On to serious discussion
The California Redistricting Commission has selected the final 60 names: 20 of each pool from which the final commissioners will be selected. You can access the lists here:
Republicans
Democrats
Unaffiliated
With these fairly detailed lists, we can begin to discern the shape of the commission. The most common characteristic of everyone is their comfortable income. This is unsurprising - those most willing to participate in redistricting are stable enough to give up time to political activism.
There is another reason. Those with skills attractive to the auditors likely have a higher income. For example, one of the commissioners last decade was a former head of the Census Bureau. Skills such as leadership of an organization, analytical skills, maps skills, resulted in a higher income.
Applicants had to submit what amounted to a resume, including letters of recommendation.
A dishwasher might claim that his analytical skills are demonstrated by arranging the dishes to maximize throughput, or that he had stood up for a Burmese employee who was taunted by the other employees because she couldn't speak Spanish.
Demographically, the ethnic distribution is what one would expect but with some exceptions. The democrats have more minorities than whites, and the opposite is true for the GOP. The biggest demographic standout is in the Indie group, which is very diverse. It also has a lot of Asians, and we know how that group has moved in the past 4 years. It leads on to potentially conclude that there are D-leaners in both the GOP group and especially in the Indie pool considering the nature of the coalitions. This however should be unsurprising given California's Trend.
The most interesting thing though are the cross-cutting geographic identities selected by the California commission. There are A LOT of Bay Area Republicans, and Los Angeles dominates the democratic pool. This has seems to have been done to temper partisan attachment to ones home region - Bay Area republicans have nothing to present for the GOP in the region, and LA democrats are surrounded by more democrats and will be more concerned with ethnic communities. The problem I am sensing though is that the playing field is not level; this is California and the California Democratic Party has more tools at their disposal. If the Republican contingency is dominated by NorCal, then they won't have the on-the-ground knowledge that would help them preserve Red opportunities in Orange and her environs. I you only have a birds eye view then you may just see a Blue OC and consider it lost.
The commission has tended to have a northward bias. People around Sacramento probably have an inordinate interest in the legislature. People in LA will have more interest in Hollywood, aviation, or the beach. In Silicon Valley, they will be focused on tech.
The auditors are based in Sacramento and may be biased.
Applicants are classified by geographic region. But Santa Clara and Santa Cruz were swapped so that Santa Clara was placed in the Central Coast, and Santa Cruz in the Bay Area.
Northern Central Valley was effectively "Sacramento plus Yolo and Placer".
South Coast was everything from Ventura through San Diego.
Based on registration you would expect South Coast to have 27.60 of the 60 applicants. It has 20, only two of which are from Orange County.
Northern Central Valley should have 4.89 of 60 applicants. It has 11, plus there are three more from San Joaquin County.
While the commissioners are expected to respect the geographic diversity of the state, the auditors did not.
