and considering redistricting based on recent history could trap Democrats with a Maginot Line strategy, failing to prepare us for the ramifications of the political transition that has already taken place.
Technology, Geography, & Biological Systems
Our first glimpse of what we will see the next decade actually occurred prior to the last re-districting. In his 2000 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain raised a then-startling $4 million within 48 hours of announcing. While the internet was given the credit, it was primarily telephone contributions that made it an event. Still, technology had circumvented geographic distance.
Since then, the entry barriers to bridging distance have decreased dramatically. Cell phones (many with free evening and weekend long distance) have become ubiquitous. VOIP offers free long distance calls to anyone with a high speed internet connection. The daily use of email has become a social norm. And by the next election a majority of voters will have a minimum of SMS capability via cell phone, with many enjoying the full benefits of the interent — everywhere they go.
In a very important post, Stirling Newberry examines this transition from a mathematical perspective:
A Lévy flight is a random walk where the size of the steps has an infinite variation – they can be small, and tend to be, but there is no limit to how large they can become, and while large steps get smaller and smaller in frequency, they never die out – and where the amount of time between steps is not related to distance. This is the property known as having a heavy tail, and many mathematicians distinguish flights from walks by saying that walks have steps whose time taken is in proportion to the distance travelled. […]
My own interest in Levy flight behavior was sparked at the age of 9, when I noticed that in the north field, plants of a given kind were found in clusters. The pattern implied a mathematics, but mathematics implied something underneath. It would be a long time later that I would understand that there is a locative relationship involved in selection -closer clusters select for individuals with better intra-species competition, that is selfish and sexual signally behavior – while long jump individuals have better inter-species competition. When you are with neighbors of the same kind, holding off the others is easier, but your neighbors are also your competitors for everything including the attention of bees. Alone, you have the grasses and other competitors of other species. This implies that the balance of inter/intra species competition will be influenced by the long jump strategy a species has.[…]
The features of Lévy flight distribution show up with a vengeance with the advent social networking software, because the internet and personal telecom facilitate the “long jumps” needed to create a Levy flight distribution. thus allowing insurgencies to metastasize whether cultural or military – the long jumps radically reduce the distance between two nodes, and the cost of a long jump determines the cohesiveness of the clusters. The cheaper the jump, the greater the cohesion. A random “walk” means that the amount of time for a given move is proportional to distance, a “flight” on the other hand means that all steps take the same amount of time. A “random flight” down Wall Street comes to different conclusions than a random walk – something which Bouchard and Potters detail in their useful text on financial risk and drivative pricing.
As political moves lose proportionality to distance, a geographic emphasis on political campaigning loses efficiency. In other words, the most effective path of influencing a single voter can’t be assumed to be contained within the confines of the district.
Take for instance Charlie Brown’s campaign against Congressman John Doolittle in California’s fourth congressional district. In addition to driving the narrative and volunteers, bloggers raised over $60,000 for Brown via ActBlue. One of the primary sources bloggers relied upon for daily information on the race was a blog named Turn Tahoe Blue. This critical blog is written by a gentleman who lives in….Mannheim, Germany.
Sven chose Tahoe because — I’m not making this up — he was a high school exchange student near Tahoe a decade ago. His introductory post declared:
Since I am not a U.S. citizen and I do not live in the United States I won’t be able to contribute to the efforts of Democrats in the Lake Tahoe area running for office this year. All I have is my laptop and this blog and I will do my best to Turn Tahoe Blue this election year.
Understanding this dynamic is critical to realizing why the 50 State Strategy increases Democratic performance in crucial districts by exciting and inspiring Democrats everywhere.
While most consultants agree that the most effective way to turn out a low-propensity voter is via somebody they know and respect asking them to vote, many still cling to the mistaken assumption that the conduit will live in the same district, or at least another targeted district.
But browse through the “Recent Call” list on your cell phone and I doubt that you will only see people who reside in your assembly district.
While history should be used as a guide, the last half century of redistricting history are less illustrative of what lies ahead than looking at similar periods of transition. Stirling suggests:
Recognizing this – that we are moving from a “random walk” world to a “random flight” world – leads us to look back at other times when there were similar transitions. The printing press in Europe is a well worn example, as is the age of discovery. The late Roman Republic failed to deal with the shift from walk driven Italy politics, to flight driven military and political dynamics that came from being masters of the inland sea.
The expectation of random walk versus the reality of random flight which often causes mismatches and anomalies. Random flights often can send cascades of letters to a congressmen where only a few were expected. Mistaking random flight behavior for random walk behavior leads people to look for conspiracies, because a random flight move is so far out of their normal expectations, that it seems to be produced by design.
That is where disaster lies for the California Democratic Party establishment, a continued inability to diagnose non-geographically bound dynamics prevents a 58 County Strategy despite the fact that such an approach would benefit Democrats no matter how the next lines are drawn.
Moreover, the lack of competitiveness in California provides a severe disincentive to innovate. This has resulted in California no longer leading the nation in campaign tactics.
The lessons the internet has provided in the last few years demonstrate the dynamics that Democrats will face during the next decade:
Internet politics is in the business of joining tight clusters of activity with long leaps that join them – getting people upset with Lieberman and people upset with Conrad Burns to see themselves as part of the same moment – and moving resources rapidly to the point where they will do the most good. “Top Down” and “Bottom Up” structures both want to restrict most people to normal and slow distributions, where, like sheep, they stay in the same places. Lévy flight distribution overturns the entire random walk of equal steps paradigm of social normalcy and organization, whether the space traversed is physical or political.
So, in summary, Paul Pierre Lévy gave us many tools to think about the world, he, and those tools, are only now becoming known, but once an individual has a feel for their signature, they look at the world differently. Suddenly patterns which seem random or coincidental become joined by how the long jump and short cluster relate to each other, finding a game theory matrix where the two forms are joined by some common trade off – the choice that the jumpers make is the opposite of the choice the clusterers make. Since Lévy flights are “natural” in the sense that natural processes result in Lévy distrubtions, and human beings participate in this because we too, are natural, there is no reason to be biased against them in our social organization or legal system, except, of course, that some interests benefit from having people bound all up in close clusters, or by walks rather than taking flight on distributive wings.
Until Democrats realize that progress is in our interests, the incumbency protection paradigm will dominate Sacramento. Redistricting offers an opportunity to force the Democratic Establishment to begin running 21st century campaigns. In fact, it may be the best hope.
