Mother Jones illustratoin; Getty(3)
When Sara Sadhwani, a Democratic member of California’s independent redistricting commission and a political science professor at Pomona College, first heard of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s vow to enact a new congressional district map in response to Texas passing a mid-decade gerrymander inspired by President Donald Trump, she was skeptical.
“My initial response was, you don’t have that power,” Sadhwani told me. “The Constitution is very clear that neither the governor nor the legislature has that power, and so I just didn’t see how he thought he would do it.”
“California has felt the brunt of the out-of-control actions of this administration.”
But when she saw the details of the plan, Sadhwani began to change her mind. In 2010, California voters had overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative giving an independent commission the power to draw the state’s congressional lines. (Sadhwani served on it for the post-2020 redistricting cycle.) Newsom’s unorthodox idea was to have the legislature quickly pass a new congressional map that would temporarily override the state’s commission through 2030—potentially giving Democrats up to five new US House seats—and ask voters to weigh in on it. After realizing what could be done, Sadhwani became a key supporter of the effort, now known as Prop. 50.
“It’s not easy to see our hard work, our blood, sweat, and tears being thrown out,” Sadhwani says. “But I do believe that it is for a much greater cause in this moment.”
Sadhwani didn’t want to see the work of the independent commission put aside, but she says she believes that passing a new map, on a temporary basis, is the only way for Democrats to restore fairness to the race for the US House as Trump presses state after state to gerrymander their maps in advance of the 2026 midterms to give his party as many new seats as possible. “There is a bit of a moral dilemma here,” she says. “It’s because I support democracy, it’s because I support good governance, that I support Prop. 50.”
In a matter of months, Prop. 50 has gone from an improbability to a near certainty. It’s one of the most important votes on the ballot in November. Democrats’ hopes of retaking the House in 2026 hinge on its approval. But the significance of Prop. 50 goes beyond its initial goal of offsetting Texas’ gerrymander. California will be the first state in which voters have the power to approve a mid-decade redistricting plan, and Prop. 50’s supporters hope its passage will inspire other Democratic-led states to make similar moves.
“If Prop. 50 is successful, it should fortify in every Democratic elected official and leader that the voters are on the side of action in order to prevent a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the 2026 midterms,” says John Bisognano, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group founded by former Attorney General Eric Holder that oversees the party’s redistricting strategy.
Bisognano notes that even if Prop. 50 passes, Democrats could still end up six to 10 seats behind Republicans in a redistricting arms race, as Missouri and North Carolina already have enacted new gerrymandered maps, following Texas. Other Republican states, including Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska, could go next. That would make it much harder for Democrats to take back the House.
There are signs, however, that other Democratic states are starting to follow California’s lead. Virginia Democrats convened a special session this week to begin redrawing their map to boost Democratic representation, which would require approval in two sessions of the legislature, this year and early next year, followed by the backing of the voters, much like California. Democratic members of Illinois’ congressional delegation voiced unanimous support for a new congressional map Tuesday.
But some Democratic states remain on the sidelines. The Democratic leader of the Maryland state Senate said his chamber wouldn’t redraw state lines before 2026. Other Democratic states, like New York and Colorado, are constrained by independent redistricting commissions that can’t be circumvented before the midterms. That has given Republicans, who are already more predisposed to engage in partisan and racial gerrymandering, more opportunities to do so.
Despite her distaste for mid-decade redistricting, Sadhwani hopes that the passage of Prop. 50 inspires other Democratic-led states to move forward with new maps for the greater good of protecting the Constitution and providing a long-overdue check on Trump’s extreme use of executive authority.
“These off-cycle elections, not only Prop. 50, but the mayor’s race in New York City and governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia, these are a litmus test on the president and where the country has moved in one year since the presidential election,” Sadhwani says. “I think if we pass it here in California, my sense is other places might be more willing to move.”
With every recent poll showing Prop. 50 passing, Republican opponents of the measure have largely given up on defeating it. More than 20 percent of mail-in ballots have already been returned, and Democrats make up 52 percent of that electorate, compared with 27 percent for Republicans. The yes side has outspent the no side $114 million to $47 million, with $32 million of the opposition coming from one donor, Charlie Munger Jr., the son of Warren Buffett’s late partner at Berkshire Hathaway. Newsom went so far as to tell his supporters to stop donating to the effort, projecting an unusual level of confidence. A who’s who of high-profile Democrats appear in Prop. 50’s closing ad, from former President Barack Obama to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “You have the power to give America a fair midterm,” Warren says.
But as California Republicans wave the white flag, the Trump administration is just getting started casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election.
The Justice Department is sending election monitors to five counties in California, based on complaints from state Republicans, which Newsom called “voter suppression, period,” comparing it to Trump dispatching the National Guard and ICE to Los Angeles.
“Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is!” Trump wrote on Truth Social recently, amplifying his long-standing lies about the state’s voting system. “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’”
The monitors are unlikely to have much of an impact, given how many ballots are returned by mail in California and how many staff members have left the Justice Department’s civil rights division. The administration seems less concerned with swaying the outcome of Prop. 50 than laying the groundwork to challenge the legitimacy of future elections, particularly the midterms.
“I’m certainly concerned about it as a model for what they’re going to do in other places,” Sadhwani says. “It appears that they are trying to test-run intimidation tactics on our special election in 2025 and perhaps in preparation for 2026.”
California has long been a bogeyman on the right—Trump came into office falsely claiming that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally in the state. More recently, Republicans have invoked Prop. 50 to justify their own gerrymandering efforts, without acknowledging that Texas began the mid-decade gerrymandering arms race.
“We are here today because California and the radical left launched a full-fledged coordinated attack, not only on North Carolina, but on the integrity of democracy itself,” North Carolina Republican state Rep. Brenden Jones claimed when Republicans passed a new gerrymander last week designed to oust a Black Democrat from office, never once mentioning Texas.
The California map is often compared to the one passed by Texas Republicans, but it differs in critical respects.
“Texas split 145 cities,” says Paul Mitchell, the Sacramento-based redistricting consultant who drew California’s map. “Texas changed all but one of their districts. Texas split minority communities. It was a capital-G gerrymander, just like the Republican states that followed it.” In contrast, “we changed five districts without eviscerating the independent commission’s plan.”
Those factors, along with the fact that Prop. 50 must be approved by the voters, helps explain why good government groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, who’ve long opposed gerrymandering, have stayed neutral on Prop. 50. “California is only going to make this stand with a majority of voters supporting it,” Sadhwani says. “You don’t get more democratic than that.”
It’s fitting that the most concrete effort to push back on Trump’s election rigging is being led by California, which has been targeted by the Trump administration more than any other state, from National Guard deployments to ICE raids and economic retaliation. “Democrats recognize what is at stake in our country in this particular moment,” says Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party. “California has felt the brunt of the out-of-control actions of this administration.”
Anger toward Trump, more than any other factor, is motivating voters to back Prop. 50. But supporters recognize that the ballot measure is just a means to an end. The goal is not only for Democrats to take back the House in 2026, but to regain control of Washington with sufficient numbers so that they can enact a national ban on gerrymandering that will stop this race to the bottom once and for all.
“Federal legislation to ban partisan gerrymandering,” Bisognano says, “is the only end point I can see.”
