A ballot measure put to the folks of California yesterday, November 4, saw an overwhelming victory for Golden State Democrats. Proposition 50 asked voters to approve the “temporary use of new congressional district maps through 2030.” With a whopping 63.8% voting for, and just 36.2% against (on 70% of the vote counted), it is anticipated that the new district borders will add an additional five “safe” seats for Democrats in the US House. But how did it start and what are the wider implications?
Liberty Nation News put these questions and more to Editor-at-Large James Fite.
Birth of a Movement?
Mark Angelides: This whole exercise has its roots in the 2020 Census report admitting that major mistakes were made. What’s the deal here?
Jim Fite: So, the process is supposed to go like this: Every ten years, the Census updates the demographic information for the nation, revealing how many people are in each state. That count is then used to determine how many representatives each state should have in the US House. Each state’s legislatures – or, in some cases, redistricting commissions – then redraw the congressional district maps. This time, though, the US Census Bureau announced back in 2022 that it had significantly undercounted in six states and overcounted in eight. If the information used to create the latest congressional maps was incorrect, then the maps themselves are flawed.
Mark: Yes, and even the Bureau admitted that these counting errors almost entirely had a negative effect on the GOP. How much of an impact will these new districts have on the eventual makeup of the House, considering several Republican heavy states are doing the same?
Jim: It’s hard to say, exactly, how big a difference this will make. For one thing, the only way to say with 100% certainty how an election is going to go is to wait until after the votes are in. That little disclaimer aside, think of any given congressional seat as existing on a spectrum from “reliably Democratic” to “leans Democratic,” “toss up,” “leans Republican,” and then finally “reliably Republican,” and we call the ends of that spectrum reliable for a reason.
Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan is projected to result in at least four, and maybe as many as five, seats currently held by Republicans being won by Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections. That would be enough to flip the House majority, but California isn’t the only state playing the gerrymandering game. Texas alone is projected to pick up another five Republican seats based on its new maps, resulting in a net movement of zero across both states.
Ohio’s new map makes it more likely the GOP will flip two Democratic districts, while the maps in Missouri and North Carolina could allow Republicans to pick up one more in each state. So, as of right now, it seems like Republicans are up by four.
The Prop 50 Progeny
Mark: There’s a lot of speculation about whether this will be a tit-for-tat escalation. But is it true that most Democrat-leaning states are already heavily gerrymandered?
Jim: If you look at vote results compared to how many representatives of each party are in Congress, you’ll see that it does seem to be true that solid, dark blue states are about as gerrymandered as they can get – but the same is true for the reddest of states as well. A study last year out of the University of Minnesota revealed that 13 states have been represented in Congress by a single party consistently for the last six congressional elections.
At present, Democrats control the full congressional delegations – House and Senate – for seven states: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Rhode Island. But each of those states has registered Republicans voting in each election. This not insignificant portion of the population in each state is unfairly unrepresented in Congress. To be completely fair, Vermont probably belongs in that category as well, since Senator Bernie Sanders is the only non-Democrat but technically caucuses with them.
The same can be said, however, for Democrats in a dozen red states. Democratic voters exist in all of these states, yet not a single Democrat sits in the House or Senate for Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming.
It’s only the states that still have mixed-party delegations that could possibly gerrymander any more than they already are.
Mark: How far is what’s happening now from the vision of the founders?
Jim: Well, the original plan of the Founders was to avoid political parties, though of course that didn’t survive the first Congress. As well, the United States was much smaller during the lives of the Founders. James Madison is often said to be the final Founder to pass, and he died in June of 1836. Arkansas was admitted as the 25th state on June 15, 1836. The US population at the time was an estimated 15 million people. While they may have imagined such a populace in their wildest dreams, 342 million people spread out over 50 states spanning around 3,000 miles from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific is a difficult animal to deal with. Most likely, problems like this weren’t part of the plan. Probably, problems like this weren’t really considered at the time. In hindsight, however, it seems it was eventually inevitable.
