Reformers who seek to make politics in California less polarized were celebrating Tuesday as they turned in 1.2 million signatures to quality for the November ballot an initiative they believe will promote their goal.

It is a measure that would take the power to draw legislative districts away from lawmakers and give it instead to a 14-member bipartisan commission.

If it is approved by voters, said AARP's California President Jeannine English, "It will compel candidates to address important issues that they haven't addressed because they're not representing the constituents of their state."

It is an alluring thought — the notion that polarized politics can be fixed by a commission. It is based on the all-American belief that everything we don't like must be the fault of politicians.

In this case, it's not.

The fact is that over the last 30 years, Americans, famously mobile, have been engaged in a steady process of sorting themselves into communities that are homogenous in many ways: in education, in income, in ethnicity, in religion and, yes, in politics.

As Texas reporter Bill Bishop details in his book, "The Big Sort," Americans have been engaged in a determined process of surrounding themselves with people like them.

Bishop notes that in the 1976 presidential election, decided by just 3 percentage points in the national popular vote, a quarter of Americans lived in politically lopsided areas — counties in which either Republican Gerald Ford or Democrat Jimmy Carter won by 20 percentage points or more.

By 2004 — another presidential election decided by just 3 percentage points in the national popular vote — the percentage of Americans living in such politically homogenous counties had doubled, to 48 percent.

The nation-state of California is no different.

In the 2004 election, either President Bush or John Kerry won 41 of the state's 58 counties by landslides. Bush took 26 counties by 20 percent or more; Kerry took 15 counties by a similarly lopsided margin.

Most of the state's largest counties were landslide counties. Kerry won Los Angeles by 27 points and Santa Clara County by 29. Bush won Orange County by 21 points. Among the big counties, only San Diego was reasonably close.

Rural California was overwhelmingly one-sided; Bush carried little Lassen County, for instance, by 43 percentage points.

This is the 21st century political landscape in California: red here, blue there, and very few shades in between.

If the redistricting initiative were to pass, it would create a different way to slice the pie. But there is no way for any commission to better blend the ingredients.

The redistricting measure would instruct the new commission to respect city and county boundaries and to keep intact communities of interest. And it is at the neighborhood level where the self-segregation of the population is most acute.

As Bishop told ABC News: "You have to look at where people live It's at that community level that people are becoming more segregated."

English is correct in her assertion that legislators in recent years have not been representing "the constituents of their state." But a good case can be made that most of them have done a fine job of representing the people of their districts — the only folks who are in fact their constituents.

It is not surprising that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the redistricting initiative's most active supporter. Elected statewide, the governor's constituency is much more politically diverse than that of any state legislator. He has been continually frustrated at Sacramento's silence to his call for an era of "post-partisanship."

Neither is it surprising that former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis has joined with Schwarzenegger in promoting the initiative. Davis was a centrist in his own way, and it can be argued that his downfall came about because he was forced ultimately to side with hyper-partisans in the Legislature.

Moderates of both parties, and there are few, are equally frustrated by polarization.

If the initiative were to pass in November — and that is a huge "if," given that every redistricting initiative in the past has been soundly rejected by voters — it would create a system that would likely produce only a handful of competitive districts.

And that could be enough to somewhat alter the political dynamics in Sacramento.

But these reformers need to get the stars out of their eyes.

Redistricting done by a bipartisan commission might eliminate some of the quirks and power plays of redistricting done by politicians, but it won't eliminate or even significantly diminish political polarization in the legislative branch.

The people have voluntarily sorted themselves out, and no commission can scatter them.

— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star's state bureau. Read his political blog "95 percent accurate*" at http://www.TimmHerdt.com.