Proposition 50 is a short-term victory with a big downside
One of the great conceits of California is its place on the cutting edge — of fashion, culture, technology, politics and other facets of the ways we live and thrive.
Not so with Proposition 50.
The redistricting measure, which passed resoundingly Tuesday, doesn’t break any ground, chart a fresh course or shed any light on a better pathway forward.
It is, to use a favorite word of California’s governor, merely the latest iteration of what has come to define today’s politics of fractiousness and division.
In fact, the redistricting measure and the partisan passions it stirred offer a perfect reflection of where we stand as a splintered country: Democrats overwhelming supported it. Republicans were overwhelmingly opposed.
Nothing new or novel about that.
And if Proposition 50 plays out as intended, it could make things worse, heightening the country’s polarization and increasing the animosity in Washington that is rotting our government and politics from the inside out.
You’re welcome.
The argument in favor of Proposition 50 — and it’s a strong one — is that California was merely responding to the scheming and underhanded actions of a rogue chief executive who desperately needs to be checked and balanced.
The only apparent restraint on President Trump’s authoritarian impulse is whether he thinks he can get away with something, as congressional Republicans and a supine Supreme Court look the other way.
With GOP control of the House hanging by the merest of threads, Trump set out to boost his party’s prospects in the midterm election by browbeating Texas Republicans into redrawing the state’s congressional lines long before it was time. Trump’s hope next year is to gain as many as five of the state’s House seats.
Gov. Gavin Newson responded with Proposition 50, which scraps the work of a voter-created, nonpartisan redistricting commission and changes the political map to help Democrats flip five of California’s seats.
And with that the redistricting battle was joined, as states across the country looked to rejigger their congressional boundaries to benefit one party or the other.
The upshot is that even more politicians now have the luxury of picking their voters, instead of the other way around, and if that doesn’t bother you maybe you’re not all that big a fan of representative democracy or the will of the people.
Was it necessary for Newsom, eyes fixed on the White House, to escalate the red-versus-blue battle? Did California have to jump in and be a part of the political race to the bottom? We won’t know until November 2026.
History and Trump’s sagging approval ratings — especially regarding the economy — suggest that Democrats are well positioned to gain at least the handful of seats needed to take control of the House, even without resorting to the machinations of Proposition 50.
There is, of course, no guarantee.
Gerrymandering aside, a pending Supreme Court decision that could gut the Voting Rights Act might deliver Republicans well over a dozen seats, greatly increasing the odds of the GOP maintaining power.
What is certain is that Proposition 50 will in effect disenfranchise millions of California Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who already feel overlooked and irrelevant to the workings of their home state.
Too bad for them, you might say. But that feeling of neglect frays faith in our political system and can breed a kind of to-hell-with-it cynicism that makes electing and cheering on a “disruptor” like Trump seem like a reasonable and appealing response.
(And, yes, disenfranchisement is just as bad when it targets Democratic voters who’ve been nullified in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and other GOP-run states.)
Worse, slanting political lines so that one party or the other is guaranteed victory only widens the gulf that has helped turn Washington’s into its current slough of dysfunction.
The lack of competition means the greatest fear many lawmakers have is not the prospect of losing to the other party in a general election but rather being snuffed out in a primary by a more ideological and extreme challenger.
That makes cooperation and cross-party compromise, an essential lubricant to the way Washington is supposed to work, all the more difficult to achieve.
Witness the government shutdown, now in its record 36th day. Then imagine a Congress seated in January 2027 with even more lawmakers guaranteed reelection and concerned mainly with appeasing their party’s activist base.
The animating impulse behind Proposition 50 is understandable.
Trump is running the most brazenly corrupt administration in modern history. He’s gone beyond transgressing political and presidential norms to openly trampling on the Constitution.
He’s made it plain he cares only about those who support him, which excludes the majority of Americans who did not wish to see Trump’s return to the White House.
As if anyone needed reminding, his (patently false) bleating about a “rigged” California election, issued just minutes after the polls opened Tuesday, showed how reckless, misguided and profoundly irresponsible the president is.
With the midterm election still nearly a year off — and the 2028 presidential contest eons away — many of those angry or despondent over the benighted state of our union desperately wanted to do something to push back.
Proposition 50, however, was a shortsighted solution.
Newsom and other proponents said the retaliatory ballot measure was a way of fighting fire with fire. But that smell in the air today isn’t victory.
It’s ashes.
