Good Republicans dead.
The Golden State of California is a magical
place where starlets sprout in Hollywood Hills, butterballs wash up
on Malibu beaches, Facebook founders and CEOs e-foil patriotic
lakes and the people live in wonderful harmony, all showering in
the warmest rain of Papa Gavin Newsom.
Except every ten years a Hunger Games-like phenomena occurs
wherein the public is carved into different voting districts and
then utter hell breaks loose.
This decade’s edition has seen surfers emerging as a powerful
bloc able to drag the entire fortunes of California with it.
Per a just-released report in
Bloomberg:
California’s mapmakers will soon decide whether to keep the
district as a coastal enclave or to redraw the map so coastal towns
are joined with areas further inland. Surfers and other ocean
lovers have argued they need to remain in a single district so they
can speak with a unified voice in Washington. The seemingly
nonpartisan issue could help shape the political future of Orange
County, a traditional Republican stronghold where Democrats have
been making gains.
To combat gerrymandering, California and six other states
have taken the job of redrawing congressional boundaries out of the
hands of partisan legislators and given it to independent panels.
The state requires the panels to group together communities with
shared social and economic interests. But such “communities of
interest” are often proxies for partisanship, especially as the
U.S. becomes increasingly polarized along lines of income,
education, and race. And defining them can be subjective and
fraught with controversy.
In Orange County, which hugs the Pacific just south of Los
Angeles, some residents say that keeping coastal neighborhoods
together would help promote the vital tourism that surfing brings
and the lifestyle that goes with it.
And later…
Huntington Beach, with a population of 198,711, brands
itself as Surf City USA (the moniker prompted a trademark dispute
with Santa Cruz, six hours to the north; Huntington Beach prevailed
in 2006). It’s home to Boardriders Inc., which includes the
Quiksilver, Billabong, and Roxy brands of boards and apparel, and
the surf forecasting company Surfline\Wavetrak Inc., as well as
dozens of retail surf shops, the annual U.S. Open of Surfing, and
the Surf Walk of Fame.
Surfing historian Scott Laderman says that while issues like
coastal preservation and beach access can galvanize surfers,
there’s not much else that unites them politically. “Looking
historically at the surfing community, they tend to be an
apolitical bunch,” says Laderman, author of Empire in Waves: A
Political History of Surfing. “Most surfers will tell you that’s
what they like about it—it allows them to transcend the everyday
concerns that they might otherwise have to deal with and escape the
social, economic, political turmoil of the outside world.”
But there are commonalities that have little to do with
recreation, Laderman notes. “These tend to be overwhelmingly White,
upper-middle-class areas,” he says. “There’s this localist strain
that if this beach is in my neighborhood, then I have rights to the
wave that other people don’t have. And that localist strain tends
to be a very White, privileged one. It’s probably easier from a
redistricting point of view to identify that as a surfing community
of interest than a White, wealthy community of interest. That
probably wouldn’t fly very well.”
Before putting the whole business into greater context…
It’s not unheard of for districts to coalesce around local
industries. Coal mines in western Pennsylvania, oil refineries
along the Gulf of Mexico, and tourism in central Florida have all
been used to draw legislative maps. Still, Orange County’s surfers
will have to compete with other interests.
Before ending with a banger.
“This was the place where Ronald Reagan said good
Republicans came to die,” Smoller, the political scientist, says.
“Now I think Orange County doesn’t know what it is—it just knows it
doesn’t want to be Los Angeles. They want to retain their
separateness, but they’re holding on by their fingertips because,
like the rest of the country, it’s going to be majority
minority.”
California surfers: Good Republicans dead.
Very Halloween, no?
