Gerrymander backfires on Dems in Pasadena

April 23, 2013

By Wayne Lusvardi

Gerrymandering is a strategy to manipulate political district boundaries to split the voting population in favor of the group in power.  But sometimes gerrymandering is subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences and results in the opposite of what was intended.   

An example is Pasadena Unified School District’s Measure A, Formation of Geographic Sub-Districts Pasadena Unified School District, that passed with 54.5 percent of the vote on June 29, 2012.  As reported in the Pasadena Sun newspaper, Measure A was intended to generate greater low-income Latino representation on the Pasadena School Board.

Measure A ended at-large voting by all voters in the school district for school board members.  Nomination and election of board members would be by geographic sub-districts only.  The sub-districts would be adopted by the School Board and redrawn after each U.S. Census, based upon recommendations of a Citizen Redistricting Commission.

However, what happened in the very first election under the new law, on April 16, is that Pasadena ended up with no Latino representation on the School Board.  This was the result of an unexpected combination a Latino board member in District 5 deciding not to run for re-election; and the failure to elect a Latino in a heavily populated Latino District 3 under the new law.

Ruben Hueso, a Democratic-Party candidate, failed to get elected. Yet he enjoyed a $30,000 campaign warchest for a runoff election from donations by state Sen. Kevin DeLeon, D-Los Angeles; former Assembly Speaker Fabio Nunez; and state Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, Ruben’s brother. Ruben Hueso also garnered endorsements from almost every liberal elite in town.

Possibly contributing to Hueso’s defeat was that the local teachers’ union, the United Teachers of Pasadena, pulled their endorsement of him for unexplained reasons just before the election.

Republican broad public interest politics won

In ultra-liberal Pasadena, Hueso lost to a most unexpected candidate: a Republican in the construction business who had a campaign fund of $10,000: $5,500 from his construction business and $4,500 from small contributions. His name is Tyron Hampton, Jr. (pictured above).

Hampton attributed his election to senior citizen turnout in his new district.  He ran on a platform of developing innovative solutions to school district budget shortfalls.  Hampton is married to Tara Gomez, PhD, an alumnus of UCLA and Cal-Tech.

The turnout for the runoff election was only 10.7 percent of all registered voters.  Hampton got 904 votes (61.5 percent) compared to 590 votes for Hueso (39.5 percent). But how did Hampton win when even Republicans initially opposed Measure A?

Republican Bill Bibbiani, a former Pasadena Unified School District administrator and School Board member, opposed Measure A on the grounds it would “result in a style of racially oriented, ward-based, ‘what’s in it for me’ politics and politicians.”

What resulted, however, was the opposite: the candidate who appealed to the broader public interest — rather than racial or ethnic politics — won. Gerrymandering gave a Republican candidate an opportunity to win that would have been unlikely in school district-wide election in a Democratic Party stronghold.

The Democratic candidate lost in part because of using gerrymandering tactics that narrowed the numbers down to fewer voters; and narrowed the election issues down to symbolic ethnic identity politics that had nothing to do with the concerns of senior citizens and property owners in the newly carved out district.

Maybe the senior citizen voting block that put Hampton in a seat on the School Board didn’t want racial identity politics, but a public school system that didn’t have to ask taxpayers for more money to meet budget shortfalls.