California set to approve Proposition 50 as voters signal dissatisfaction with Trump | California

California’s Proposition 50 began as a warning from the nation’s largest blue state to the largest red state: Don’t poke the bear. But when Texas launched a rare gerrymander in the middle of the decade, pushed by Donald Trump as Republicans sought to consolidate their fragile House majority in the midterm elections, California made good on its threat.

Now, California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who see it as an opportunity to check Trump’s power.

“California will not stand idly by as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our nation’s democracy before our eyes,” Newsom said at a rally, formally announcing the initiative, known as the Election Rigging Response Act.

Proposition 50 asks voters to temporarily abandon the state’s independent congressional district lines in favor of new redistricted maps to help Democrats win five additional safe seats — a tit-for-tat response to Texas, where Republicans gained five new, friendlier districts earlier this year.

Voting has been underway for weeks in the Golden State. As of Saturday, nearly 6 million ballots had been returned, or about one in four of the total mailed, according to Political Data Inc, a company that tracks voter data. Voting closes on Tuesday, November 4.

Early results and polls suggest the vote is on track for a comfortable victory. Although it can be difficult to predict turnout in off-year special elections, several recent surveys have shown it to exceed 20 points.

The focus on Trump has galvanized Democrats in the deep blue state, avoiding what some initially feared: an esoteric debate over the political details of redistricting, a process that until just a few months ago typically took place at the start of each decade.

National Democrats have lined up behind California’s retaliation plan. Their closing ad features Barack Obama, Newsom and prominent congressional Democrats — including New York House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — telling voters they have the power to “stand up to Donald Trump.”

“The Democrats won the messaging war in California because they were able to present it as an anti-Trump campaign,” said Dave Wasserman, senior elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Republicans simply haven’t mustered the resources or momentum to stop this.” »

Opponents of the effort initially promised a formidable fight, but their campaigns were widely contested and support from national Republicans never materialized. In recent weeks, Republicans have largely withdrawn from the airwaves.

California Republicans focused part of their attack 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 likely 2028 presidential campaign. Millions of conservative voters in the state will be disenfranchised, they warned, appealing to the fairness of the independent redistricting commission’s current work.

California Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose district would be redrawn under the new maps, has called for a nationwide ban on redistricting by mid-decade. The proposal did not gain traction.

“What Newsom is trying to do here is consolidate even more power in the hands of a corrupt political class that has taken California from being the most beautiful state in the country to being the most popular state to leave,” Kiley said in an interview this week on Fox Business Network.

Republicans hold only nine of the state’s 52 seats in the House. If successful, the gerrymander could cut the number of Republicans California sends to Washington by more than half.

Former California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who championed the commission’s creation, harshly criticized Proposition 50. And Charles Munger, the wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, has invested more than $30 million in efforts to prevent California from “returning to the evils of partisan gerrymandering.”

Amid immigration raids and the federal takeover of U.S. cities, California voters were more concerned about stopping the Trump administration than saving their cards, said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who advises Munger’s opposition group, the Protect Voters First committee. Madrid suspected that most of the people who voted for Proposition 50 hadn’t even bothered to study the new neighborhoods.

“This has nothing to do with redistricting,” he said. “It’s about sending a message to Donald Trump.”

National good governance groups such as Common Cause, which have historically fought partisan redistricting, have chosen to remain neutral on California’s gerrymander.

“The question was: Are we going to unilaterally disarm a camp? said Virginia Kase Solomón, CEO and President of Common Cause. Instead, the group developed six-point “fairness” criteria, aiming to put “guardrails” on the process, which it said were reflected in the California measure.

The view that politicians should not draw their own districts remains popular in California. Trump, however, is not. Nearly two in three voters agree that the president treats California “worse” than other states, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey. Among those who voted in favor of the measure, 75% said opposition to Trump was a factor in their decision.

“It doesn’t make me happy to see the maps drawn by the commission being tossed aside,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College who served as one of the Democratic members of the mapping committee in 2020. “However, I believe that right now we need to take on a bigger fight to ensure a level playing field across the country for the 2026 elections.”

Sadhwani appeared in one of the yes campaign’s first ads, in which she warned: “Donald Trump’s plan to rig the next election is an emergency for our democracy.”

Although Trump is at the center of the yes campaign, he has been unusually quiet on the ballot measure itself. Last month, he spoke on Truth Social to preemptively discredit, without evidence, the “totally dishonest” results of Tuesday’s election.

The Trump administration announced it was deploying federal election observers to New Jersey and California to monitor the vote. 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 observers.

As Election Day approached, Democrats’ confidence gave the campaign an air of inevitability — so much so that Newsom, to the surprise and delight of his supporters, took the unconventional step of telling them last week, “You can stop donating now.”

But the yes campaign says it is taking nothing for granted. Newsom spent the final weekend before Tuesday’s special election traveling “up and down” the state, his team said, while tens of thousands of volunteers knocked on doors and sent text messages reminding voters to turn in their ballots. “This election is not over,” warned the governor.

Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Newsom made a point of saying he was “deeply confident” that California voters would approve Proposition 50 — and said Trump was “changing the rules” and Democrats had to adapt.

“We want to return to some semblance of normality, but we must face the current crisis,” he said.

In the national redistricting arms race, California remains the furthest along among all Democratic-led states in fighting back. Wasserman estimates that passage of the ballot initiative in California would likely improve Democrats’ chances of winning a majority in the House next year by 10 to 15 percent. But as Trump has pushed Republican-led states like Missouri and North Carolina to approve new maps and others ready to follow suit, he noted, “The problem for Democrats nationally is they don’t have enough California.” »

As the gerrymander war intensifies, advocates outside the Golden State are imploring Californians to, in the words of their governor, “fight fire with fire.”

“We’re looking to California to help a friend, to help us as a country,” said Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier, who fled the state with about two dozen of her Democratic colleagues to prevent a vote on the Republican gerrymander. “The future direction of this country is at stake.”