California's Proposed Gerrymander

• Published September 18, 2025
• Tagged: curr events

I've been unpleasantly surprised by the preponderance of positive coverage of Prop. 50, Gov. Newsom's proposal to redraw Congressional districts in California mid-decade as a counter to similar plans in Texas and other states, including boosterism in the NY Times comment section (which I generally see as a barometer of establishment Dem opinion). My pithy one-liner: "If you're arguing that five extra seats in Congress will save democracy in America, I sure hope they're Senate seats."

Why am I, specifically, writing about this?

TBQH, I was expecting more of a constituency for "principled opposition" to Prop 50. But I've already started getting mailers and phone-bank calls, the measures passed the CA Assembly (57-20, chamber is 60-19 Dem with a vacancy) and Senate (30-8, chamber is 30-10 Dem) with near-unanimity among the caucus, and it seems like a key part of Newsom's "see? I'm doing something" national press strategy.

Sure, there's been some coverage of opposition (and a lawsuit) from the CA GOP, but, of course, they're the ones losing seats. Conversely, of course, I think it's fair to interrogate the objectivity of state legislators who face fairly strict term limits and for whom a House seat is an obvious next step up the ladder.

There was a well-written op-ed from an originating backer of the current system, Charles Munger Jr., but as the namesake son of the billionaire and longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, with a long history of funding various statewide ballot measures over the years, I think it's fair to characterize him as more "politically involved rich guy" than "objective technocrat." And former Governor Schwarzenegger has been mobilized to campaign against the measure, but he also famously pushed his chips in on a bunch of ballot measures while in office and lost handily.

So I guess that's all to say: it feels like there's discursive space for me to weigh in, as an ordinary lefty/Oakland resident and huge nerd, to say Don't Do This, It's a Bad Idea, and there's no personal interest that's pushing me to speak up beyond "what I believe is right."^[1]

It's a bad idea

The argument that we should draw a distorted and less-fair map "to defend democracy" (per the Yes on 50 site itself) should call to mind the "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it" quote.^[2] It values the outcome (a specific balance of power) over the process... not get all "Webster's Dictionary defines" on you, but democracy is the process.

Also, it won't work

Then let's turn to the practical. The new map is included in the Prop. 50 proposal, and it's been estimated to swing +5 safe-Dem House seats. This isn't going to get us anywhere close to "save democracy" -- the Texas redistricting is projected to move 5 seats the other way by itself, Missouri a 6th, and Florida and Ohio are entertaining proposals to do similarly.

So the "we're abandoning taking the high road, so that liberals can use the same antidemocratic tools as the GOP" doesn't produce an improvement on the status quo, where the Dems are already the minority party in both chambers of Congress. (Also: the 2026 Senate map (Class II) looks like a wash, with the competitive races split between the parties by incumbency (GA and MI against ME and NC). Obviously, redrawing districts but not state borders won't have any effect there.)

So let's run through what the status quo has gotten us this session: legislation passed by the current Congress includes March's budget bill to avert a government shutdown (which was not a 'clean' Continuing Resolution), July's omnibus bill (passed via reconciliation), and a cryptocurrency bill. This is not a status quo I'm excited about, and the Yes on 50 camp doesn't seem to have much to say about what they'll do with the hopefully-approximately-the-same power in the 120th Congress.

And might even backfire

When the Affordable Care Act was being written and argued-over, a significant finding was that Americans hate the health insurance system, but generally felt neutral-to-satisfied about their current plan (which is why the message "everyone can keep their current insurance!" was a key part of the rollout). Similarly, trust in Congress as an institution is dead last in the Gallup "Confidence in [US] Institutions" annual polling... but most people feel much more positively about their own Congresspeople. Redistricting is shuffling a bunch of people away from their current Representative to 'someone else's', which I would expect to reduce the advantage of incumbency and also irritate people (e.g., making low-engagement opposition voters more likely to show up but friendly voters less likely).

Giving up on persuasion

While three of the five districts being targeted have been uncompetitive (10-point-plus margin in 2024), the other two were tossups, with margins of around 12,000 votes -- note that the lone dissenting Democratic vote in the State Assembly came from the member planning to run in one of them. Maybe some of that was pre-emptive, taking the conflict-of-interest argument out of the race next year, but I also read it as a gesture of confidence that the voters in CA-22 can be persuaded.

Misdirected attention

And when we spend a lot of time talking about something that won't achieve its stated goal, it crowds out other avenues of action. While the phone-bank caller I talked to the other week challenged me with, "Do you have any better ideas? Let's hear them!" I have some ideas on the scale of, like, myself -- being more engaged in my community and with my neighbors, for example -- and ideas on the scale of "hold a new Constitutional Convention" because I think we've learned a lot in the past 250 years about, just as an example, written rules versus unwritten norms.

Prop 50 falls somewhere in the middle of these: large enough that deciding to vote for it isn't making a change in an individual's life, but small enough that it won't fix a federal government that's unable to pass a budget on time, to say nothing of solving problems like the cost of housing, corporate tax avoidance, or /gestures at healthcare system. Even with the low turnout odd-year special elections typically get, I'd much rather see the cumulative effect of 6000000 people doing something small in their own lives to make positive change than passing Prop 5 to swing a few House seats.

We already have a good thing going

The really galling thing for me, is that we already litigated (uh in the court of public opinion, although iirc it did also make it into the legal system) whether Californians want politicians to draw legislative-district maps or not. And while the original Prop 11 (2008) to establish the CCRC just squeaked through, the re-visiting in 2010 by Prop 20 (expand mandate) versus Prop 27 (repeal and return to pre-2008 status quo) ended with a clear 60/40 majority in favor of the CCRC.

So let's get into what the CCRC actually is -- most national coverage talks about the partisan makeup of its members (5D/5R/4 unaffiliated-or-other), but that feels a little backwards to me: applicants aren't nominated by state or local party apparatuses, anyone can apply as an individual. (There are essay questions! Which are publicly released if you get selected!) Applicants' party registration is used to balance the candidate pool, but conflict-of-interest rules bar elected or appointed officials, their staff, political consultants, party committee members, registered lobbyists, or significant donors (>$2k cumulative) for 10 years after said disqualifying activity. It is, needless to say, a role that attracts teachers, non-profit employees, and career civil servants.

And as a nerd triumph, the CCRC publishes a big ol' report afterward, describing their methodology, priorities, and public engagement. This is what "transparency in government" actually looks like: 200+ pages that I get excited about (but still just skim, I'm no hero).

Guiding motivation for CCRC

The way that the CCRC takes public input and draws maps includes, of course, legal obligations (equal population, Voting Rights Act), but importantly centers the process of identifying and keeping-intact Communities of Interest, broadly understood. To that end, public input was solicited up and down the state, and this goal was balanced against the other criteria (geographic contiguity and compactness, existing city and county boundaries, obligations mentioned above).

I see this as a distillation of the theory of representative government -- an individual has interests shared with others, and to the extent possible, those interests are used to allocate a seat at the table, where a chosen representative can advocate for those interests.

Contrast this with the 2002 map that serves as the immediate context for Prop 11: the 2002 map produced 2004 election results with zero upsets of incumbents and <2% of state-legislature and Congressional seats were within ten points... although similar problems (and independent-map-drawing solutions) were raised back in the 1980s. That's a politics that uses incumbents' home addresses (and narrow isthmuses) to place specific individuals into easier or tougher districts. It, like Prop 50, values a specific outcome (for specific incumbents no less) over the process of doing democracy.

Can I end this on a positive note?

I should at least try! Alright, so Prop 50 is a bad solution, in its substance (retrogression), the rhetoric that creeps toward Newspeak by arguing that it's pro-democracy, how annoying the millions of dollars of ad time will be to sit through, and in the lack of concrete agenda for what those extra five-or-so Representatives will be doing to save America once installed in office... but maybe it's also an opportunity to grab some of that mis-directed we're-in-a-crisis energy and contemplate some bigger dreams.

Government employees and elected officials both take an oath when starting their positions to "protect and defend the Constitution," and fortunately that document contains the framework for its own revisions (even though we haven't been using it much lately), so we aren't bound to any particular instantiation of the system. What if, just as an example, we had multi-member districts? A reconfiguration of state boundaries to better reflect physical and human geographies (and maybe rebalance their populations)? Remove the layers of bandaids and edge cases that make passing substantial legislation an adventure into the depths of parliamentary procedure?

Sorry, sorry, positive note. OK! Find a way to volunteer in your community, and spend less time doomscrolling the news.

Notes

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