TALLAHASSEE - When voters head to the polls in November, they will cast three votes that could reshape the political future of the state - and the nation.

Two of those votes will be on a pair of redistricting amendments that would bar politicians from using political calculations or incumbency to draw new lines for seats in the state Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. The other will affect one official who can change at least the latter set of maps: the governor.

In Florida, the governor's influence is felt directly only in attempts to craft lines for the state's congressional delegation. But that means the race is being watched closely in a year when the Republicans and Democrats are vying for control of Congress. The Fix, The Washington Post's politics blog, recently ranked the Florida governor's race the top redistricting battle of the year.

"Florida is slated to gain at least one congressional seat, and Democrats who watch these things project the governor's race could determine control of seven or eight congressional seats, when all is said and done," the analysis said.

Shortly after the polls closed on Florida's gubernatorial primaries last month, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association called attention to the race, specifically citing the looming battle over reapportionment.

"The stakes in Florida's election are high - with redistricting and 2012 on the horizon - and the DGA is committed to winning this top-tier pickup opportunity," Delaware Gov. Jack Markell said.

The GOP counterpart to Markell's organization has also zeroed in on the possibility for governors' races to reshape the political map. The Republican Governors Association has set a goal of boosting its number of governors' seats to 30 in the 2010 elections - up from the current 24.

"Electing more Republican governors has never been more important. We know Republicans won't become America's majority party again until we reclaim the majority of governorships," the organization says on its website.

Both parties have shattered previous fundraising records - with a chunk of that money likely to head to large states, like Florida, where more seats are in play. Florida already has 25 House seats and is likely to gain another before the 2012 redistricting.

The DGA raised $17 million through June and had $22 million on hand, more than the association spent in 2006. The RGA had already raised $28 million and had $40 million in the bank; the best number for that period before 2010 was $15.1 million.

"Certainly, redistricting is a big reason for that," said Douglas Johnson, a fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College in California, which studies redistricting in states including Florida.

Amendments 5 and 6

Furthering questions about whether the parties will be able to overhaul the state's political bent are Amendments 5 and 6, backed by an organization called Fair Districts Florida. The group is avowedly nonpartisan, but some supporters point to the disparities in party voter registration and the overwhelming majorities in the Legislature as one indication that gerrymandering in the state is rampant.

Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State University, agrees that the skewed numbers point to a selective carving of political boundaries.

"Right now, you have a state more or less evenly divided among the parties and a Legislature that's three-fourths Republican, and that's because of the way redistricting is done," he said.

But Ellen Freiden, the campaign chairwoman of Fair Districts, said the measures are aimed at getting rid of rigged results and improving representation for voters, not at a particular political outcome.

"I can't predict what the change in the make-up of the Legislature would be," she said.

At least some research suggests the calculus might not be simple. A recent paper by Jowei Chen at the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden at Stanford University suggested that it would be almost impossible to draw a map under even the Fair Districts standards that would do away with the heavy GOP tilt of the Legislature. The authors ran several simulations of different maps and repeatedly came up with a strong Republican majority.

"In short, a substantial share of Florida's observed electoral bias can be accounted for without any intentional manipulation on the part of mischievous Republican cartographers," the report says. "Pro-Republican bias is a natural outgrowth of the geographic distribution of voters when districts must be compact and contiguous and Democrats are concentrated in cities."

Nonetheless, Florida's proposed standards, if passed, could prove more effective than they have elsewhere. Johnson said other state's courts have been hesitant to pursue challenges to redistricting plans based on state standards. That could be different in Florida because the state's Supreme Court is already supposed to hold hearings on the new maps before they go into effect.

"That is why Fair Districts could make a big difference," Johnson said. "The letter of the law and the Supreme Court hammer is already there, in the Constitution, to enforce the law."

Sometimes it doesn't take a change in the law or a win in the governor's race to tilt the political alignment, Johnson said. In the 1970s California Republicans pushed through the courts a map they thought would help them - only to see the gains wiped out when the Watergate scandal hit.

In the 1990s, Florida Democrats decided to try to maximize their partisan advantage by drawing districts with ever thinner majorities; Republicans ended up winning many of the districts. Pennsylvania Republicans saw a similar plan backfire after the last decade's round of map-making.

"Major parties sometimes overplay their hands," Johnson said, "and can get themselves in trouble."

brandon.larrabee@jacksonville.com, (678) 977-3709

Link: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-09-15/story/november-electi...