Hispanics seek their own place on redrawn N.J. legislative map
CAMDEN — Early in the process to redraw the state’s 40 legislative districts, battle lines are already forming over how to represent New Jersey’s growing Hispanic population.
Hispanics make up almost 17 percent of the state, according to the American Community Survey. But there are only six Latino legislators in the state Senate and Assembly, accounting for just 5 percent of the Legislature’s seats.
“We are the youngest and fastest-growing community. We need to be at the table, not in back of the line like we are today,” said Angel Cordero, a member of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey, at a meeting today in Camden of the committee that will redraw legislative district boundaries. “We ask that you guys be kind when you draw the lines and keep our communities together so that we can grow.”
The big question is whether to “pack” districts with more Latino voters to increase the chances they’ll elect Hispanics to the Legislature, as Republicans are expected to propose, or to keep the population spread out and mixed among other ethnic groups, as Democrats prefer.
It’s similar to the question that New Jersey grappled with in 2001, when Democrats took heavily minority districts and distributed their mostly Democratic voters into whiter, more Republican districts, giving the party an electoral advantage. Republicans took Democrats to court, accusing them of diluting minority voters’ clout, but Democrats successfully argued that doing so would help elect more minorities to the Legislature.
Under the current map, minority representation has expanded in the past decade, and Democrats, who control the Legislature, elected black and Hispanic members as Assembly speaker, the third-most powerful position in the state.
But Hispanics remain under-represented, and Republicans have met with the leader of Cordero’s group to talk about how they could get more Latino lawmakers elected.
Latino Leadership Alliance President Martin Perez said he met with Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr. (R-Union) — who heads the Center for a Better New Jersey, a think tank and fundraiser for the Republicans’ redistricting efforts. Perez said the Democrats’ strategy of spreading out Hispanic voters didn’t work 10 years ago, and he wants to concentrate them in districts so they can elect more Latinos.
“In certain areas of the state, we want maps that reflect the growth of the Latino population,” said Perez, who added that he has reached out to Democrats but has not heard back. “We have 40 senators and only one Latino. According to our population, we should have six at least.”
Kean said he listened to Perez but did not commit to anything.
“The entire mission of the center is for folks to talk on legal and demographic issues,” he said.
BIGGER PICTURE
But there’s more than just Latino representation at stake. If a map “packs” Latinos, who as a group leaned Democratic in the 2010 elections, into Hispanic-concentrated districts, they are detached from whiter, suburban towns where Republicans would stand a better chance.
Republicans have not formally advocated the packing strategy, saying only that the new map should take demographic shifts into account. But Democrats and some other Hispanic groups say it’s clearly the GOP’s intention.
And the Republican redistricting team has hired attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, who 10 years ago helped them argue against the Democrats’ strategy of “unpacking” heavily black districts and was an architect of the national GOP’s plan to create majority black congressional districts in the early 1990s.
“They don’t say it. But I’ve always been taught that what people don’t say is almost as important as what they say,” said Democratic State Committee Chairman John Wisniewski, who heads the Democrats’ redistricting team. “I think their strategy is to have minority candidates, in minority districts fight amongst themselves for as few positions as possible.”
DISPUTED DISTRICTS
The fight could play out in Passaic and Bergen counties.
In the 35th Legislative District, the city of Paterson, which is heavily Hispanic and Democratic, dominates the district’s small, whiter towns that are more likely to vote Republican. In the 36th Legislative District, the heavily Hispanic city of Passaic offsets blue-collar, southern Bergen County “Reagan Democrat” towns.
Another Hispanic group that’s taken an interest in redistricting said they’re not on board with “packing.”
“We’re concerned what we’re hearing are the positions of the Center for a Better New Jersey, in terms of relying on this strategy,” said Christian Estevez, a Democrat who is executive vice president of the Latino Action Network. “It’s basically segregating Latinos, African-Americans or whatever group into a specific area and keeping them out of other areas. Our big concern there is while it might look like Latinos would do better in the immediate area, overall we might end up losing more than we gain.”