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[Editor’s Note, Jan. 7, 2016: Part 1 of this story covered two topics: Jordan Brandman’s betrayal of his supporters (culminating in unanimous condemnation of his actions by the Democratic Party of Orange County) and an assessment of where he could run for Anaheim City Council again under the “Recommended Plan” of the judges on the Advisory Committee on Electoral Districts. (The answer was: he had no obvious good choice.) This post also contains two different stories in one package — part of a larger single set that will feature another segment prior to Tuesday’s Council meeting. Go ahead and read just one story within this post at a time, if you prefer. That way it may not seem as overwhelming. Or you can read all of the stories in all of the posts right after another all at once, once they’re up, if you enjoy being overwhelmed!]
3. Jordan’s Current Objectives
Jordan Brandman was, by all accounts, deeply bruised by the Democratic County of Orange County’s universal condemnation of his betrayal of the interests of Central Anaheim’s Latino’s on the very verge of their political victory. (A Democratic consultant privately called it “the sort of injury from which political careers do not recover,” but in more colorful language.) Some people might be stopped short by such a rebuke, reconsider their actions, and begin again with greater humility. Others might seethe, decide that whatever happened it was not their own fault, double down, and plot revenge against their enemies, no matter what the apparent political cost.
Brandman is one of the latter type.
Brandman has two major objectives right now. (Three, if you count doing the bidding of his mentor Curt Pringle, in whose patronage he has much invested.) First, he wants to return himself to his stature as Orange County’s Democratic Golden Boy — beloved by the party’s wealthiest and best established power brokers whose top priority is imposing him on the party’s long-suffering progressive and working-class activists. But he also wants to destroy those who took him on. Increasingly, he doesn’t seem to care how bizarre he looks while trying to do both. This post will deal with the latter objective; given its length, I’m putting the former into “Part 3” of this series.
After enduring a stream of negative public comments at the December 8 City Council meeting, Brandman clearly took delight in pulling the rug out of the public when they were done speaking and he had the floor. He presented a tortured explanation of how the political fight that had scalded him was not a function of the question of which districts should be selected for elections in 2016 — an odd argument because THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT IT WAS ABOUT — and contended that the real problem with the process is that the Reyes 2 Map — aka the “People’s Map,” aka the “Recommended Plan” of the judges on the Advisory Committee on Electoral Districts — just wasn’t a good one. (For him personally, it wasn’t — but at the time it came out he was still running for Congress.) Completely ignoring the intellectual labor and well-documented conclusions in the report by the five retired judges, he decreed that the process of selecting a map should begin over — or, rather, half over.
Here’s the Reyes 2 map again — and please note that nice straight line down Euclid that divided the western third of Anaheim (blue and pink) from the eastern two-thirds:
So let’s review what happened on December 8.
Brandman made a motion during that day’s meeting for something that was not even on the agenda and had therefore received no public comments prior to the public hearing on districting. (Conflict noted: I submitted a letter on behalf of Brian Chuchua identifying past and potential future Brown Act violations due to the Council’s adoption of Brandman’s motion. There’s good reason to expect that litigation will ensue. I don’t expect to be the only attorney involved with it, if so.) According to the agenda, the Council was supposed to adopt or modify the ordinance creating the districts and determining the sequence of elections. The ordinance was what was on the agenda.
What Brandman wanted to do was not on the agenda. He wanted to go back and scrape up a bunch of discarded maps from the drawing board — maps that by and large did a terrible job of representing Latino interests because they virtually guaranteed that four out of six districts would have Non-Latino White pluralities — and make the Council choose ONLY from them.
(Subliminal message: DO NOT CROSS JORDAN BRANDMAN, BECAUSE HE WILL CUT YOU!)
This post from December 14 collects all of the maps that remain “in play. It’s worth reading.
Unexpectedly, Brandman offered a motion intended to revise the entire process of determining what maps would be considered as the Council’s final choice. He wanted to consider only those maps that created two Latino majority districts rather than one. In most cases, two Latino majority maps also meant that four of Anaheim’s six districts would not even have Latino pluralities! That would likely lock Latinos into the minority of Council seats, even if they continue to have a Mayor favoring their interests. until at least 2022.
That sort of move is one of the main legal problems that continually crops up in redistricting suits — an offense called “packing.” Cram the minorities into a small number of seats and let them elect whomever they want so long as they’d be consigned to an ineffectual minority on the City Council. That’s why you get these snaking districts absorbing every Black voter that can be found in parts of the South.
Two of those 16 maps (there were 17, but one was essentially a miscarriage) received kind words from the podium. Jordan said that he thought that Consultant Map 2 was an “excellent” map; Murray — and this was puzzling at the time — said that one map was so good that it had three Latino CVAP majority districts. That Map was known as “LULAC 3.” It seemed incredible that Murray might actually want three Latino CVAP majority districts — she has not been a noted advocate of Latino issues and concerns, although she did donate some soccer balls to their kids (walking through the neighborhood as apprehensively as if she were in Baghdad in 2005) — but anything was possible.
The maps that created only one Latino majority district were favored by most Latino activists because the second-best districts, those with Latino pluralities, usually contained strong pluralities of 46-47% with no other ethnic group even in the vicinity. Even the third-best districts for Latinos, under the “one majority district” map, were far better than the third-best districts of most maps with two Latino majority districts. If one wanted a Council where Latinos had a decent shot at representation in Council seats proportional to their share of the pool of eligible voters, a “one majority district map” was the way to do so — and the judges, having studied the issue, said as much. This was especially true because, given demographic changes in Anaheim over this decade, a district that had had a 47% Latino electoral pool five years ago probably was a majority Latino district by now — and, if not, it would happen soon.
There were some maps that did manage to create two majority Latino seats while a third seat was reasonably viable for Latinos, but they generally did so at the expense of one of the top considerations that is supposed to go into districting: keeping “communities of interest” together. In Anaheim, the two clearest “communities of interest” were Anaheim Hills — roughly coterminous with District 6 — and the historic “Colony” district. The decision to keep the Colony together was an early decision on the part of the judges, following testimony from people across the political spectrum on its integrity and importance. Colony residents were a main part of that push — and may now be getting pressure to switch their positions on the issue. Of course, their earlier statements are on video — and their switching positions now would just be yet another indication that the sudden opposition to the Recommended Map was based on race.
(Some of them will probably be reading this, so I’ll let them know: they, especially if they are involved with SOAR, should pay close attention to who’s trying to get them to speak in favor of Brandman here. Is it Disney? Or is it those associated with Pringle and Brandman. The Recommended Plan was not such a bad plan for Disney, partly because it might neutralize accusations that they were actively working to suppress the voting power of Latinos. Switching to a plan that divides up Central Anaheim’s Latino areas would be tantamount to a declaration of war. Up until now, the interests of Pringle and Disney have been aligned, but: is that really what Disney wants? More on that on Monday or early Tuesday.)
But Brandman’s proposal, which hopefully — we’ll find out this afternoon — the City government agrees was stillborn, did much more than that. If it has a theme, it is this: it is designed specifically to keep Dr. Jose Moreno off of the Council.
4. How Jordan (and a Few Others) Tried to Whack Dr. Moreno
Murray and Brandman have an odd ally in their quest to keep Jose Moreno off of the City Council: a couple of old school Latino civil rights leaders — Zeke Hernandez and Art Montez — who fancy themselves adept with districting. (There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that; so do I.) They are the people who turned in one map with three Latino majority districts, about which Kris Murray had nice things to say. (Murray also mentioned at one point that she had met with Latino leaders who didn’t like the Recommended Map; despite that both Hernandez and Montez ended up supporting it, it’s pretty likely that they were the ones she meant. They also spoke last week at Los Amigos, from which Hernandez had quit last month, trying to convince a skeptical audience of the merits of dropping Latino support for the Recommended Map. My take: I like both guys, and they are tenacious, but they should realize that they are being used and that it’s past time to give up. As a fellow map-maker, I did so two months ago.)
Art and Zeke seem to have a bit of a dislike for Dr. Jose Moreno, though, and when I show you their three majority district map you’ll see why. Here it is:
The problem with a map that creates three Latino majority district is that it cases every other relevant criterion — compactness of districts, keeping communities of interest together — to the wind. That is one ugly, gerrymandered, map. The first 50 or so times I looked at it, that’s all I saw. But ultimately I came to realize that there was something else weird going on — and it was very telling.
Take a look at district 3, in olive gree. It includes most (but not all) of Central Anaheim and the Colony in its eastern portion (to the right.) But then it snakes over to the west, around the northeast part of District 2 — which is in blue — to take in the area near Dad Miller Golf Course. This didn’t around my suspicions, because I presumed that they were out hunting for Latino voters anywhere they could find them to cram into District 3.
And then I looked more closely at that northeast corner of the very non-Latino District 2. It’s the only part that crosses the 5 — right at Lincoln. But that would men that the left part of the portion above the 5 would be — Anaheim Plaza! And the rest of it would be the part — behind Anaheim Plaza! And that’s a predominantly Latino area! It’s at least as much so as the area that the map contorts itself to pull in the district! So — why bypass it?
“Behind Anaheim Plaza” rang a bell, though. I checked with a friend and, sure enough, I had visited there once before, back in the spring of 2012. That’s where Jose Moreno lives!
So, what was then called the “LULAC 2 map” — the statewide, as opposed to Santa Ana, LULAC hierarchy came out in favor of the Recommended Map, so this does not likely hold the threat of a LULAC, or even MALDEF, lawsuit behind it if it is not approved — was drawn to take the guy who had gotten the most votes in Latino Central Anaheim and stick him into the second-least Latino district it would create in the City.
That’s right: 28% Latino, 41% white. Good luck running there, Jose! And it was entirely gratuitous — a map that didn’t gerrymander the area by crossing the 5 would actually create a stronger District 3! Well-played, Art and Zeke; well-played. (But, also sort of revolting.)
That sort of dirty trick — don’t even try to deny it, guys — generally falls into the category of “disgusting but not illegal.” However, because Dr. Moreno was the top vote-getter in Latino Central Anaheim, and because the may specifically seeks him out to put him in a district where he could not be elected to City Council, and because he’s the guy that brought the bloody lawsuit for districting in the first place — there is a plausible argument that this constitutes retaliation against Latinos generally by neutralizing one of their top civic leaders who in the vast majority of maps remains with his district. (And I, by the way, really didn’t remember where he lived when I drew my maps; I thought that it was probably well north of there.).
But the LULAC Map isn’t likely to be chosen. And neither is Claudio Gallegos’s map, the best of the lot that met this criteria, which he conceded was not has good as the Recommended Map.
The likely winner? Consultant Map #2. Let’s take another look at it:
See that Pennsylvania-shaped purple district up there in the upper left? That’s District 4. It divides the districts 4 and 5 at Lemon St. and then goes all the way west. NO ONE ELSE DID THIS IN ANY OF THE MAPS. Euclid St., the most common dividing like between the west and the rest, appears just left of the “2” in the bright blue district. (The heavier line is a railroad track.) The judges approved of that. The put their rationale for it in their report — where it was ignored along with all of the rest.
In this map, the largely Latino area east of Euclid is separated out from the rest of Latino Central Anaheim and placed with a very different district, one going all of the way to Dale St. It is only the third-best Latino district, with a minimal 42-37 margin of Latinos to non-Latino whites. Most importantly, the two ends of the district have little to do with one another — the “community of interest” between them is weak. No one at any hearing, so far as I know, ever testified for “west of Lemon, north of Dale” district as a “community of interest.”
What this map does do, though, is to keep Dr. Jose Moreno away from Central Anaheim. And far from strengthening Central Anaheim’s Latino districts by doing so, this weakens it. This is the opposite of the “packing” that we saw in the Hernandez-Montez map. It’s called “cracking.” And it’s illegal.
We don’t know if the consultant’s coming up with this map was intentional on his part — or whether he was responding to feedback from particular community members. (He’ll probably be asked to explain its form, most likely on Tuesday night. Some of his public statements during the hearings suggest that it might have been something as uncompelling as “whimsy” or “just messing around to see what happens.”) But that doesn’t much matter: what matters is that what it does to Dr. Moreno is apparently why Brandman and (most likely) Murray favor it.
Note that I don’t include Kring in that. Brandman suggested that districts 1, 2, 3, and 5 be the ones sequenced to vote first — again, keeping Dr. Moreno off of the Council until at least 2018. The argument that she gave on sequencing at the December 8 (or 15) meeting suggests that she would NOT be happy with the northern part of what had been District 2 not being able to determine its own fate until 2018. So she’ll be interesting to watch in this process — she could split with Brandman here.
Almost none of the “sour 16” maps have a chance of being chosen, so the Consultant #2 plan seems like where Brandman is heading. This will lead much of the Democratic Party of Orange County — with the notable exception of its generally dominant “Old Guard” — to call for his head. So how does he expect to survive? That is for Part 3!
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