California’s elected Democratic leadership makes no bones about Proposition 50, acknowledging that it is intended to gerrymander the Golden State’s U.S. Congressional Map in a way that will be even more favorable to their party. In making that admission, they insist however that it was not they but the Republicans who cast the first stone with regard to loading the political dice.
Proposition 50 was drafted by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom with input from at least seven other Democratic officeholders and their advisors. No Republicans were involved in framing the proposition. It calls for a one-time suspension the authority of the state’s independent redistricting commission, which was established with the passage of Proposition 20 in 2010, to instead adopt a map drawn by the current state legislature. The California legislature, which meets at the statehouse in Sacramento, consists of the upper legislative house, the California Senate, and the lower legislative house, the California Assembly. A supermajority – more than two-thirds – of the California Senate, are Democrats, consisting of 30 of the body’s 40 members. Likewise, the Assembly is overwhelmingly dominated by the Democratic Party, with which 60 of its members are affiliated, while 20 of its 80 total seats are held by Republicans.
California, the most populous of the nation’s 50 states, is responsible for electing 52 of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who meet at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. At present, Democrats lopsidedly outnumber Republicans in California’s 52-member Congressional delegation 43-to-9. That is a reflection of the degree to which California leans leftward politically.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time following a four-year lay-off in January of this year, his party, the Republicans, held a slight 220-to-215 majority in the House of Representatives and an equally thin  – 53-to-45, with two Independents – advantage in the U.S. Senate. This gave him leeway to carry out his executive policies with little effective resistance and the opportunity to pursue with relative success his legislative agenda. The whirlwind of initiative he pursued, while pleasing to his political base, generated controversy and provided Democrats and other Trump critics with ammunition to attack him. This sparked concern over the prospect that the marginal Congressional majorities the GOP now enjoys could be eradicated in the mid-term 2026 election.
Political maps throughout all 50 states are traditionally redrawn the year following the decennial census, that being the year ending in 1, and are first employed in the year ending in 2. Generally, those maps remain effective for a decade. President Trump’s political team undertook the rare, indeed virtually unheard of, tack of seeing which states, those being the ones where the Republicans were in ascendancy, might consider redrawing their congressional district lines mid-decade in a way that might ensure the election of a handful more Republicans, thus allowing the Republicans to keep their numerical edge in the lower legislative house. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott signaled his willingness to redraw that state’s 38 congressional districts in accordance with his fellow Republicans’ request. Thereafter he set about having the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature comply with his wishful agenda to redraw the Texas Congressional District Map in such a way that the current balance of 25 Republicans, 12 Democrats and one vacant seat might be shifted to 30 Republicans and 8 Democrats after the November 2026 election.
Halfway through July, when Governor Abbott unveiled the Texas plan to unseat the five Texas Democrats and got the Texas Legislature to approve the new electoral map and other Republican-led states such as Indiana, Florida and Missouri began inching toward doing the same, Governor Newsom began speaking openly about how the democratic process had been sucker-punched.
To Democrats, there was no doubt their rivals were simply greasing the skids for themselves while yanking the rug out from under their Democratic counterparts in an effort to give Republicans better odds at maintaining control over the House after the 2026 election cycle. Newsom, who has presidential ambition that would be furthered by his assuming an aggressive leadership role in his own party, figured that if the Republicans were doing that in Texas, the Democrats could do it in California. Two could play at the game devised by Trump and Abbott, Newsom asserted.
There was a slight though not insurmountable catch, however. Texas has no equivalent to Proposition 20, so the Republican legislature and the Republican governor in the Lone Star State have a free hand there to do as they want. In California, a simple vote of the legislature would not change the federal Congressional District map. That would need to be done by a vote of the people. Holding such a special election in 2025, an odd-numbered and therefore a political off-year would entail a cost statewide approaching $300 million. Such is the cost of democracy, Newsome figured.
$300 million was merely the cost of the special election that the state government – and its taxpayers would have to bear. There was also the cost of convincing the voters of doing what Newsom felt it was in their best interest to do.
Governor Newsom was convinced that sentiment against Donald Trump and his administration was strong enough in California that with a campaign in favor of the initiative to approve the new map would prove successful if it was simply presented as a strategy to undercut the current president. Moreover, Newsom calculated, such a campaign could be bankrolled by the pollical war chest consisting of leftover money from his 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign that was at his disposal, along with the generosity of the Service Employees International Union, Democrat businessman Andrew Hauptman and the Democratic House Majority Political Action Committee. Confident California’s voters could be convinced to support the reapportionment to prevent the president from having the legislative support he needs to accomplish his agenda.
On August 21 the California Legislature voted to schedule a special election for November 4 at which California voters would be asked whether or not they approve the redrafting of the state’s electoral lines.
The manipulation of an electoral constituency’s boundaries so as to rebalance the comparative numbers of voters residing and voting therein in favor of one party or class is called gerrymandering. Gerrymandering can consist of so-called  elimination, which involves having the surrounding districts claim a part of the targeted district so that it is entirely absorbed by its neighbors; “cracking,” which entails diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s registrants across multiple districts; or what is referred to as “packing,” which involves concentrating the opposing party’s voting power in one district to reduce its voting power in other districts. The overall goal is to increase the hold the controlling party already enjoys within a given jurisdiction. For gerrymandering to take place, the party doing the electoral district map manipulation must, generally, already enjoy at least a slight electoral advantage over the rival party, as the authority for setting or altering political boundaries and electoral maps resides with a state governor or legislature or combination thereof. In the case of California, that authority resided with the nonpartisan commission that had been created by Proposition 20 in 2010. The way Governor Newsom and his cohorts bypassed that was to draw up the map on their terms and then have the state legislature vote to give the state’s electorate a chance to say “aye” or “no” to the map. If the voters approve the map, Newsom and the other leaders of the Democrats will get what they want. If more voters cast “no” votes than “yes” votes, the map stays the way it is.
What Newsom and his team are doing is presenting the voters with a map of Congressional districts calculated to likely result in five of the nine California Congressional seats now held by Republicans falling into the hands of Democrats during the 2026 mid-term election.
The map redrafting would bar the door to the U.S. Capitol Building for Congressman Ken Calvert, of Corona, who has now been in Congress since 1993 following his first election to that office in 1992 and is thus the longest-serving member of California’s Republican delegation, through elimination. In essence, the remapping would simply extinguish Calvert’s 41st Congressional District as it now exists, which is entirely contained within Riverside County. Instead, a new district would be created in Los Angeles County, where the predominate registration of voters there is with the Democratic Party.
The new state map would dilute the number of GOP voters in California Congressional District 1, where Congressman Doug La Malfa serves in Northern California; California Congressional District 3 in the area around Sacramento, where Kevin Kiley is the incumbent; California Congressional District 22 in the San Joaquin Valley, where David Valadao serves; and California Congressional District 48, where Darrell Issa is the incumbent.
According to Governor Newsom, he and his fellow Democrats are simply “fighting fire with fire.” Gerrymandering is such an abomination, the governor insists, that California has no other choice than to engage in its own gerrymandering.
Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas maintains the Democrats are bravely fighting against the forces of darkness in holding off the malevolent Donald Trump.
The placement of Proposition 50 on the ballot has given, Rivas said, “California voters… the final decision to fight back against Trump’s attacks on their state economy and democracy. I’m proud to stand with my Democratic colleagues…  as we pass this historic measure.” The Democrats are merely standing up against their loathsome Republican oppressors, Rivas said, “with courage. President Trump wants us to be intimidated. His playbook is simple: bully, threaten, silence — then rig the rules to hang onto power. California will not be a bystander to that power grab. We are acting — openly, lawfully with purpose and resolve, to defend our state and our democracy. Donald Trump does not believe in democracy. He is terrified of losing — and he will do whatever it takes to cling to power. If Trump can’t win fairly, he’ll try to make it impossible for Republicans to lose.”
According to the Republicans, however, it is the Democrats seeking to rig California’s – and by extension the entire nation’s – political system.
According to California Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher, in drawing up the electoral map they are presenting to the state’s voters, the Democrats embraced a strategy of “No public hearings, no transparency and complete secrecy. Gavin Newsom’s Democrat allies are behind closed doors, rigging California’s congressional districts so politicians can choose their own voters.” Proposition 50 is an attempt, he said, “to reverse a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2010. That amendment stripped the legislature of its power to draw congressional districts and gave that authority to the Citizens Redistricting Commission, an independent body created to stop politicians from rigging maps to protect themselves. These are rigged maps drawn in secret to give Democrat politicians more power. These maps shred the fair, transparent process voters demanded. The independent commission spent months gathering public input, holding 196 public meetings, hearing 3,870 verbal comments and collecting 32,410 written submissions before finalizing the current maps. Democrat politicians are throwing that work in the trash for a rigged scheme cooked up behind closed doors. This is a mockery of democracy,” Gallagher said. “If they can neuter the commission here, they can neuter it anywhere. Californians should choose their representatives, not the other way around.”
The Proposition 50 map redraft would not apply just to the 2026 election cycle, but remain in place in 2028 and 2030, rendering LaMalfa, Kiley, Valadao, Issa and Calvert, most likely, into permanent political has-beens. After the 2030 U.S. Census, California would return to having its lines drawn by the independent redistricting panel, consistent with 2010’s Proposition 20.