As long as red states gerrymander and California does not, we are going to keep losing the house.
There are something like 40 democrats and 12 republicans representing California. I believe with gerrymandering it would be closer to 50 democrats and 2 republicans. I read that years ago in an article though, so I don’t have a source.
That is easily the difference between a house that supports Trump’s agenda vs a house that blocks it.
I fully support a federal ban on gerrymandering (as well as federal laws to protect voters and make voting easier). But as long as the GOP gerrymanders in places like TX and the democrats do not in places like CA, we are going to keep losing.
You’d have to basically carve out all of eastern California, from Kern County up to the top of the state, as red. I don’t think you could give the R’s just 2 seats out of that big half.
The reason you don’t have a source is because it isn’t true. Despite the perception of California being a “liberal stronghold”, outside of the populous Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas (and more recently San Diego and Sacramento) and certain coastal enclaves, most of the state is pretty mixed and the northeastern counties (a.k.a. “The State of Jefferson”) are deep red. You can gerrymander the shit out of any map if you work hard enough, I guess, but a 50:2 map would have some extremely tortured districts.
But beyond that you’d first have to convince a majority of voters to amend the CA constitution to allow for it. Prop 20 in 2010 (won with 61% of the vote) made it a “non-partisan” decision by committee. Further it only undertaken after a census year, the last one was in 2020 and redistricting was not complete until 2022. Next census is in 2030, which means the earliest you are going to see any redistricting is maybe 2031. Which means the 2032 election, two full presidential terms from now.
Even if you want to do it, it requires plenty of uncertain hoop-jumping and will not happen until several years from now at the earliest.
I’ve seen a map that’s legal, upholds the Voting Rights Act, and produces 49 to 50 Democratic seats,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster and director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project who polled for the Harris campaign and advised the Biden White House. California currently has 43 Democrats and 9 Republicans in Congress. “This is something lawmakers should consider if Texas goes first.”
Just because some campaign pollster for a losing candidate is quoted in Politico as saying something does not make it true. Let’s see this “map that’s legal, upholds the Voting Rights Act, and produces 49 to 50 Democratic seats.”
As for
why don’t you take it to The Pit instead of edging around with veiled insults in P&E?
Combined together, those three predominantly Democratic metro areas comprise slightly less than half of California’s population of 39.5M people which is why the state has frequently alternated between progressive-ish Democrats and staunchly conservative Republicans in the governor’s mansion. Some of those populations, particularly up on the Central Coast like Santa Barbara County, are quite liberal, but others are deep red with Trump and MAGA signs proudly on display, and a whole chunk of the northern part of the state which quite seriously wants to break off and form its own “State of Jefferson”.
Whatever you think about their politics, dismissing these people as ‘irrelevant’ is the height of precisely the kind of entitled arrogance that drives people away from voting for a Democratic candidate as only looking out for ‘urban elites’.
Yeah, as Randall Munroe noted more people voted Republican in CA than in Texas. It’s a big state, with a number of solidly ruby-red rural counties particularly in the far north and east. Gerrymandering in densely-populated and paler red Orange county might work to reduce Republican share by a couple of seats. But gerrymandering those broad swathes on the borders is not very easy and that article produces more naysaying about the feasibility of it than that one quote would indicate.
That said we shouldn’t go overboard with how Republican the state is either. When the seat count is 43-9 without obvious gerrymandering, it’s a pretty dark blue state overall. Our last Republican governor is virtually considered an unwelcome foreign RINO by his own party at this point. A R lieutenant governor hasn’t been elected since 1983 (Maldonado was appointed for 1 year) and while Trump gained in CA compared to 2020, he still lost the state by twenty points.
Personally I think Newsom is spouting a lot of hot air to make political hay (neat alchemy trick, that). I don’t begrudge him getting aggressive in general - any opposition is good opposition to a degree and much as I kind of dislike him he’d be a 100x better president than our current disgrace (maybe a 1000x better). But IMHO the gerrymandering thing falls into the category of unhelpful grandstanding considering current CA law.
Well, the Los Angeles (including Long Beach, Anaheim, Inland Empire) metro area is the second largest urban collection in the United States (and San Francisco has outsized political influence in the statehouse due to the wealth and prestige of the tech industries) so that isn’t surprising that it tends to be Democrat-leaning. But unlike many consistently liberal (or conservative) states the politics tends to vacillate far more than such a predominance might suspect. This is, after all, the state that elected Ronald Reagan, the most conservative Republican president since Calvin Coolidge (or maybe even McKinley depending on what standard you use to measure conservatism), and the Schwarzenegger who was a social moderate but definitely came in as a ‘small government’ fiscal conservative. Anyone who has driven through the inland and northern parts of the state can attest to large strongholds of strenuously conservative politics, even (or perhaps especially) in the US$50B agricultural industry which feels betrayed by being essentially neglected by tech industry-focused Democrat politicians with roots in San Francisco.
As I said above, I’m sure you can draw a 50:2 D:R district map, but it is going to look very ‘stringy’ and tortured to pack and crack enough to get to that ratio, and I doubt you could do so in a way that wouldn’t run afoul of legitimate legal challenge for grossly partisan manipulation because that is exactly what it would be.
The cure for craziness isn’t equal and opposite craziness. Polarization gave rise to Trump and making more of it would just make him even stronger because “look at what he’s defending us against”.
Since cutting gerrymandering and adding the open primary system, California has slowly shifted back to normalcy, politically. They recently dropped whole word education, they will be putting mentally ill homeless people into conservatorship, they’re working towards re-illegalizing theft, etc. The state is liable to start producing politicians that are immune to finger pointing for crafting and backing bizarre and outlandish policies. Minus that, and Trump has no ammunition against them.
Here’s a research paper that outlines the effects of the changes:
Which makes it absurd to say anything about “California outside of the big metropolitan areas”. Why is there any relevance at all to any measure that ignores half the state?
So, just to be clear, your belief about democracy is that as long as one party has a majority of voters, we should deny representation to anyone else who is not in that majority? This is your position?
Gerrymandering is vile. I’ve always like the idea of the Democrats threatening to do it when they control the power, but offering as an alternative a constitutional amendment that would regulate district creation methods. I doubt that the general public are big fans of gerrymandering (with the understanding that some are probably fine with it when it helps them). Now, if the Republicans don’t agree, then sure, go ahead and gerrymander away. While it’s vile, it’s far worse when only one side does it.
The Voting Rights Act essentially requires a degree of gerrymandering. California districts are nowhere close to being as compact as they could be.
But it probably isn’t too far from what it would “naturally” be. If one end of the spectrum is perfectly proportional representation, one would expect a 30-20-2 split. If it were perfectly gerrymandered, it would be 52-0-0. Given how first-past-the-post voting works, you wouldn’t expect proportionality, but at the same time there is significant regional variation. So 43-9 is probably close to what you’d get even with maximally compact districts.