When Redistricting Becomes Less Boring — 11/3/25

“Redistricting” might be the least interesting word in the English language, but the act of creating congressional and legislative districts is one of the most important concepts in our democracy. The way voters and communities are apportioned every ten years fundamentally affects the partisan balance in Washington, DC, and in state capitals across the country. While attempts to skew the process to favor one party or the other have been commonplace since the founding of the Republic, there have never been such massive or such overt efforts to tilt the congressional field for partisan advantage.   

When Donald Trump encouraged Texas Republicans last summer to redraw their state’s congressional districts to protect the GOP’s House majority, it started a domino effect in which more than a dozen other states across the country have now decided to redraw their own maps. This gradual decline into craven partisanship has now affected one-third of the states with more than one congressional district. Along with the instigators from Texas, the biggest player in the gerrymandering sweepstakes is undoubtedly California, where our governor has spearheaded the effort to reconstruct the congressional map here to create a sufficient number of new Democratic seats here to offset the five new GOP districts in Texas. Gavin Newsom, who has emerged as his national party’s most fervent and most effective Trump critic, quickly identified the political opportunity for both his party—which would be much more likely to regain their House majority with these additional seats—and for himself—who is poised to achieve a high-profile victory over Trump of national importance.

But unlike Texas, where politicians still select their voters rather than the other way around, those two ballot initiatives that Californians passed in a more innocent era required Newsom and his allies to convince a statewide electorate to reverse the redistricting reforms described above. The governor knew that Californians would be reluctant to undo their own democracy-enhancing handiwork, so he made two very savvy political calculations to enhance the prospects for his own ballot initiative, Proposition 50, which will likely be passed into law on Tuesday. 

The first was to draft his measure as a temporary suspension that would allow the citizens commission to be back in charge of the regularly scheduled 2030 redistricting once the specter of Trump no longer loomed. Newsom’s second strategy was to recast a debate over the arcane topic of congressional line-drawing into a fight that deep-blue California would lead against a president who the vast majority of the state’s had opposed in three consecutive presidential elections.    

This gave Newsom the ability to not only dramatically heighten his national profile but to equally dramatically enlarge his financial support base from out-of-state small donors. Both will be of immense benefit in the next presidential election, but they also provided an overwhelming fundraising advantage for the Proposition 50 campaign. National Republicans had vowed to match the $100 million-plus that Newsom and his allies had pledged to raise but have come through with only a tiny portion of that sum. California mega-donor/activist Charles Munger, who had funded the initial redistricting reform measures, put in about $30 million before recognizing that no national GOP cavalry would be arriving to augment his own giving. Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, still the most popular and best-known Republican in the state fifteen years after leaving office, has given speeches and interviews and appeared in a television ad against the initiative.    

But these efforts have been dwarfed by the sheer scale of the Newsom-led fundraising effort on behalf of Prop 50. The measure now holds a substantial lead in the polls, and its passage appears exceedingly likely. (In what may be a political first, Newsom actually asked his donors to stop giving money to the campaign, since there was nothing left on which to spend.) Republicans in Washington seem to have decided that they would rather direct that money to competitive House races around the country next year than risk it on an all-or-nothing initiative fight in a strongly hostile Golden State. The result will be to leave the GOP with as few as four House seats in a 52-member state delegation.   

The rest of the country will be watching high profile campaigns in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia this week. But California’s reversal of its experiment in democracy may have a greater impact than any of those other races—both on the next Congress and possibly the next president.