GOP: 'Time is on our side'

The old football adage that a tie is like kissing your sister might seem a fitting assessment of the results of last month's legislative election. After investing literally millions of dollars and thousands of hours, the two parties wound up exactly where they started: Democratic majorities of 31-28 in the Senate and 67-51 in the House.

The Senate stalemate was particularly disappointing for Republicans who are starting to worry about redistricting after the 1990 census. The GOP had hoped at least to come within a seat of becoming the majority in 1988, when all 39 senators won four-year terms and thus a role in drawing the new congressional and legislative maps. Failing to gain any ground in the Senate, however, is a severe blow to the Republican plan. While adding one seat in 1990 would have been difficult, gaining two seems virtually impossible, given the incumbents likely to be running then. So, barring major catastrophe, it seems probable that Democrats will control both chambers in 1991, with a good chance in the next gubernatorial election to win a cartographic free hand.

Before consigning Republicans to another decade at the back of the legislative bus, though, savvy politicians might wish to recall how Democratic mapmakers forged those friendly districts, and then to study carefully some selected results from last month's election. The experience should be as sobering as a cold shower for Democrats, and as uplifting as a Ronald Reagan campaign appearance to Republicans.

The critical facts are these:

• In 1971 and again in 1981, Democrats optimized their legislative strength by running some safe Chicago districts out into the suburbs to offset the city's falling population.
• In 1988, as in 1986, the city's northwest and southwest side wards that anchored these hybrid districts for the Democrats showed undeniable Republican tendencies.

The idea to overlap city-based districts into the suburbs was a stroke of genius made possible by the 1970 Constitution, which abolished its predecessor's so-called "Chinese Wall," a provision which forbade such hybrids and assigned 21 districts to the city and nine to suburban Cook County. In 1971, the device was used to swallow some 400,000 suburbanites, probably most of them Republicans, into nine city-controlled, Democratic-voting districts. Along with 11 districts entirely in the city, the annexation preserved 20 districts for Chicago, two more than its 1970 population warranted.

In five elections under the 1971 map, only one GOP senator was elected from a city-based district, and he lasted only two years. Republicans never won a majority in any of the three-member city House districts.

A decade later, Democratic mapmakers used the same technique, running 10 Senate and 16 House districts into suburbia, picking up more than 600,000 residents there. Added to nine Senate and 21 House districts entirely in the city, Chicago Democrats wound up with 19 usually reliable Senate districts and 36 of 37 generally safe House districts, instead of the 15 Senate seats and 31 House seats to which the city's population entitled it.

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While the ploy again has worked fairly well, the results have not been as impressive as under the 1971 map. One GOP lawmaker, Rep. Roger P. McAuliffe, has won four straight times in his district, which arcs from the city's northwest side into Leyden Township. Four years ago, Republicans elected Sen. Walter W. Dudycz from the same area, and in 1986 added Sen. Robert M. Raica in a district curving from the southwest side into Lyons, Palos and Worth townships. Both Dudycz and Raica posted impressive victories last month. A Republican also won the House seat in the more suburban half of Raica's district, and another GOP candidate missed by only about 130 votes in the part lying mostly in the city. The obvious conclusion, of course, is that the existing hybrids on the northwest and southwest sides are no longer reliable Democratic districts.

That assessment is buttressed by the election results in national and county contests in some key border wards in those heavily-ethnic neighborhoods.

Former Cook County Democratic Chairman Edward R. Vrdolyak, for example, was blown away by Aurelia Pucinski in the circuit court clerk's race by more than 300,000 votes. Yet Pucinski, a classy, articulate Polish-American, was out-polled about 55 percent to 45 percent by her controversial foe in eight overwhelmingly white, ethnic northwest and southwest side wards. Among the Democratic committeemen unable to deliver for Pucinski against Vrdolyak were her own father, Ald. Roman C. Pucinski (41st Ward); her leading booster, House Speaker Michael J. Madigan in the 13th; County Assessor Thomas C. Hynes in the 19th, and U.S. Rep. William O. Lipinski in the 23rd.

In the same eight border wards, the GOP candidate for recorder of deeds, Ald. Bernard Stone (50th), bested Rep. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Chicago), who became the first black elected to county wide office, by about 10 points while President-Elect George Bush piled up roughly 58 percent of the vote against the Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis.

Such returns become more ominous for Democrats in light of population projections that estimate Chicago's numbers are declining slightly while the state is growing at a modest 2 percent rate for the decade. For the city to keep its current share of legislative seats, given those numbers, another 100,000 or so suburbanites would have to be added to hybrid districts. The growing Republican strength in the border wards, though, makes it clear that such overlapping is no longer a safe way to protect city seats for Democrats. Moreover, suburban areas are expected to have gained more than a quarter million new residents by the 1990 census.

So, despite this year's standoff, Republicans may wish to sing along with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones: "Time is on our side, yes, it is."□

Charles N. Wheeler III is a correspondent in the Springfield Bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times.

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