With Flawed Redistricting, No One Wins

Democrats are happy with the new legislative map approved by the state's redistricting commission, for no other reason than it is likely to preserve the party's control of both houses of the state Legislature.

Republicans are angry about it for the very same reason.

And the people of Princeton have to be shaking their heads. The new map moves the two Princetons into the 16th District, away from its natural political connections in Mercer County and into a decidedly Republican district composed mostly of Somerset and Hunterdon counties.

The new district, which also includes South Brunswick from Middlesex County, is considered relatively safe for Republicans, though a Patch analysis showed that there is an outside chance that the Democrats might be able to make it close.

As a result, longtime Assemblyman Reed Gusciora is moving from Princeton Borough to Trenton, allowing him to make a re-election run. Denise Coyle, a Republican Assemblywoman from Bernards Township in Somerset County, also found herself redistricted out of her seat--in her case the 16th--so she is moving to Princeton.

Both moves make sense from their perspective, but call into question the entire redistricting process. The idea behind the decennial process is to match the state's 40 legislative districts to the shifting population and to ensure that the people of New Jersey are represented by their geographical peers.

In practice, however, it is little more than a pitched battle between two political parties seeking to use process to better their chances at control of the state Legislature.

State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) summed this up fairly succinctly last week after the map was announced (the quotation is from Mark Magyar's story on NJ Spotligh)t:

"I’m keeping 24!" said an elated Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), whose party holds a 24-16 majority.

Alan Rosenthal, the Rutgers professor brought in as the 11th member after it was clear that the two parties had deadlocked, listed his goals for the process early on, so the outcome here should not surprise anyone.

But Rosenthal's goals -- like the entire process --  were badly flawed. Rosenthal privileged continuity of representation above nearly every other goal, which meant that any map he was likely to back would be one that would safeguard incumbents.

In a state as dysfunctional as New Jersey, however, one has to wonder why anyone would want to make it easy for the majority of legislators -- the people who have helped create the mess the state is in -- to keep their jobs.

The result is a map, as Magyar points out, that

makes it likely not only that Democrats will continue to hold their majorities in both the state Senate and the state Assembly in next November’s election, but also that 90 percent of incumbent legislators will be reelected with relatively little difficulty.

The goals should have been:

• increased minority representation in the state Legislature
• districts that are compact geographically (there are too many districts under the new plan in which towns -- see South Brunswick in the 16th -- are connected to the rest of their district by only a sliver of common border)
• competition in as many districts as possible (most observers say this map features just three competitive districts, including the 14th in Mercer and Middlesex counties)

These goals, however, would challenge the status quo and endanger too many sitting legislators.

Republicans, at the moment, are crying foul, but their map was only nominally better -- it was designed to increase the number of Republicans and would have committed some of the same sins committed by the new map.

The effort raises some additional questions about the composition of the state Legislature and whether the static 40-district model makes sense, whether we should experiment with other forms of representation and why we have allowed the public-financing initiative to die.

The people that control the two major parties in the state know that they have a duopoly on power and that conrol of the Legislature has little to do with beinniel elections. Too many districts are drawn with a weakened minority party in mind, meaning that decisions on whom is to represent voters are made during the party primaries--except that there rarely are viable challenges made to party power during primaries. The parties have the money and they have the party line on the ballot, which leaves reformers to tilt at the proverbial windmills.

The system that created the new legislative map--a 10-member commission made up of five Democrats and five Republicans, many of whom are sitting legislators, with a tie breaker appointed by a judge--does nothing to alter this reality. The committee could be broadened to include more members--in particular, the non-affiliated or those registered as independents--though that is a minor fix that is unlikely to alter the larger dynamics of state politics.

New Jerseyans might be better served by a constitutional change that ties the number of legislative seats to population rather than apportioning 40 districts across a shifting population. Or, there could be a hybrid arrangement that allows for some members to be selected through proportional representation. There are numerous possibilities.

What is clear from the latest round of redistricting, however, is that the system we have in place is badly flawed.