• Election: Special, November 4th, 2025
• Jurisdiction: California
• Endorsement: Yes on Proposition 50

This is a sad vote for me but not a tough one. Some friends and family I deeply respect disagree with me and since it does not seem like a great idea to do something facially anti-democratic when we’re in the midst of an authoritarian attempt I believe it warranted some deep introspection to prove to myself that I’m not simply rationalizing a partisan position.

I moved to California in late October of 2010. It was too close to the election on November 2nd that year to register and vote through normal channels. This was before LA County implemented its innovative VSAP voting program - so I had to schlep to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk office in Norwalk to cast a provisional ballot. From Pasadena, where I lived at the time, this was about an hour in traffic - two if you happened to live further north in the Antelope Valley. That annoyance is probably why I remember this specific ballot at all.

My first vote in the Golden State introduced me to the questionable way we tend to make large policy changes - by referendum on constitutional amendments. As is California tradition, I was confronted with two competing propositions - Prop 20 and Prop 27. Both of these propositions had to do with Prop 11 from the 2008 ballot which created an citizens redistricting commission that was now responsible for drawing the California State Assembly and Senate district boundaries. Prop 20 would extend that commission’s responsibility to United States House Districts and Prop 27 would repeal Prop 11. Prior to Prop 11, the state legislature was responsible for drawing the district maps for all three of these legislative bodies. This meant state lawmakers had a say in who their voters were and therefore had a strong incentive to gerrymander themselves into as safe a seat as 50%+1 votes in the legislature would allow.

Politicians are generally held in pretty low regard and a common narrative in our society is that gerrymandering is the vehicle they use to solidify control so they can get away with more corruption. It is self dealing and hypocritical so many voters despise it.

But reality resists simple narratives and politicians are often just as trapped by the collective action problem of gerrymandering as we are by its consequences. An exhaustive discussion of gerrymandering is way beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here - for that I highly recommend the now defunct 538 series on the topic - but the history of the practice in California over the last quarter century is relevant context for the upcoming vote on Prop 50.

Districts have to be drawn with some value proposition in mind. Do we want to group people with common interests together? What even is a legitimate common interest? Should we instead prioritize competitive elections? Voters are really suspicious of complicated district shapes - how much should we prioritize simple polygons? What about racial minorities - should disparate communities be drawn together to maximize their power? There are an endless number of considerations when drawing district lines that people may disagree over in good faith with the health of our democracy in mind. The term “gerrymander” is usually reserved for districts that are drawn to one of two value propositions that most of us recognize as blatantly anti-democratic:

1. To maximize partisan advantage
2. To maximize incumbency advantage

In 2001, California’s state and US congressional districts were gerrymandered to the second of these value propositions and it worked. From then until 2010 there were 265 US congressional elections in California. In only one of these did an incumbent lose their seat and in only 14 was the margin less than 10%. This is distinct from a strategy that would have prioritized partisan advantage. California Democrats could have made more Democratic congressmen, but they didn’t. Instead they struck a deal with the GOP that would keep the congressional partisan split constant for the next decade so as to keep both sitting Republicans and Democrats in their job. To make things seem extra gross all but two members of the Democratic caucus paid Michael Berman, a political consultant given the authority to draw the maps by the legislature, 20,000 dollars each to draw districts favorable to them keeping their seats.

Gerrymandering has different effects on our politics modulo two primary variables. The first - which value proposition was the gerrymander intended to favor - party or incumbency? And second - what is the partisan split in the chamber subject to the gerrymander? Close/competitive? Or does one party have a large majority or super majority? In all cases, gerrymandering makes our politicians less responsive to the increasingly mythical, but rhetorically useful, median voter. In cases where incumbency has been advantaged it is more difficult to unseat an incumbent - even and perhaps particularly in a primary. This can have a partisan ideological effect, but on the margin it will tend to entrench local special interests represented by the incumbent. Partisan gerrymanders tend to produce highly skewed partisan districts - particularly in districts held by the party disfavored by the gerrymander. This will tend to select representatives that hold more tightly to increasingly nationalized partisan ideologies reducing the number of politicians closer to the center.

When chambers are closely contested and subject to highly partisan gerrymanders it makes compromise much more difficult and can either result in gridlock or wild swings in policy when control flips. Voters do not like this. When chambers are held by a large majority party and the gerrymander favors incumbency it tends to reduce focus on whats generally best for all of us and favor backroom deal making between special interests. Voters do not like this either - but they mostly do not see it and when left to fester it can produce bad governance outcomes. The former situation describes the US Congress and the later describes the situation in the California state houses before Prop 11.

I must emphasize here that the causal relationship between gerrymandering and these effects varies and is pretty marginal in states like California where these same effects are produced naturally by self sorting among the electorate. More on this later. Political scientists argue continuously about which of these forces are more responsible for our current situation. It is also ironic that the bad governance outcome in the early 2000s that created the considerable anti-incumbent sentiment that ultimately drove Prop 11 to success was not the result of gerrymandered forces at all. The combo de-regulation and re-regulation of the California energy market in 1996 was passed on a bipartisan basis by a split California legislature and Republican governor Pete Wilson as a seemingly good faith attempt at reducing energy costs for Californians by introducing more competition into the electricity generation market. But well intended policies, especially those that manipulate markets, if designed poorly can have disastrous outcomes. Speculative price manipulation in the wholesale market by criminal actors like Enron convolved with price caps on the consumer end to produce shortages and rolling blackouts. Voters really really didn’t like this and even though then Democratic governor Gray Davis was not responsible for the 1996 assembly bill that created the situation, voters took their anger out on him and recalled him 2003. He may not have been directly responsible for the regulation but he was a long time California pol and the sentiment at the time was “give me anything but a politician”. This is how California ended up with Arnold Schwarzenegger as its governor.

The Governator was one of two men primarily responsible for California’s current citizens redistricting commission. The other is Republican mega-donor Charles Munger Jr. There are two necessary ingredients to amend California’s constitution by referendum when pushing against the grain: attention and money. Arnold brought the attention and Charles brought the money - gobs of it that he inherited from his billionaire father Charles Munger (Warren Buffet’s business partner). Arnold railed constantly about the evils of gerrymandering and backed the first attempt to fix it Prop 77 which would have given control to a three judge panel. This was a throwback to the 1992 process - after Pete Wilson vetoed all three maps proposed by the Democratic legislature the California Supreme Court appointed a three judge panel to break the stalemate. Liking their new found comfort in the incumbency advantaged maps of 2002, California state pols (Republicans and Democrats) spent big to defeat 77 in 2005 and it failed. Charles took notice and the second attempt in 2008, Prop 11, was well designed and well funded. It smartly only redistricted state houses to avoid the increasingly nationalized partisan divide at the federal level. 11 had the juice and it barely squeaked into the constitution with 50.82% of the vote on the same ballot that gave us Barack Obama.

I was not in California in 2008 so I didn’t get to vote on 11. I’m pretty sure I would have though, because sitting in that cold hard chair at the county registrar’s office in 2010 I circled the bubble for Prop 20 and against Prop 27. Reality resists simple narratives and many of my fellow Democrats joined me in backing this Republican effort to solidify our citizen redistricting commission’s authority. It was simply the right thing to do.

The Proposition Scoreboard

The following propositions are pertinent to the discussion here. I include the two legislative term limit props because they interact with gerrymandering in ways that will be illustrated in the impact section. Prop 14 from 2010 is also pertinent because it enacted a non-partisan primary system where Democrats and Republicans all compete together where the top two go to the general.

California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission (CRC)

California’s citizens redistricting process is considered one of the best in the country. Redistricting is inherently political and its impossible to “remove all politics” - but we do decently well. Our commission’s specific mandate is to create districts that follow these ranked priorities:

1. Equal population — Each district must have roughly equal population, complying with the U.S. Constitution.
2. Voting Rights Act compliance — Districts must not dilute the voting power of racial, ethnic, or language minorities.
3. Contiguity — Each district must be one connected area.
4. Respect for communities of interest — Districts should keep together populations with shared social or economic interests.
5. Integrity of cities and counties — The Commission must minimize the splitting of cities, counties, and neighborhoods.
6. Geographic compactness — Districts should not be oddly shaped without legitimate reasons.
7. No favoritism or political bias — Districts may not be drawn to favor or discriminate against incumbents, candidates, or parties.

Composition and Independence

The Commission has 14 members:

• 5 Democrats
• 5 Republicans
• 4 not affiliated with either major party

Commissioners are chosen through a rigorous screening process run by the State Auditor and Legislators and political operatives are barred from serving.

Transparency and Public Input

The Commission must:

• Hold public hearings throughout the state.
• Publish draft maps and data for public review.
• Consider community testimony and written submissions before finalizing maps.
• Conduct all deliberations in public meetings — no secret negotiations.

What Impact did Proposition 11 and 20 have?

To understand how all these propositions have affected the makeup of our representation we need to look at historical election trends. I pulled data from both wikipedia (1992-2002) and from the statewidedatabase.org (thank you UC Berkley!). I also reference metrics from planscore.org which is the best third party non-partisan map analysis organization I have found.

There are enumerable ways to rate maps for partisan lean and political scientists argue over them constantly. If you’ve heard of any of these you’ve probably heard of the efficiency gap because it was made famous in the 2018 Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford that challenged Wisconsin’s gerrymandered state maps. Whitford was ultimately remanded based on a lack of standing argument and the question of the courts using the efficiency gap - or any other metric at all was later declined in Rucho v. Common Cause, 2019 as being a nonjusticiable political question.

The idea behind the efficiency gap is to count the total number of “wasted votes” for a party across all districts. Your vote is considered wasted if the party you voted for did not win OR if your vote was unnecessary to win (i.e. all votes over the win threshold - 50%+1 in a 2-way race). The gap is the difference between each party’s wasted votes. So if Republicans have a +11% efficiency gap it means their votes were wasted at a rate 11% lower than Democrats. Generally an efficiency gap of over 8% is considered to represent a durable partisan gerrymander.

In theory the efficiency gap should be easy to compute. I have done so, in plot C below. In reality, the computation is complicated by two primary factors - how do you count third party votes? and how do you handle uncontested races? In these cases I used a simple model to reapportion third party votes and in cases where there was no challenger I use a turnout model to determine the undervote and use a portion of that as a stand in for the opposition vote. This method is grounded in the actual election results and uses as little modeling as possible - I only had to employ the turnout model in 14% of contests. Further, simply eliding the third party votes versus a reapportion strategy did not produce significantly different results. I include the planscore.org metrics in plot D for comparison. I assume planscore.org uses more sophisticated modeling techniques and in some cases our computations meaningful differ. I do not know precisely where these disagreements arise because their methodology is not public. planscore.org also provides three alternate metrics to the efficiency gap - you can read all about them on their website.

We need to consider the impact 11 and 20 had separately because there is one crucial difference between the state and federal districts our commission has authority over. For the state houses, it draws all of the districts that comprise the legislative body and for the federal congressional districts our commission draws only 52 of 435 (12%) districts. 49 other states have 49 unique processes for drawing the other 386 districts. Our state houses are also subject to term limits where the federal districts are not. Most importantly Prop 50 only pauses the CRC jurisdiction for the federal districts (Prop 20) and does not in any way alter the CRC Prop 11.

The State Houses

I aggregated the state senate and state assembly as though it were one unicameral chamber. The total number of seats has been constant at 120 (80 Assembly/40 Senate). The assembly votes are every 2 years and the senate every 4. These plots cover two different term limit epochs:

1. 1992-2010: Representatives elected during this time frame were subject to a maximum of 6 years in the Assembly (3 terms) and 8 years in the Senate (2 terms). You could switch chambers for a total of 14 years in the state legislature, but in reality this isn’t such an easy thing to do.
2. 2012-on: Representatives elected during this time frame are subject to a 12 year total limit in the state legislature regardless of chamber.

Some observations of our state districts:

1. Party registration and chamber membership tracts decently well. No party preference has been growing considerably over time (plot A). If partisan registration mapped exactly to votes and independents voted 50/50 for each party you’d expect to see the red/blue boundary exactly bisect the Republican/Democratic party registration lines. The fact that it more closely hugs the GOP line is indicative of registration/voting incongruities and maps that are marginally but increasingly favorable to Democrats.
2. The incumbent gerrymander from 2002-2010 maps produced zero incumbent losses during that entire time frame (plot B).
3. Turnover is dominated by term limited representatives (plot B).
4. Turnover modestly spikes during new-map years (plot B).
5. Incumbent losses are generally very low (max: five in one year), but have increased with the CRC maps (plot B).
6. Prop 14 massively increased the number of contests uncontested on a partisan basis. Average before per election was 6 and after its 20. Most of these races now involve two democrats passing through the primary (plot B).
7. On average, 26% of the state legislature is new every cycle (plot B).
8. Chamber transfers (moving from Assembly to Senate or vice-versa) was reduced 3x by Prop 28. We should probably have a unicameral legislature anyway!
9. None of the 4 maps in question would be considered a durable partisan gerrymander based on the efficiency gap metric produced by either me or planscore.org. My computation sees the earlier maps as slightly favoring the GOP and later maps as neutral (2012-2022) or having a slight Democratic lean (2022-2030). The planscore.org metrics indicate slight and growing favoritism to Democratic candidates for the last three map epochs..
10. The histograms of the contest margins show that overall the elections are way more competitive than the incumbent gerrymandered maps (2002-2010) and even marginally more so than the judge appointed maps (1992-2000). However the number of Dem/Rep contests at the general had reduced considerably (Prop 14).

The U.S. Congressional Districts

The U.S. House districts are of course not subject to term limits. The number of seats changes with redistricting based on the population recorded by the census. From 1992-2000 California had 52 seats in congress, from 2002-2020 we had 53 and since 2022, having lost population due to our housing and cost of living crisis, we are back down to 52.

Some observations of our congressional districts:

1. Similar trend to the state districts with slightly increasing partisan advantage to Democrats over time, but marginal.
2. The Democratic wave election of 2018 is notable in plot A. 5 incumbents lost reelection and 4 more members retired. The Democrats picked up 7 seats. This shows up in the efficiency gap as a strong Democratic advantage because Democrats were winning most of the close contests.
3. The incumbent gerrymander for the 2002-2010 maps saw only one incumbent lose reelection during that entire timeframe.
4. When the new CRC maps went online in 2012, 7 incumbents lost reelection and 15 total seats ~28% of the California delegation turned over. The Democrats gained 4 seats.
5. In total there is far less turnover each cycle than in the state chambers on account of having no term limits.
6. Prop 14 had a similar effect as on the state chambers by significantly increasing the number of single-party general election contests.
7. The most notable disagreement I have with planscore.org is in the efficiency gap for the 2002 maps. I compute an average value of -5.84% (Republican advantage) compared to their flat 0%. My average is significantly driven by the wave election year of 2008. Democrats had huge gains in congress in 2008, but in California the incumbent gerrymander held strong and Democrats gained no seats. This would track with a very large efficiency gap GOP advantage that year. Democrats also had historic gains in 2006 nation wide. All those extra Democratic votes that yield no additional wins are “wasted”.
8. The red shift of California shows up in the large Democratic advantaged efficiency gap in 2024. Los Angeles county moved 10 points to the right. All of those votes were “wasted” because they’re still in safe Democratic districts. The marginal additional GOP vote in rural districts is also wasted because Republicans were already winning there.
9. As with the state maps, the histograms of the contest margins show that overall the elections are way more competitive than the incumbent gerrymandered maps (2002-2010) and even marginally more so than the judge appointed maps (1992-2000). However the number of Dem/Rep contests at the general had reduced considerably (Prop 14).

Overall Impressions

• When politicians decide they want to gerrymander to achieve a result they can get what they want. The incumbent favoring gerrymander of 2002-2010, saw 1 incumbent lose in over 860 contests. That’s a challenge success rate of 0.11%. I doubt the voters were that pleased with their representation. Notice the shape of the histogram distribution on the 2002-2010 maps. Its much more normal than the others and median election is way less competitive.

• The efficiency gap metric is highly sensitive to wave elections that see lots of close elections break one way. A map that looks neutral in a normal year may look gerrymandered in other years (2008, 2016, 2024).

• A straight computation of the efficiency gap in many states is not strictly possible and will require some level of modeling. The notable disagreements I have with the planscore.org numbers in the earlier map years highlight this. They have clearly made different modeling decisions that down weight the effect of wave years. This exercise has made me much more sympathetic to the court’s decision to punt a quantitative gerrymandering precedent out of its jurisdiction. When left to the judiciary I think its best to allow them to use the fuzzy logic they’re so famous for (they know porn when they see it). If we ever legislated against gerrymandering as a nation, I could see us using quantitative metrics - but we’d have to establish an authoritative department to produce these measurements. Otherwise the judiciary will just be clogged with different plaintiffs claiming to be correct.

• It’s clear that the CRC has been producing maps that increasingly favor Democrats on the margin. This could be indicative of Democrats more successfully working the process. It could also simply be that the priorities established by the commission convolve with geographic voter distributions to produce this effect in more innocent ways. It might also just be that Trump has driven Californians insane. Most likely, it’s a little bit of all of the above. The CRC process does not remove all politics from redistricting. It brings the process into the light and sets very clear value propositions. Nothing in its mandate explicitly requires it to produce competitive maps.

Where Did Proposition 50 Come From?

No redistricting process is perfect, but we in California were happy with ours. We don’t want this fight and didn’t start it. Like most terrible things in modern America this started with Trump issuing a quasi-direct order over TV and social media to his gubernatorial helpmates - initially Gov. Greg Abbot in Texas. The following timeline ensued:

• July 15th: Trump publicly urges Texas to gerrymander its congressional maps to “pick up five” additional U.S. House seats.
• Late July: In an effort to block the Texas plan, most of the Democratic delegation of the Texas House flees the state to deny a quorum for the special session. Shit hits the fan, fines are issued, the Texas AG files suit to expel 13 Democratic members, and the FBI gets involved to track down the fleeing Dems.
• August 8th: A group of six Texas Democratic state lawmakers—part of the quorum-breaking delegation—travel to Sacramento, California. They stand beside Governor Gavin Newsom, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and California legislative leaders at the Governor’s Mansion, jointly endorsing Newsom’s plan to “offset” the Texas gerrymander.
• August 14th: Governor Newsom officially unveils a state constitutional amendment dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act” - later to appear on our ballot’s as Prop 50.
• Mid August: California Republicans break with Trump on the redistricting issue. They publicly call for a U.S. Constitutional amendment that would require a California-like independent process in all states.
• August 20th: Texas state house reaches quorum and passes new congressional maps that would shift 5 of their 38 congressional seats to GOP control.
• August 21st: California legislature puts Prop 50 on the ballot.
• August 29th: Texas governor Greg Abbott signs their Republican gerrymander into law.
• Early September: Florida state house creates a committee to explore if they can squeeze one or two more GOP seats out of their already Republican gerrymander.
• September 8th: Missouri state government passes new mid-cycle maps that would increase their already Republican advantaged maps from 6-2 to 7-1, increasing projected GOP seats by 1.
• Mid September: Indiana state GOP lawmakers have a closed door caucus to consider expanding their 7-2 Republican gerrymander to 9-0. Indiana GOP lawmakers are wary but are under enormous pressure from the Trump administration: threats to withhold federal funding and favors and a tax-payer funded visit from vice president Vance to lobby for the new extreme gerrymander.
• September 28th: Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signs the Republican gerrymander into law.
• September 29th: Fourth lawsuit is filed by Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee to block the Missouri maps.
• Late September: Kansas GOP party leaders circulate a petition to call for a special session to consider redrawing maps. Kansas has a Democratic governor so the GOP would have to override her veto - which they could do if they lose no votes, there are just enough in their state house to pass new maps. The target would be Democratic Congress woman Sharice Davids, for a GOP pickup of 1 seat.
• October 1: The Texas maps are challenged in court under the argument that they violate the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. A 3-judge panel will later rule on the maps.

The GOP is now so slavishly devoted to the whims of one man that a simple utterance at a press conference (and subsequent threats to use executive power unconstitutionally) has upended hundreds of years of tradition of census driven redistricting. Right now, the math from states considering a mid-cycle partisan redistricting process (other than those mandated to take another look by the courts) is thus:

The AP also has a good summation article.

In addition to the mid-cycle redistricting gerrymander fight several southern states, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana are awaiting judgement by the courts regarding their racially gerrymandered maps. If the courts struck down the racial gerrymanders Democrats might pickup as many as 2 seats - but these are at the expense of existing gerrymanders.

Ohio is mandated to redraw its congressional districts in time for 2026 due to a state constitutional requirement for bipartisan approval that was not met by the 2022 maps. In a weird quirk if they fail to get enough Democratic support by November the GOP could unilaterally redraw the maps. The Democrats have a strong incentive to agree to some bad maps here to avoid potentially worse maps later - unclear how this will play out. Ohio is currently 10-5 and the GOP could possibly drive this to 12-3. Ohio is also being pressured by the Trump administration to gerrymander its maps even more so than they currently are - all but assuring the Ohio GOP will propose maps the Democrats cannot accept. What a ridiculous mess.

The current net effect for 2026 if all enacted GOP plans survive and Prop 50 passes is GOP+1. On a longer timescale (2028 - because New York’s constitutional amendment process is multi year) if all states currently considering or under pressure to gerrymander pass maps successfully we’re looking at a partisan advantage over current baseline of something like +2 GOP. A one-sided redistricting onslaught could render a partisan advantage of about +10 Dems to +12 GOP in either direction. It is unlikely that this scenario could play out in Democrats favor because that would mean voters and the courts approved of Democrat’s maps while the courts struck down the GOP maps. It is much easier to see how a lopsided redistricting result could favor Republicans - referendums in California and New York fail and the courts approve of the GOP maps.

Expert analysis currently rates the partisan advantage in Congress as about +8-10 seats for the GOP. This bias comes from a combination of self-sorting natural geographic bias (Democrats live more densely in cities, increasing their per-capita efficiency gap) as well as a slight nation-wide advantage to the GOP from explicit partisan gerrymanders. The 2025 partisan advantage map looks like this:

What Does Proposition 50 Actually Do?

The coverage of what Prop 50 actually does has been slowly driving me insane. Prop 50 is a scalpel designed to only touch the part of our process that can reduce the effects of partisan gerrymandering from other states.

Early versions made Prop 50 activation contingent on the GOP enacting mid-cycle gerrymanders in another state - but this text was removed following Texas’s passage of their gerrymander. This leaves open the small but not impossible chance that the courts could strike down the Texas and Missouri maps but leave California’s in effect if 50 passes.

Prop 50 gives the state legislature permission to draw congressional maps that will be used in the 2026, 2028 and 2030 U.S. congressional elections. In 2032 the congressional maps will revert to being under the control of the CRC. The proposition itself does not include the new map boundaries - those are moved in separate legislation which the proposition names. The map legislation (AB 604) proposes maps that on average would produce 5 extra Democratic seats.

Bottom line, a Yes on Prop 50 would probably give Democrats 5 seats in Congress that would otherwise be held by the GOP – but only for the 6 years following 2026. In the most plausible version of events where the Prop 50 maps are in use - the TX and MO gerrymanders are also allowed - which means a yes vote most likely means, instead of allowing the GOP to gain 6 additional seats in Congress, we only allow them to gain 1. This may be enough to tilt control of the body to Democrats.

The TX and MO gerrymandered maps will have to be redrawn in 2031 when the CA maps go back to the CRC. Those states have no independent process as of yet and so likely their legislatures will just cement these gerrymanders for the following cycle. So Prop 50 is already less than a proportional response!

Here is the full text of Prop 50 and here is the CA Legislative Analyst Office’s analysis of what it will do.

Why I am Voting Yes

This is a sad vote for me but not a tough one. I wish there was language in the text that said the new maps would be void if the courts struck down all of the mid-cycle GOP gerrymanders. This would make the “we’re doing this only because you made us” case much cleaner. As mentioned above though, I think the scenario in which the courts uphold the CA gerrymander and strike down the TX and MO gerrymanders is extremely unlikely. So I think it is fair to consider this legislation as purely retaliatory and meant to blunt the effects of a GOP power grab for a legislative body in which they already have an unfair advantage. Furthermore there is an expiration date on this gerrymander of 3 elections, at which point it will be as though we never passed Prop 50 at all. This expiration date and the fact that 50 does not touch the state chambers gives me a lot of confidence that over the long term CA will not revert to it’s pre-CRC ways.

I have three primary arguments for why we should do this:

Prop 50 might save our democracy.

If you don’t already agree with me that we are in the midst of an authoritarian attempt to seize control of our government I am probably not going to convince you here. I would just implore you to give this at least as much introspection as I have done here on Prop 50 and consider if you’re slowly being boiled - lulled into a false sense of the world by normalcy bias. Consider:

• The last time the current head of our government lost an election he hurled a violent mob at our legislature as they were certifying that election. People died. Once in office again he pardoned over 1500 of these violent perpetrators.
• The President has lied so brazenly and constantly about the 2020 election that it is now the orthodoxy of the Republican party that that election was illegitimate.
• Our Department of Justice is now fully politicized. It is halting corruption cases against administration allies, charging political opponents frivolously and has fired or is looking to fire every FBI agent who ever worked an investigation into an administration ally or thought a wrong-thought.
• SCOTUS is now considering if its rulings will be followed by the executive before it makes them.
• The executive has unilaterally decimated Congress’s Article I appropriations authority.
• We are experiencing the greatest assault on the freedom of speech since McCarthyism.
• Soldiers are walking the streets of American cities and the President is threatening to jail political opponents.
• Cabinet members are mocking the oversight process.
• Corruption is unchecked and rampant.

Ask yourself, given recent events in Los Angeles, DC, Chicago and Portland - do you think soldiers are not going to be ordered to polling stations in swing states? If your answer to that hypothetical is anything other than complete and total confidence in a “no”, we have a problem.

We have seen examples of this playbook around the world. Turkey and Hungary come to mind. These tactics have been more successful and moved faster than even I anticipated. Open, liberal democracy is the exception rather than the norm in human history. Most governments through time have used the boot. I really do not think I am overreacting. I have not thought every subsequent election was more important or existential than the last as escalating partisan rhetoric would have us believe. I voted for Obama twice, but I was not terrified by the prospect of a McCain or Romney administration. Both of these men were honorable and believed in the rule of law. My disagreements with them were about political priorities. I believe any rational, honest, considered opinion of our current situation can only find that it is an emergency and we are not in normal order. We are in a struggle for our way of life and system of government.

This is not to say that I believe that the success of this authoritarian attempt is inevitable - only that it is happening and has thus far been more successful than even the most alarmist among us anticipated. How high is too high a chance that it could succeed for us to take it seriously? 20%, 10%, 5%? I think the success of the liberal democratic capitalist order post the New Deal and World War II was so successful that it lulled us into a false sense of decadent security. Americans have a hard time imagining what its like to live in a place like Hungary… or Russia, because we’ve had it so good for so long. The thing that should give me the most hope here is that our politics has been equal to the challenge. It hasn’t. The thing that actually gives me the most hope is that the illiberal forces will have to pull off a political succession and it is unclear if that is possible.

But say a political succession is in the cards, in the event of an electoral college tie in 2028 the U.S. House of Representatives will break the tie. The process is notoriously murky which can lead to unpredictable shennanigans and diminished perceived legitimacy. However, this is not a majoritarian vote - each state delegation gets one vote. Prop 50 will not help us here, the GOP controls delegations from 30 states and the Democrats have 18 with 2 states in even split. While it would certainly give me comfort that the transition of power in 2028 would happen and be peaceful if the Democrats control congress, the mechanism by which a GOP majority could disrupt it is less clear to me if we’re following constitutional order. Its that later part that is of more concern to me and for that the 2026 election is more important.

My concern is mostly about oversight in the run up to 2028. The Senate is not subject to gerrymander. It is however subject to structural bias towards the GOP on account of rural votes having much more power than urban votes (1 Wyoming vote is worth 67 California votes). It is extremely unlikely that Republicans will lose control of the Senate in 2026 given the states that are up. The only hope for meaningful oversight of the Trump administration is that Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in the next election. Prop 50 may be determinative.

The brakes on this bus are out and we need to fix them. Subpoena power wouldn’t let us stop the bus but it would help us slow it down. We need to buy time, ensure the integrity of our elections and show the American people that serious adults are still in government and trying to hold this administration accountable. If troops show up at polling stations, we need the ability to force officials to explain to the American people why that is happening. When corrupt tech billionaires land the deal of the century (buying a 400B company for 14B) and the ability to control what our young people see and hear - we need to understand how and why that happened.

Prop 50 will bring the partisan balance of power closer to where the voters are.

Maybe you don’t agree with me about the existential nature of our current moment - but you have to admit as I have shown above that a unilateral disarmament by Democrats would likely result in a GOP partisan advantage in the house of ~20 seats. This is simply unfair and not representative of where the American people are. Prop 50 would bring that representation closer to the people for the next 6 years.

This of course would be at the expense of California Republican’s parochial concerns - i.e. those concerns that a sympathetic representative could meaningfully make unilateral progress on. I think any honest assessment of this expense is minimal. Constituent services are non-partisan and economic development tends to be a cross-party priority. In our current political climate the thing that matters most is which party has control and for that the fairness argument clearly falls in favor of Prop 50.

The current Congress is doing remarkably little anyway, considering that its under unified control. Much of the past few months has been spent out of session trying to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. What this body has actually been doing is so laughably unserious that it’s hard for me to take high minded arguments about representation seriously. Exactly whose interests are currently being represented? It certainly does not seem like the American people’s from where I sit. From where I sit it seems like our federal government is being perverted to make money for one man and his political allies at the expense of sick children and the rule of law.

Prop 50 could make it more likely that we address gerrymandering nation-wide.

There is some high minded objection to Prop 50 from quarters whose political project it would benefit. These arguments range from “but its just wrong” to “we can’t campaign for democracy with one hand and do this with the other”. I do think Prop 50 can be considered unethical under certain deontological ethical frameworks and if thats your thing I envy the certainty with which you must barrel through the world. I’m more of a consequentialist which means I spend a lot of time wrestling with the unknownable future and thinking in terms of probabilities.

One argument is that an escalating gerrymandering war will tarnish the Democratic pro-democracy brand in a way that will make it harder to win elections and save democracy. Instead, if Democrats unilaterally disarmed and let GOP gerrymandering diminish their power they would have a stronger case to make to voters that they are behaving well and deserve votes for that behavior. There are a few problems with this:

1. Democrats already have gerrymanders in place so you have to combat a strong preexisting – and correct – narrative that this is a practice that both parties engage in.
2. California already had a measurable partisan advantage for Democrats even given our CRC process.
3. If you think democracy is an important electoral issue, and you don’t mean because you think the 2020 election was stolen, you’re already voting for Democrats.
4. This issue isn’t going to go viral in the attention economy algorithms. It generates no salacious imagery and its fairly technical. As a concept it does piss people off, but when jack booted thugs are brutalizing the citizens of Chicago its just going to get lost in the noise.

I think the most likely scenario is that Prop 50 will have no effect on the probability we nationally address the practice of gerrymandering. I do however think that a reciprocal gerrymandering war has a higher probability of productively pushing on the issue than a lopsided GOP power grab does. If democrats just cede power the other side has no incentive to give it up and that includes voters. To put this another way: we have a better chance of passing SCOTUS-proof national anti-gerrymandering legislation if neither side stands to lose meaningful power by doing so.

This logic locks us into a collective action problem of maintaining power parity with a fair national map. We can believe that gerrymandering is bad and that we shouldn’t do it but be forced into it to keep the power balance as close to the real sentiments of the polity as possible. Not just because thats fair, but because its a necessary precondition for any bipartisan legislation to fix the root problem.

Long Term Solutions

I think California Democrats should back California Republican’s proposal of an independent redistricting constitutional amendment. It would be better if every state used a process like California’s. But as we’ve seen if you have to draw districts at all you have to do so to some value proposition and that choice is inherently political. It is simply impossible to “remove politics” from the process entirely if humans are a part of it. Some people have proposed algorithmic or random districts. Ok - but an algorithm has to be written to some value proposition and random districts just seem silly (probably more so than they actually are). I think a more serious option that leaves the mechanics of our system intact would be to expand the number of representatives. Just expand the house to 3000 members. Gerrymandering loses potency as the districts get smaller. The problem with this is that voters hate politicians and are usually pretty reluctant to create more of them.

There is a better solution: just get rid of the districts.

This is where it’s important to take a step back and ask why the hell are we doing any of this anyway? The whole point of democracy is to create a government that represents the people. So the metric we should evaluate our system to is how well our elected representatives match the national political divides. Our system has two major problems that make this difficult and creates space between where the government and the people are:

1. Bias in density and geographic sorting/gerrymandering that create durable partisan advantages.
2. The 2-party binary.

This entire endorsement has been about 1 but the best solution to gerrymandering could also solve 2, which is a way more pernicious driver of bad outcomes than 1. As currently constructed the United States can only have two parties. This isn’t the result of dark scheming forces that just want there to be a uniparty. It’s physics. Our first-past-the-post, plurality-winner-take-all elections ensure there can only be a path to power for two parties and so it will always be the case that our complex myriad of political constituencies will shoehorn themselves into a two party binary. These binaries undergo periods of reconstruction and upheaval. We’re in one now, but they always come to rest as 2.

The only way to fix this is to create an electoral system that allows a path to power for minority vote getters. This is called proportional representation and most democracies learned from our mistakes and decided to use it instead. The simple idea is that you vote for parties instead of people and the parties receive a number of seats proportional to their performance in the election. If no one party achieves a majority and none usually do, they have to form a majority governing coalition of the willing with other parties. This pushes compromise out of the party bases and into the professional political class where it belongs. Party based voting also has the nice side benefit of getting people to vote for ideas instead of personalities.

There are certainly flaws with every voting system, but proportional representation is just obviously better. Making it real in the United States seems like a pipe dream but we’ve got to start somewhere. The first step would be to get some states to convert to the system. I think California is the best bet. We’re big enough and have diverse enough concerns that we could support a lot of parties. It would also solve one of California’s biggest electoral challenges: nobody can tell the difference between all the Democrats on their ballot. There are organizations pushing for this. If you feel gross about this vote as I do, I would encourage you to donate to them.