Newsom got his gerrymander. Now what?
Winning is more than just fighting
“Stop Trump and vote for Proposition 50,” read signs throughout my neighborhood. It’s a short and clear pitch: Texas did an unusual mid-decade redistricting to squeeze out Democratic-leaning districts, and we’re going to fight back. My fellow Californians were clearly compelled: by a nearly 2-to-1 margin (with 71% of precincts reporting; come on, it’s California), the ballot measure was approved.
Now what?
Democrats love that Newsom is fighting back, but I’m reminded of an important principle that I heard once from a friend who does recreational sword fighting: The point of fighting isn’t to fight, it’s to win.
People love to clash their swords forcefully against the enemy’s sword; reasonably often, they forget that they are actually supposed to be trying to use the sword to end the fight, not just to have it.
Democrats need an endgame, not just to clash their swords dramatically as the world burns. And the only good endgame is a world where every American lives in a district designed to offer them fair representation and where the district lines aren’t constantly redesigned for partisan advantage.
I don’t have a tactical playbook to get there, but I know what it should look like: Voters deserve competitive districts with multiple candidates who speak to the issues they care about.
Competitive districts are good for the dominant party too. Incumbents who don’t feel electoral pressure are incumbents unburdened by voter approval — which is sort of antithetical to the whole democracy thing.
As you can probably tell, I dislike gerrymandering on principle and was genuinely cross-pressured about how to vote yesterday. I believe we should ban it at the federal level, and mid-decade redistricting — as distinct from the redistricting required after each census — should be banned as well.
Even a law requiring neutral election commissions would be a huge improvement, one that could be passed in the next Democratic-controlled Congress. But if every American were as upset about this as I am, there’s an even better answer: multimember districts with proportional representation. That is, larger areas would be represented by multiple representatives, chosen based on the share of the overall vote their party got. It makes third parties more viable and reduces polarization.
Pie-in-the-sky electoral reforms aside, the Democrats could have simply banned gerrymandering in 2021 or 2022, but instead they proposed a grab bag of electoral reforms that couldn’t pass Congress. Next time they get that shot, Democrats should take it and pull us back from the Prop 50 world of ultra-gerrymandered states.
I’m not happy about Prop 50 in part because if we’re now playing tit for tat, there are many dominos yet to fall. There are many Republican states that can gerrymander and so far haven’t. Indiana’s legislature is convening to consider a redistricting plan to draw out a few Democratic seats, but Indiana Republicans have been reluctant to go ahead, despite extraordinary pressure from the White House. They are more likely to give in, though, if California passes Prop 50 and Maryland or Virginia examine their own redistricting.
Newsom’s decision to make this a high-profile fight has been great for his own presidential campaign and reputation, but it has probably intensified the pressure on Republicans who were resisting pressure from Trump to fold. What Texas did wasn’t right, but that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
Perhaps I’m daydreaming about closing the barn door when the horse has long since left the stable. Utah’s legislature approved new maps. Missouri’s legislature approved new maps. And next year, there will likely be a wave of redistricting efforts if, as expected, the Supreme Court finds that the Voting Rights Act districting rules are unconstitutional — though the decision may come too late to affect the 2026 midterms. This whole thing may be a catastrophic race to the bottom that will leave our country more fragmented, but that doesn’t mean it’s a race that you can avert just by not participating in it.
But let’s be clear — this is leaving us all worse off. The nationalization of our politics has been bad for everyone, and this intensifies it.
If gerrymandering eliminates more moderates,1 that is a tremendous loss. When we lose moderate Democrats from red states or moderate Republicans from blue states, we lose voices who can speak credibly to the concerns of voters in those states.
I think it is frankly bad for the people of California that the state Republican Party isn’t a meaningful force in state politics. It reduces the pressure to run really good Democratic candidates who are loved by voters, in favor of ones who are really good at internal party politics.
When I bring up my concerns to people, they usually have one very compelling response: How do you even care about all of this in the age of Donald Trump?
The man is demanding that his attorney general prosecute his political opponents on spurious charges.
His ICE and CBP agents are brutalizing American citizens who are just going about their business — in some cases charging them with serious crimes when video shows that they were the ones attacked. The administration has jailed law-abiding immigrants for months, and sometimes deported them, over minor paperwork mistakes.
Trump has pardoned people who participated in political violence on his behalf. When one of them subsequently tried to kill Barack Obama, Trump’s DOJ put on leave the prosecutors who wrote a legal filing that discussed his violence on Jan. 6 and acknowledged that he’d gotten Obama’s address when Trump posted it.
They’re right; I’m terrified. I think there’s a very real chance that our institutions — which, for all their flaws, made us the richest, freest country in the world — will become pure tools of a personalistic imperial presidency. And if you can prevent that with Prop 50, obviously you should. The question is: Can you?
I’m not so sure, and no one is articulating a plan for how gerrymandering a few seats in California can save democracy. Hell, I’m not even sure it helps Democrats win the Senate or the presidency!
Winning means winning elections. More favorable maps help, but ultimately, to win elections, you need a platform that half the country finds compelling. You can’t lose the national popular vote because of national geography. Democrats lost because more voters wanted to support Trump than Kamala Harris.
California voters angry about deportations, DOGE, and the government shutdown were given an outlet to express their rage, and they took it. But if Democrats are going to provide a nationally competitive alternative to the party of Trump, this can’t be their focus.
If rules-lawyering becomes a higher priority than hearing voters out and delivering results they believe in — and it’s pretty easy to argue it has done so in California — then Prop 50 will be consigned to the dustbin of history: an irrelevant proxy battle to the larger lost war over American democracy.
It’s possible that by trying to draw more competitive districts, states actually end up creating some more, well, competitive districts
I'm borderline annoyed by this article.
> What Texas did wasn’t right, but that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
What a terrible argument. Doing nothing results in Texas picking up 3-5 seats with nothing from the Dem side. Is this winning? For the California redistricting to have been the right choice, it just has to be better than not doing it and not necessarily result in a net positive, and this article did a poor job arguing on that front.
You can easily argue that Republicans not facing any repercussions on their action results in them becoming emboldened. This article is strictly relying on the idea that California's actions will be some magical motivator for Republican states redistricting, not the actual concrete motivator, which has been the Trump administration threatening primaries and withholding funding. And you can also argue that Prop 50 being such a blowout win will embolden other Dem states to do the same.
Gerrymandering being bad is obvious. But writing a whole article to state that and dooming around Dems doing what is both politically smart and took a lot of good politicking the very day after is just dooming for the sake of dooming. And you might hate Newsom or whatever, but I'm glad he's in charge and not some inane moralist.
Damn. It's been less than 24 hours since a resounding Democratic victory, and we are already back to the hand-wringing and panic. You're not wrong, but goddam can we PLEASE allow ourselves a moment to breathe and refill the tank for the next fight?!