Whether the $448.1 million the taxpayers and activists on both sides of the political divide spent on Proposition 50 between August and earlier this month was done in vain and now stands as an absurdist manifestation of the struggle for governmental dominance is now open to question, one that will be answered sometime over the next month or so as the U.S. Supreme Court will take an expedited look at whether the recent rash of gerrymandering that has gripped the country passes constitutional muster.
On January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, barely two-and-a-half months following the 2024 General Election, he embarked on a host of policy initiatives that gave promise of ultimately having a direct impact on the 2026 election.
Trump came into office with his party – the GOP – holding a slight 53-to-46 advantage in the U.S. Senate, including two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and an even thinner 219 to 213 seat majority ratio in the U.S. House of Representatives. His determination to be even more aggressive in propounding his political philosophy through executive action –  directives, mandates and orders – during his second term than had been the case during his first term was manifest with the tariff’s he imposed on the products of trading partners with which the U.S. is friendly and unfriendly alike, his insistence that the U.S. could no longer be counted upon to shoulder the entire financial burden of defending its allies militarily, deregulation of business, the reversal of energy policy which meant a deemphasis on renewables and a return to dependence on fossil fuels and a far more aggressive enforcement of immigration law.
Almost immediately, the president’s Democratic rivals began jockeying to exploit whatever ways those policies might be wielded to their advantage, with the very apparent goal of using the hard feeling some of those policies had engendered in the electorate to drive them to the polls a little less than two years hence in a bid to reverse the Republican advantage in both houses of the federal legislature into a Democratic advantage.
Trump’s allies and Republicans in general were alive to what was happening, and they began to examine their options to neutralize or otherwise prevent that reversal from taking place. Thus, late this spring and early this summer, President Trump called upon those aligned with him in those states where the Republicans held a significant upper hand both in terms of Republican voter numbers and Republican domination of the state houses to tweak those states’ respective electoral maps to maintain the number of congressional districts then occupied by an incumbent Republican while adjusting the boundaries of some of those districts occupied by a Democrat to include a critically larger number of Republican voters in a way that would be likely to replace those Democrat members of Congress with a Republican. This redrafting of electoral jurisdictions for partisan advantage dates back to 1812 and was originated by Elbridge Gerry, who was the vice president under President James Madison and the one-time governor of Massachusetts. Gerry as governor signed into law the redrafting of Massachusetts’ state senate districts to benefit his political party. The practice thereafter has been referred to gerrymandering.
President Trump or those close to him made such a gerrymander request of Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana and Indiana, where the state government lies firmly in Republican hands to the point that it was likely such changes could be effectuated. As it turned out, the Republican leaders in Indiana and Kansas were met with enough Democratic obstruction that they needed suspend or delay the effort until early 2026. In Florida, Louisiana and Nebraska, officials have made progress toward revamping their congressional electoral maps but have not completed doing so. In Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and most notably Texas, the state legislatures there have utilized their authority to redraft those states electoral maps such that the GOP will be likely to swell its ranks in the lower federal legislative house by, respectively, two, one, one and five members.
It was Texas’ move in July, spurred on and choreographed by Republican Governor Greg Abbot, to do that which prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom and his Democratic Party allies to, in Newsom’s words, “fight fire with fire” by altering the Golden State’s congressional electoral map to counter, by an identical number of five, the Lone Star State’s gerrymander. Newsom and his brother and sister Democrats retained Democratic map drawing consultant Paul Mitchell, who set about recontouring the boundaries of a significant number of the state’s congressional districts.
The mechanics or techniques of gerrymandering generally involve three different approaches: elimination, cracking or packing. Elimination consists of having the surrounding districts claim a part of the targeted district so that it is entirely absorbed by its neighbors. Cracking entails diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s registrants across multiple districts. Packing 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.
At present, 43 of California’s congressional seats are filled by Democrats and nine are held by Republicans. What Mitchell, at the behest of Newsom and the Democrats, did was to target five of those Republicans – California District 1 Congressman Doug La Malfa, who serves in Northern California; California District 3 Congressman Kevin Kiley, who represents the Sacramento area; California District 22 Congressman David Valadao, whose bailiwick is located within the San Joaquin Valley; California 41st District Congressman Ken Calvert, whose district lies entirely within the partial confines of Riverside County, immediately adjacent to a portion of San Bernardino County; and California District 48 Congressman Darrell Issa, whose constituents live in San Diego and Riverside counties.
In the case of Calvert, what Mitchell did was to carve the 41st up into six pieces, moving each of those portions into what are now the adjoining 25th, 48th, 40th, 35th, 30th and 23rd districts, such that the 41st District as it currently exists disappeared. For the most part, what Mitchell did in conniving with Newsom and the other Democrats to get rid of La Malfa, Kiley, Valadao and Issa was to take portions of their districts which contained high concentrations of Republicans and moved them into adjoining districts now represented by other Republicans. This transformed those already Republican-leaning-and-held neighboring districts into solid Republican districts, thereby conferring an absolute advantage on those incumbent Republican congress members. In the process, however, the trade-off is that not enough Republican voters remain in the 1st Congressional District, 3rd Congressional District, 22nd Congressional District, or 48th Congressional District for La Malfa, Kiley, Valadao or Issa to remain in office. The 41st Congressional District is recreated in a separate geographical area from Riverside County, resurrecting in and around the heavily Democratic communities at the crux of northwest Orange County and Southwest Los Angeles County in and around Los Alamitos, Downey and La Habra.
Unlike Texas and most of the other states that had simply used the authority of their legislators to adopt an altered congressional map, California was hamstrung by Proposition 20, which had been passed in 2010, creating a nonpartisan redistricting commission that took reapportionment out of the hands of lawmakers, who as members of political parties – usually the Democratic Party or Republican Party – have a self-interest in how those map lines are drawn. Proposition 20 had a provision that allowed the map-drawing authority of the nonpartisan commission to be suspended, but only upon a vote of the entire electorate of the state in the form of passage of a proposition.
In August, Newsom, relying upon the California Assembly, of which 60 of 80  members are Democrats, and the California Senate, of which 30 of 40 members are Democrats, pressed a bill through the legislature to put Proposition 50, asking whether California’s Congressional District Map drawn up by Mitchell should be adopted in lieu of the map approved by the nonpartisan commission in 2021 based on the 2020 census.
During those discussions, the prime movers behind the bill to put Proposition 50 on the ballot openly stated that they were motivated in undertaking the gerrymander merely on the basis of what was going on in other states. The language of the bill, as it was initially proposed, stated that California’s revamped congressional electoral map would go into effect “only if Texas, Florida, or another state adopts a new congressional district map.” Ultimately, however, that clause in the bill was removed. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’s office said there could be no turning back for California once Texas had committed to its redistricting map.
In the discussion engaged in on the legislative floor in August prior to the approval of the bill, several of the state’s Democratic legislators arguing in favor of its passage stated that revamping California’s congressional electoral map to elect more Democrats to Congress and fewer Republicans was a necessary countermove to the power grab being conducted elsewhere by the Republicans, particularly in Texas. Moreover and as importantly, Proposition 50 would create an electoral map that would result, or likely result, in the election of more Latino congressional candidates, boosting the representation of California’s Hispanic population.
In passing the bill to put Proposition 50 on the November special ballot, the legislature committed California’s taxpayers to covering the cost of the election, which included the state’s administrative costs to schedule and carry out the balloting, along with reimbursement to the state’s 58 counties for polling services. To date, the tallying of those expenses indicates the cost at roughly $282.6 million, Democrats and anti-Donald Trump political forces aligned with them expended $121 million on top of that in promoting Proposition 50. That was countered by approximately $44.5 million in spending by Republicans and their allies in a campaign opposing Proposition 50.
Proposition 50 passed by an overwhelming 64.6 percent to 35.4 percent.
Less than 24 hours after the polls closed on November 4, David Tangipa, a California resident and Republican Assemblyman from District 8; Eric Ching a California resident and Congressional Candidate and California residents Saul Ayon, Peter Hernandez, Roxanne Hoge, Joel Guiterrez Campos, Solomon Verduzco, Paul Ramirez, Jane Ortiz-Wilson, Vernon Costa, Rachel Gunther, Doug Buchanan, Sayrs Morris, Mike Netter, Christina Raughton, Kristi Hays, James Reid, Michael Tardif and Alex Galicia, along with the California Republican Party on November 5 sued Governor Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, alleging Prop. 50 violates the 14th and 15th Amendments.
The lawsuit alleged that the redistricting plan mandates racially gerrymandered congressional districts in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In response to the suit, Governor Newsom tweeted “Good Luck, Losers,” suggesting the legal action was a sour grapes move by the Republicans who don’t have the political muscle to prevail at the polls.
On November 13, the U.S. Justice Department, represented by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jesus A. Osete Assistant United States Attorney Julie A. Hamill of the Civil Division’s Civil Rights Section and Trial Attorneys David Goldman, Joshua R. Zuckerman, and Greta Gieseke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division together with First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California entered a motion to join in with the plaintiffs in Tangipa, et al. v. Newsom, et al. in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
According to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice, “Substantial evidence, including that in the legislative record and public statements, indicate that the legislature created a new map in which Latino demographics and racial considerations predominated, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
“The race-based gerrymandered maps passed by the California legislature are unlawful and unconstitutional,” Essayli said.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Democrats and Trump opponents mounted a challenge in federal court to the redrawn congressional electoral map as drafted by Governor Abbot and ratified approved by the state legislature. This week, on November 18, a panel of three federal judges in El Paso in a 2-1 ruling sided with plaintiffs, accepting the arguments that the reconfigured Texas congressional district map was contrary to to the interests of that state’s African American and Hispanic residents. The decision was authored by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, one of President Trump’s nominees to the federal ben during his first term.
The finding that the map redraft could be canceled on the basis of it having used race and/or ethnicity of the electorate had a broader implication than just in Texas as it pertained to the Texas map. By logical extension, that principle applied to the circumstance in California where Governor Newsom and other California Democrats, with the introduction of the bill to place Proposition 50 on the ballot and during legislative floor discussion with regard to it, not only spoke of it as a means of countering the Texas gerrymandering but as intended to increase the number of Hispanics holding California congressional seats.
Governor Newsom, in a post on X, represented the federal court ruling in Texas, which so obviously redounded to the advantage of the Democratic Party, as a positive development. “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom wrote.
That struck many as the California governor whistling past the graveyard, since the very issue that had undone the new Texas map was equally applicable to the new California map, and it too had been placed under examination by a federal court, albeit in a different circuit.
The prospect that the California Democrats’ ploy to alter the lines of competition in their state’s congressional races in their favor which had cost them and the state’s taxpayers upwards of $403 million to accomplish was to be rendered null and void as a consequence of their party’s challenge to the Texas Republicans’ legislative maneuver to alter their state’s electoral maps in their favor, which had cost the Texas taxpayers and that state’s GOP virtually nothing, was too painful, embarrassing and potentially damaging for California’s Democrats to dwell on. This put California’s Democrats into the rather absurd position of rooting for the Republicans in their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the Texas federal court’s ruling that Texas’ 2026 congressional redistricting plan discriminates on the basis of race.
Three days after the ruling, this morning, November 21, U.S. Supreme court Justice Samuel Alito threw the matter into a state of limbo when he signed an order temporarily blocking the lower court’s ruling while the full Supreme Court considers whether to allow the redrawn Republican-friendly map to be used in Texas in 2026.
In previous years, the nine-member Supreme Court, which is composed of six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three appointed by Democratic presidents, has blocked lower court rulings pertaining to voting maps because they have come too close to elections.
Whatever the full Supreme Court’s decision with regard to whether Texas can adopt mid-decade a new electoral map when traditionally such maps are put into place at the beginning or a decade and remain in place for ten years or five election cycles, it is unlikely, on the basis of consistency alone, that the panel will one standard to be applied in Texas and another standard to determine what happens in California. It is an open question of whether, when the appeal with regard to the however the lower courts rules in the Tangipa, et al. v. Newsom, et al. case, the Supreme Court will insist that the eleventh-hour tinkering with the electoral maps in both California and Texas be voided. It would seem, then, that if the redrafted electoral map in Texas is used next year, then the electoral map approved by the passage of Proposition 50 will be used in California in 2026. Similarly, if the revamped Texas map is struck down, it is highly unlikely that the Proposition 50 electoral map will survive.