California poised to approve Prop 50 as voters signal displeasure with Trump | California
California’s Proposition 50 began as a warning from the nation’s largest blue state to its largest red state: don’t poke the bear. But California made good on its threat when Texas moved forward with a rare mid-decade guerrilla push pushed by Donald Trump as Republicans sought to shore up their fragile majority in the House of Representatives in midterm elections.
Now California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure put on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who see it as a chance to check Trump’s power.
“California will not stand idly by while Trump and his Republican lapdogs destroy our nation’s democracy before our eyes,” Newsom said at a rally, formally announcing the initiative known as the Election Rigging Interference Act.
Proposition 50 asks voters to temporarily repeal the state’s independently drawn congressional district boundaries in favor of new maps carved out to help Democrats win five additional safe seats; It’s a tit-for-tat response to Texas, where Republicans won five new, friendlier districts earlier this year.
Voting has been going on for weeks in the Golden State. As of Saturday, nearly 6 million ballots had been returned; About a quarter of the votes sent were sent by mail. based on To Political Data Inc., a firm that tracks voter data. Voting will end on Tuesday, November 4.
Early returns and polls show the vote is on track for a comfortable victory. While turnout is difficult to predict in special elections held outside the year, several recent polls have shown turnout exceeding more than 20 points.
The focus on Trump has galvanized Democrats in the deep-blue state, preventing what some initially feared: an esoteric debate over the political details of redistricting, a process that, until just a few months ago, typically occurred at the beginning of each decade.
National Democrats have lined up behind California’s retaliation plan. In closing ads, Barack Obama, Newsom and leading congressional Democrats, including New York House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tell voters they have the power to “oppose Donald Trump.”
“Democrats won the messaging war in California because they successfully framed it as an anti-Trump campaign,” said Dave Wasserman, the nonpartisan party’s senior election analyst. Cook Political Report. “Republicans have not been able to put together the resources or momentum to stop this.”
Opponents of this effort initially promised a tough fight, but their campaign was greatly exaggerated and support from national Republicans never materialized. Republicans have largely retreated from the airwaves in recent weeks.
California Republicans have focused some of their attacks on Newsom, denouncing the plan as a “Gavinmander” designed to help the term-limited governor build a national profile and donor base ahead of a possible 2028 presidential run. They warned that millions of conservative voters in the state would be disenfranchised and appealed to the fairness of the independent redistricting commission’s current work.
Republican California representative Kevin Kiley, whose district will be redrawn according to the new maps. in the name for a nationwide ban on redistricting by mid-decade. The offer did not gain traction.
“What Newsom is trying to do here is put even more power into the hands of a corrupt political class that has transformed California from the most beautiful state in the country to the most popular,” Kiley said. in question In an interview on Fox Business Network this week.
Republicans hold only nine of the state’s 52 House seats. If successful, the gerrymander could cut the number of Republicans California sends to Washington by more than half.
Former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who supported the creation of the commission, harshly criticized Proposition 50. Charles Munger, a wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, has poured more than $30 million into the effort. stop California’s “return to the evils of partisan gerrymandering.”
Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who advises Munger’s opposition group, the Protect Voters First committee, said he is more interested in stopping the Trump administration than saving fair maps of California voters amid immigration raids and federal takeovers of U.S. cities. Madrid suspected that many of those who voted for Proposition 50 had not even bothered to vet the new districts.
“This has nothing to do with redistricting,” he said. “This is about sending a message to Donald Trump.”
National good governance groups like Common Cause, which has historically fought partisan redistricting, have opted to remain neutral on California’s gerrymander.
“The question was: Are we going to unilaterally disarm one side?” said Virginia Kase Solomón, CEO and president of Common Cause. Instead, the group developed a six-point “fairness” criterion, an effort to put “guardrails” in the process that it said was reflected in the California measure.
The view that politicians should not draw their own districts is still popular in California. But Trump not. Almost two thirds Voters agree president treats California ‘worse’ than other states, poll finds CBS News/YouGov poll. 75 percent of those who voted for the measure said opposition to Trump was a factor in their decision.
“It does not make me happy to see the maps drawn by the commission being pushed aside,” he said. Sara SadhwaniHe is a professor of politics at Pomona College and served as one of the Democratic members of the mapmaking panel in 2020. “But right now, I believe we have a bigger fight to fight to ensure a level playing field across the country in the 2026 elections.”
sadhwani appeared in one of the first ads of the yes campaignHere he warned: “Donald Trump’s plan to rig the next election is an emergency for our democracy.”
Although Trump was at the center of the yes campaign, he remained uncharacteristically silent on the vote. He weighed in last month Real Social Preemptively discrediting, without any evidence, the “completely fraudulent” results of Tuesday’s election.
The Trump administration announced that it had deployed federal election observers to New Jersey and California to monitor the voting. In response, Newsom accused Trump of trying to “suppress the vote,” while Democratic attorney general Rob Bonta said the state would send its own monitors to monitor federal monitors.
Democrats’ confidence heading into election day gave the campaign an air of inevitability; So much so that Newsom, to the surprise and delight of his supporters, took the unusual step of telling them last week: “You can stop donating now.”
But the yes campaign says it does not take anything for granted. Newsom spent the final weekend before Tuesday’s special election traveling “up and down” the state, with tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors and sending text messages reminding voters to return their ballots, his team said. “This election is not over yet,” the governor warned.
In the national arms race, California remains the furthest away among Democratic-led states that could retaliate. Wasserman estimates that passage of the California ballot initiative would likely increase Democrats’ chances of winning the House majority next year by 10% to 15%. But as Trump pushed Republican-led states like Missouri and North Carolina to approve new maps and poised other states to follow suit, he noted: “The problem with Democrats nationally is that they don’t have enough California.”
As the gerrymander war escalates, supporters outside the Golden State are imploring Californians to “fight fire with fire,” as their governor puts it.
“We’re relying on California to help a friend, to help us as a country,” said Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier, who fled the state with nearly two dozen Democratic colleagues to avoid a Republican gerrymander vote there. “The future of this country is uncertain”
