California’s gerrymandering measure would move the nation backwards | David Daley

Let’s imagine it’s early 2031. Democrats hold a three-seat edge in the US House. California has just lost four seats to congressional reapportionment. Texas has gained four.

Reapportionment has not gone well for Democrats. In addition to the four from the Golden state, New York has lost two seats. Minnesota, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois each lost one. Blue states surrendered those seats – and electoral college votes – to red states where the Republican party draws the lines: Florida, Utah, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

President Gavin Newsom, needing to make up those 11 electors in a re-election campaign against Donald Trump Jr while also defending his party’s slender lead in the House, calls California’s Democratic leadership. Texas will already gain four seats, he tells them. California will lose them. Democrats are going to have to draw a 47-1 congressional map. If not, Republicans could win another trifecta. Trump Jr could win. Democracy itself is on the line.

Very little in this scenario is fanciful. If population trends continue, Sun belt migration will cost blue states a dozen seats in the US House. Newsom will be a favorite for the Democratic nomination. Texas and Florida will gain additional seats, no gerrymander required. And the partisan calculus in 2031 could look a lot like it does in 2025: without a big boost from California, Democrats might not have any hope to hold the US House.

Newsom and other proponents of California’s proposition 50 – a measure that would allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts – insist that they are only asking voters to replace California’s bipartisan commission-drawn map as a temporary solution to an urgent crisis within American democracy. The 48-4 map, they promise, is purely retaliatory, and designed to restore partisan balance and match the five seats stolen first by Texas. The commission – designed to ensure fair districts – would supposedly be restored to power after the 2030 census.

It’s difficult to believe that’s true. Those additional California seats will not be any less important to Democrats in five years. After all, the exact electoral concerns driving Newsom and Democrats to act in 2025 will still be with us when the next round of redistricting begins, after the 2030 census. Indeed, after reapportionment – and if the US supreme court further weakens the Voting Rights Act in a case from Louisiana this term, placing seats held by Black Democrats across the south in jeopardy – the Democrats’ partisan prospects might even be worse.

Now put a Trump scion or another Maga acolyte on the ballot. Combine that with the electoral college boost the Republican party will receive after apportionment and their long-term edge on the US Senate map. Won’t California Democrats insist, again, that democracy depends on a radical gerrymander? Might partisans approve another power grab in the name of democracy?

California voters face a difficult choice this fall. Many citizens, rightly concerned about the authoritarian turn of the national GOP, will support proposition 50 as a counterweight. Yet it’s worth considering this: once politicians gain power over redistricting, they’re loath to hand it over voluntarily.

California voters, after all, created the state’s independent commission for precisely this reason: the politicians could not be trusted to do it themselves. In the 1980s, the Democratic representative Phil Burton called the state’s Picasso-style cartography his “contribution to modern art”. He offered the same justification as Newsom: this power play was needed to counteract Republicans. But voters hated this gerrymander so much that a statewide repeal vote succeeded in 1982.

This rebuke taught Democrats a curious lesson: they’d simply guarantee themselves the number of seats they wanted by working with Republicans to gerrymander the state. After the 2000 census, the two parties agreed on a fair split of the delegation behind closed doors. Voters had no say at all – and the seats were so locked in that despite a tumultuous decade in politics, only one incumbent lost a re-election bid.

Voters didn’t like this much, either. They finally took the pen away from politicians, over the course of two initiatives in 2008 (affecting state legislative districts) and 2010 (affecting Congress). The commission voters established is the gold standard for reform. Commissioners are put through an arduous process to ensure fairness. No state provides more public input. The commission has inspired nonpartisan reformers nationwide, who have pointed to its success when winning anti-gerrymandering initiatives in Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere.

And while competitive elections have dwindled nationwide, they’ve dramatically increased in California. Instead of one congressional seat changing hands each decade, 15 seats flipped from 2012 to 2020. In 2022, five seats were within 5 percentage points, and another two were within 8 percentage points. In 2024, eight seats were within 5.1 percentage points. Those competitive seats would be wiped away on the new map – which not only flips GOP seats blue, but also strengthens three other Democratic incumbents.

It is no small thing for a state to lose all of its competitive seats. It becomes almost impossible to hold lawmakers accountable. In districts this safe for one side, good luck changing your representative even if you want to.

This gerrymander does net Democrats five seats nationally. One could argue that’s a fair trade-off. But in the end, it doesn’t actually create a level national playing field – now or long-term. Proposition 50 counters Texas. But with Missouri, Ohio, Florida, Kansas, Indiana, North Carolina and Kentucky redrawing next, that’s an additional 10 seats with no counterweight – all with the US supreme court weighing a Voting Rights Act case that, depending on the decision, could allow Republicans to nab another dozen seats. Californians will surrender their commission, and the best national inspiration for reform. The actual national impact may be negligible to zero.

And over the long run, the partisan picture will grow cloudier still for Democrats. California’s shrinking population could cost the state four seats in Congress via reapportionment. That’s another reason why it’s so hard to imagine Democrats giving up power to draw the lines ever again. After the 2030 census, four incumbents will lose their districts. Will an additional five Democrats want to lose theirs – the likely outcome if the commission returns? Might partisans want the power to choose which side, or which incumbents, lose their seats? Come 2029, the rumbling will begin: this power should stay with the legislature. You know, because democracy itself will depend upon it.

If this mid-decade redistricting armageddon tells us anything, it’s that we desperately need a national standard to end gerrymandering everywhere. But if California unwinds the most successful example of reform for partisan purposes, well, it moves the nation farther away from any real solution.

It moves California backwards as well, to a time when mapmakers chose winners and losers – something politicians tend to like just fine. We should expect them to zealously protect it at all costs.

• David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count