Canvassers encourage passing motorists to vote Yes on Prop 50 along Bicentennial Way in Santa Rosa, Calif.Alvin A.H. Jornada/The Associated Press
Voters in California have passed a ballot measure that will redraw the state’s electoral map, in hopes of giving Democrats an additional five seats in the country’s sharply contested House of Representatives.
The vote on Proposition 50, whose outcome was projected by U.S. news organizations well in advance of a final tally, marks a key victory for California Gov. Gavin Newsom and for the Democratic party, as it seeks to take back power in Congress in midterm elections next year.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Newsom called on other states to follow California’s lead, including Virginia, Maryland, New York, Illinois and Colorado.
“We can de facto end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it,” he said, after Californians set a turnout record for a special election.
“I’m proud but I’m very mindful and sober of the moment we are living in,” Mr. Newsom said. “Donald Trump does not believe in fair and free election. Period. And full stop.”
Remaking his state’s map was an attempt, Mr. Newsom has said, to neutralize earlier action taken in Texas.
In July, Mr. Trump called on Republicans across the country to redraw boundaries in their own favour. “Texas would be the biggest one,” he said at the time. “Just a simple redrawing we pick up five seats.”
By late August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had signed his state’s new map into law.
Democrats must flip three seats in Congress to retake power in next year’s midterm votes, a pivotal election that will either ease or constrain Mr. Trump’s ability to act over the final two years of his term.
With such great stakes predicated on the outcome of just a few seats, states across the U.S. have joined the effort to tilt maps. Democrats are seeking new advantage in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. Republicans, meanwhile, see the possibility for additional gains in Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio. Missouri and North Carolina have already made changes.
Republicans believe their changes can help them in roughly nine Congressional seats; it’s unclear whether Democrats can match that. In New York, for example, the party approved a new map just last year, following a lengthy battle.
Courts, too, are likely to play a role in adjudicating the merits of maps drawn across the country.
Still, the California measure has created a unifying moment for a Democratic party that has been pulled apart by wildly different visions of its future, without a leader to direct its course of action.
In one television commercial aired by the Yes on 50 campaign, Mr. Newsom was joined in urging approval of the proposition by former president Barack Obama, New York progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, a long-time friend of failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“We’re going to take back control of the House of Representatives next year,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN Tuesday night. Alongside Democratic wins in a series of East Coast votes, Mr. Jeffries said the “Republican mandate” is “gone. Red wave, gone. The ability to jam extremism down the throats of the American people — all of that is gone.”
In California, the ballot measure offered the first chance since last year’s presidential election “to vote against Trump with their middle finger,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid wrote on X.
It’s not clear, however, how much the vote demonstrates a shift in the state’s politics.
Last year, Mr. Trump won 38.3 per cent of California votes. On Tuesday, with Californians still queueing to mark ballots, early results showed the “no” side with roughly 35 per cent.
Adoption of Proposition 50 steers California away from a hard-fought democratic reform, the 2010 creation of a California Citizens Redistricting Commission that was intended to end decades of bitter fighting over electoral maps by entrusting their drawing to an independent body.
Such gerrymandering is a “plague on democracy,” Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose California district is likely to be refashioned to better favour Democrats, told ABC News.
“I think it takes power away from voters, undermines the fairness of elections and degrades representative government,” he said. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, too, has spoken out against a measure he called “going backwards.”
But decades of effort to ensure more electoral equity in the state have been cast aside, replaced by a more naked pursuit of power in the Trump era.
The campaign in favour of the proposition raised US$168-million, with Californians donating in such enormous numbers that Mr. Newsom actually told people to stop sending in cash. The yes campaign more than doubled the money raised by opponents of the measure, who were led by Republican Charles Munger Jr. — previously a key backer of independent redistricting.
Mr. Trump himself, meanwhile, suggested he would not readily accept the results of the vote, which he called a “GIANT SCAM” in a social media post Tuesday.
“The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” he wrote, alleging — without evidence — that Republicans had been shut out of mail-in voting.
The proposition vote, he said, is “under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”