Mother Jones illustration; Jill Connelly/Getty
California voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 in a race called by the Associated Press before a single ballot was counted—a reflection of decisive support in a victory that significantly boosts Democratic chances of retaking the House of Representatives next year. The ballot measure establishes a new congressional map through 2030 that could help Democrats win five additional seats, offsetting a mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer.
“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50.”
Prop 50 represents Democrats’ first significant victory against President Donald Trump’s unprecedented plan to rig the midterms by pressuring as many GOP-controlled states as possible to redraw their maps before the 2026 elections. The hastily assembled California plan, championed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, asked voters to temporarily set aside the congressional maps drawn four years ago by the state’s independent redistricting commission and approve new maps passed by the legislature that were designed to maximize Democratic representation.
Though the independent commission remains popular in California, Democrats successfully convinced a majority of voters that urgent action was needed to hold Trump accountable and restore fairness to the race for the House.
“Voters have been able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time, which is that they support independent redistricting but they also believe we’re in an existential crisis where something has to be done,” says Paul Mitchell, a California-based redistricting expert who drew the new congressional map.
Supporters of Prop. 50 hope that the ballot measure’s passage inspires other Democratic states to act. Even if California Democrats ultimately pick up five seats to counter the Texas map, other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, have since redrawn their maps to give the GOP additional House seats—with more red states, like Indiana and Florida, potentially still to come. That means Democrats could ultimately start an additional six-to-10 seats behind in the race for the House.
Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a remap that is similar to California’s plan and would ultimately need to be approved by that state’s voters. On Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced a redistricting bid, as well—though the Democratic head of the state Senate opposes the effort. National Democrats are pressuring Illinois lawmakers to redraw that state’s maps, too.
“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50,” Mitchell told me.
Though California Republicans failed to generate significant resistance to the ballot measure, the Trump administration has sought to cast doubt on the validity of the election, previewing the strategies it might use to contest the midterms.
The Justice Department announced that it was sending election monitors to five counties in the state with large Latino populations, which Newsom called “voter suppression, period.” Trump also claimed the vote would be “totally dishonest” and said the DOJ would sue to challenge the map. The DOJ lawsuit hasn’t materialized, but lawsuits by California Republicans and GOP members of Congress to block the measure failed in state and federal court. On Tuesday, Trump escalated his attack on the ballot measure, calling the vote “unconstitutional” and threatening a “very serious legal and criminal review.”
“I’m certainly concerned about it as a model for what they’re going to do in other places,” Sara Sadhwani, a former Democratic member of the state’s redistricting commission who supported Prop. 50, said before the vote. “It appears that they are trying to test-run intimidation tactics on our special election in 2025 and perhaps in preparation for 2026.”
But if the Trump administration sought to deter voters from supporting Prop. 50, it didn’t work, with early voting turnout almost reaching presidential election levels.
While many supporters of Prop. 50 were uncomfortable with partisan gerrymandering and would like to ban it at a federal level, they believed that unilateral disarmament in the redistricting wars was not an option.
“Our current president and his administration is explicitly saying that we want to change the rules of the game midstream in order to insulate ourselves from the people’s judgement,” former President Barack Obama said on a livestream with Newsom on October 22. “The people of California are saying stop. This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop. 50 is about.”
