Out of hundreds of maps submitted by the public over the last nine months, two of the four semi-finalists to be considered by the Long Beach Independent Redistricting Commission (LBIRC) are being promoted by Cory Allen, a longtime, well-connected Long Beach political consultant and operative.
The two maps under heightened consideration, #47428 and #49564, break up Long Beach City Council’s 4th District by placing Los Altos in the 3rd District, thus likely eliminating Councilman Daryl Supernaw (a Los Altos resident) as the 4th District representative.
Cory Allen has deep ties to Long Beach’s politicians and political machine. For years Allen worked on, coordinated, and managed numerous Long Beach political campaigns. Among his campaigns, Allen was the campaign chair for Herlinda Chico who lost to Daryl Supernaw in the last 4th District election (which was the 2015 special election to fill the seat vacated by now-Assemblyman O’Donnell, Supernaw having run unopposed in subsequent reelections).
Cory Allen also happens to be Chico’s roommate.
Allen promoted his gerrymandered maps at the October 20, 2021 LBIRC meeting. While he mentioned his position as a Long Beach Human Relations Commissioner, he failed to mention his day job: political consultant with deep political ties to the local political machine.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Allen currently is the Campaign and Policy Director for Progressive Solutions Consulting (PSC), a political consulting firm belonging to Melahat Rafiei with professional ties to candidates including Chico (a Long Beach City College elected trustee), State Senator Lena Gonzalez, Councilwoman Cindy Allen, Councilman Rex Richardson, former councilmember and school board candidate Tonia Reyes Uranga, Councilwoman Mary Zendejas, and Councilwoman Suely Saro. A look at the firm’s Facebook page shows the extent of its connections to numerous Long Beach politicians and their elections.
Allen’s own LinkedIn profile makes clear he is a “political consultant, community organizer, campaign strategist” for Rafiei’s PSC. Allen’s and Rafiei’s firm represents their clients, not the interests of the public at large, as could be said of any consulting firm.
Allen’s Twitter account name is @corypolitics and notes that he is also a Democratic Party Central Committee Member for Los Angeles County and involved with numerous other Democratic Party clubs.
The connection to Chico is important because the Cory Allen Maps that are now under consideration do two things:
First, they redistrict Supernaw out of the 4th District, thus eliminating him from running again and opening the way for Chico. Chico has had a longtime ambition of being on the City Council.
Second, they carve out a new 4th District with the center of the district being Chico and Allen’s own Bryant Neighborhood. The new 4th District would break apart neighborhoods, student housing, business districts, and police and fire divisions.
The odds of having two of the four citizen’s maps being reviewed for consideration being those of political operative Cory Allen, out of hundreds of community maps submitted, appears not to be mere luck or serendipity.
This appears to be nothing short of the gaming of the new “independent” redistricting commission’s process, according to sources contacted by LB4D, which the political bosses of Long Beach have become very adept at.
As a political consultant and establishment operative, Allen has a lot of connections with experience from the statewide 2010 redistricting process, under the then-new “independent” citizen’s redistricting system.
In fact, it is the Long Beach Independent Redistricting Commission’s city hall-chosen consultant Paul Mitchell, and his company Redistricting Partners, who the noted investigative journalists at ProPublica have previously reported on and identified as essentially having invented the process of gaming the California “independent” redistricting system for politicians.
Citizen redistricting started in California on the state level with the 2010 Census after the passage of Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 in 2010. Both Propositions passed with landslide wins despite opposition from both the California Democratic and Republican parties. It was the majority party bosses during redistricting that would no longer have the power to gerrymander political district lines to increase power, or so the voters were led to believe.
In 2009 and 2010, with the power to draw the Assembly, State Senate, and Congressional districts lines under threat, the Democratic Party and its associated actors poured millions of dollars to defeat the two initiatives. With both initiatives eventually passing, party bosses then turned to strategies to game the new system to get lines that were favorable for their numerical objectives.
After the first statewide redistricting under the new state commission, surprisingly to many, did not produce the expected shift away from Democratic-maximization gerrymandering of seats, ProPublica took notice.
An independent, non-partisan, award winning, nonprofit newsroom that investigates governmental and business abuses of power, ProPublica investigated the 2010 California redistricting process and released an article that examined the strategic gaming of the system.
Central to ProPublica’s investigative piece is Paul Mitchell, who is now the contracted consultant for the new Long Beach Independent Redistricting Commission.
The ProPublica piece reveals that party operatives’ plan was to get the lines the party wanted by using others to advocate for their chosen lines, also known as astroturfing. Mitchell’s firm Redistricting Partners was hired by Congressman Jerry McNerney to save his gerrymandered Northern California seat centered in San Joaquin County.
According to the article, Mitchell and his firm gamed the system by creating a made-up Community of Interest called OneSanJoaquin, which falsely referred to itself on Facebook as a nonprofit, despite no records of such a nonprofit in any state. The idea was to have party supporters then echo the Community of Interest’s maps and talking points to the Redistricting Commission.
The article reports: “The author of OneSanJoaquin’s maps was not identified on the Facebook page, but ProPublica has learned it was Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant hired by McNerney. Transcripts show that more than a dozen people delivered or sent the canned testimony to the commission, which accepted it without question.” (emphasis added)
Mitchell, with his firm Redistricting Partners, was successful in saving Congressman McNerney, and according to the article he gloated on social media:
“McNerney ends up with safer district than before,” Mitchell’s firm tweeted, after McNerney announced his candidacy in his new district. “Wow! How did he do that?”
When approached by ProPublica about his work on influencing the 2010 redistricting process, Mitchell did not deny it. Indeed, he defended it.
Mitchell insisted that the Commissioners knew that some testimony was fabricated by outside groups:
“Paul Mitchell, the consultant whose work had such a large impact on the commission’s decisions, said voters benefited from the work done by him and others deeply involved in the process. The commissioners, he said, “knew some of the testimony was being fabricated by outside groups. But what were they to do? They couldn’t create a screen of all testimony and ferret out all the biases.
Mitchell said. “My only regret is that we didn’t do more.”
So the questions now are: Do the LBIRC citizen commissioners know what their consultant Mitchell likely knows about the individual-benefit political engineering of the ringer maps and attendant testimony by a political consultant? Is he assuming they know or does he know that at least some know? Or does Mitchell see, or want us to see, Allen’s gerrymandered Chico-friendly map as creating a “better map”?
In other words, have Mitchell and Allen manipulated, via insider and/or external pressure, yet another group of citizens, most of whom only want to do what the people voted for—finally to redistrict through a truly independent process, free of politicians self-serving influence?
ProPublica: How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission: To get the districts they wanted, Democrats organized groups that said they represented communities but really represented the party.
- Summary of the ProPublica piece.
