Election 2025 - CA Prop 50

I never say this, but this time your vote matters.

Summary

States choosing to redistrict to gain an advantage in the next House election may feel unfair, and may be unprecedented, but it’s not illegal or unconstitutional. Like so much we have lost in the Trump era, we have found another institutional norm that was only enforced by sentiment and not law. There is little we Californians can do to stop the country’s descent down the road the Republican party wants to take us. Prop 50 gives Californians an opportunity to take action that will have a national impact. It may not be enough to guarantee Democrats taking back the House, but it is something. I encourage you to vote Yes on 50. Furthermore, I encourage you to learn about a system that would completely eliminate gerrymandering: proportional representation.

Context

The US Constitution requires representative reapportionment across the states every ten years based on changes in population, but leaves the drawing of districts to the individual states. Normally, redistricting coincides with this process every ten years (with a major exception being that a court order could mandate redrawing of districts) after the census determines the new apportionment of representatives across the states. There have been times in US history where this process has been flagrantly used to lock up the power of the party in control of a state. This has been normal and legal, if viewed as unfair.

In order to promote fairness in redistricting, Californians voted to delegate the authority to draw district lines to a fourteen-person citizen commission made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four politically unaffiliated people. This is why we are being presented with Prop 50 — we need to change our state constitution if we want to do our own gerrymander.

So: if Californians believed gerrymandering to be so unfair that we took the power to set district lines away from the Legislature, and if it is very strange to redistrict in the middle of a decade, why should we vote to violate our values? How is this different from the gerrymandering we wanted to end?

How is this different?

It’s important to start with the fact that Republicans control the House with a narrow majority of 220 to 215. It only takes three seats to swing the majority to the Democrats.

The NYT back in August did the math for how many seats the GOP could gain from their gerrymandering:

• Texas (5 seats)

• Missouri (1 seat)

• Indiana (1-2 seats)

• Ohio (2 seats)

• Florida (2 seats)

Since then, Texas and Missouri adopted new maps and more states have jumped into the redistricting mix. As of October 6, the Associated Press includes the following states as part of the GOP gerrymander effort:

• North Carolina (1 seat)

• Kansas (1 seat)

• Louisiana (up to 2 seats)

In opposition to this effort, the AP lists three states that may gerrymander to oppose the GOP in 2026:

• California (5 seats)

• Maryland (1 seat)

• Illinois (up to 3 seats - but probably 0 seats)

California’s proposed redistricting is in direct response to Texas and only proposes to counterbalance the Texas map. If all the red states currently discussing redistricting passed new maps to get their maximum number of seat gains and the blue states did the same, at the end of the day the GOP would be +7 seats.

So let’s compare some scenarios.

1. The electorate votes the same as in 2024 and the only redistricting that happens is what we’ve already seen happen in Texas and Missouri: R majority 226-209

2. The electorate votes the same as in 2024, plus all the red states redistrict to maximize GOP gains: R majority 236-199

3. The electorate votes the same as in 2024, plus Texas, Missouri, and California: R majority 221-214

4. The electorate votes the same as in 2024, plus Texas, Missouri, California, and Maryland: R majority 220-215 (same as 2024).

5. The electorate votes the same as in 2024, plus all the red and all the blue states (somehow magically): R majority 227-208

There are two key things that show up in all these scenarios: I assumed the electorate votes the same, and I found Republicans win the House every time.

If you believe the electorate has not changed its views on the Republican party in the last ten months, then maybe you would not be inclined to vote for something that feels inherently unfair — after all, why throw away your values if you’re going to lose anyway?

G. Elliott Morris, over at Strength in Numbers, provides some quick scenarios that show why the assumption the electorate is going to vote the same is not likely:

Democrats won 215 U.S. House seats in 2024, with a popular vote margin of -2.5 percentage points. Currently, Democrats lead by anywhere between 2 and 3 percentage points in the generic ballot (my average is coming out on Friday!). That’s a 5-point swing from 2024. If you apply that swing, Democrats would win 230 House seats, all else equal. The TX GOP’s new map in TX means Dems would only win 225.

As of September 23, Morris is reporting a D+5 advantage in generic ballot polling, which would be a 7.5-point swing from 2024, compared to the scenario above. Let’s be conservative and use Morris’s D-230 number to construct some more scenarios:

6. Electorate votes D+2.5, plus Texas and Missouri redistricting: D majority 224-211

7. Electorate votes D+2.5, plus all red states redistrict: R majority 221-214

8. Electorate votes D+2.5, plus all red states and California: D majority 219-216

In these scenarios, California tips the balance if more states than just Texas and Missouri succeed in gerrymandering before the 2026 election.

Californians, your vote matters this election. Usually, I take a pretty realistic view of voting. You shouldn’t vote if you’re not informed, and usually your vote won’t matter. But this time, if we can succeed in passing our redistricting measure, we can impact the direction of the entire nation.

Where could this lead us?

I’ll warn you that “slippery slope” is a logical fallacy. There may be some further tit-for-tat, where more states perform some more gerrymandering, but at the end of the day, there is only so much you can gerrymander before you’ve hit peak gerrymander. And folks, this is pretty close to peak gerrymander.

As far as this setting off a cascade of collapsing democratic norms beyond redistricting, I will gesture vaguely to the dumpster fire in which our Constitution now moulders. Gerrymandering has ever been a part of that dumpster heap since the ink on the Constitution was dry. Hate to break it to you, but the gerrymander is an American tradition.

In short, I don’t buy arguments that this is (marginally) harmful to our democratic norms.

But does it feel unfair?

Well. The entire system is unfair. So it is natural for this aspect of it to feel unfair. You want to fix that? Great! But the status quo certainly isn’t fair.

Is there a solution?

What we have on the ballot will not make anything fairer. But there is a reform that you should know about — and, hopefully, spread the word about — that would end gerrymandering once and for all. It’s called proportional representation.

I’ve been learning more and more about proportional representation from Huey Li of BlueSky, YouTube, and Substack fame. I highly recommend checking out his channel to learn more about political science in a very straightforward and down-to-earth way.

Here is a simple way to do it: set the number of districts per state to one. Can’t gerrymander that! Then let people vote for their preferred party. You then send a proportion of the state’s allocated representatives to the House based on the proportion that voted for that party.

Let’s use the 2024 House elections in California as an example. 9 million voters voted for Democrats and 6 million voters voted for Republicans, and there are 52 California seats in the House. So 60% of the votes went to Democrats and 40% went to Republicans. In a proportional representation system, 60% of the 52 representatives would be from the Democratic party and 40% of the 52 representatives would be from the Republican party, which shakes out to 31 Democrats and 21 Republicans.

I’m going to give you one good reason why you may like proportional representation and one good reason why you may not, and both hinge on my guess that my reader is probably left of center.

The good news is, under proportional representation, a system that is used in over eighty countries around the world, the two party system collapses and third parties have a chance at winning representation in the legislature. All you lefties out there can stop complaining about having to choose the lesser of two evils — you’d be able to choose the lesser of three, maybe four, possibly five evils! And you better believe one of those evils would be a Nazi party. Social democrats could finally get a party going in the US and win a handful of crucial seats that would require the center parties to cut deals with them in order to form a government. Bernie and AOC could fly their socialist flag and maybe have a little bit more power within the left-center coalition.

Here’s the bad news. Let’s go back to the California 2024 House election. 60% of the votes becoming 60% of the representatives sounds fair, right? But what do you think the breakdown actually was in California 2024? That’s right, 60% of the votes for the Democratic Party translated to 43 of the 52 California seats in Congress, which is closer to 83%.

Thanks, California Citizens Redistricting Commission! Great job keeping it fair.

Just for kicks, let’s look at what would have been the result if the entire country were a single district in 2024. 74.4 million voters went Republican and 70.6 million voters went Democrat. That amounts to 51% of the votes becoming 223 seats in the House for the Republicans. But I’ll remind you the Republicans control the House in our world with a majority of only 220 seats, a difference of only three seats. It’s almost as if the gerrymandering has been happening at such a constant background level this whole time that folks haven’t noticed it.

Like I was saying earlier, the status quo is not fair. It would take a reform like proportional representation to change things. And, strategically, it would not behoove Californians who love American values and democracy to give up seats to Republicans in the name of fairness. So please, if you care about interrupting the dismal course on which we’re headed, vote for Prop 50 today and tell your friends about proportional representation tomorrow.