Why the Yes and No Campaigns on California's Prop 50 Both Deserve to Lose
This column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Image credit: by Joe Mathews, using Google Gemini
The Proposition 50 campaign is being portrayed as a bitter, partisan brawl over whether California should gerrymander its Congressional maps to help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
In truth, Prop 50 has been an unexpectedly unifying and clarifying force.
Both sides of the measure are broadcasting the same two messages.
Or, to be more blunt, the Democrats supporting Prop 50 and the Republicans opposing it are telling the same two lies.
One of those lies is about the past, and specifically about redistricting. The other lie is about the future, and specifically about democracy.
Let’s take the first lie first.
In their advertisements, Democrats and Republicans both portray themselves as longtime defenders of California’s independent redistricting commission.
In reality, Democrats and Republicans are the commission’s most persistent opponents.
They dislike the commision because it’s honest. The commission consists of 14 everyday Californians, without close ties to politics, who have drawn legislative and Congressional district lines since 2010. The commission, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, is barred from considering whether the lines it draws make it easier for Democrats or Republicans to win.
Prop 50 cancels those commission-drawn lines and replaces them with a new map of Congressional districts that favors Democrats.
The Democrats insist their Prop 50 gerrymander is a temporary response to Trump’s gerrymanders in favor of Republicans in Texas and other states. The Democrats say they will return the power to the independent commission when it’s scheduled to draw districts again in 2031.
The Republicans claim that they are stalwart supporters of the independent commission, and now are protecting it against Democrats.
This is bipartisan bunk. Calling the Democrats and Republicans supporters of independent redistricting is as big a whopper as calling Vladimir Putin a proponent of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Voters created the independent commission via two ballot initiatives, in 2008 and 2010. I covered those campaigns closely. And who were the two biggest opponents of those initiatives?
The Democratic and Republican parties.
What’s more, both parties had spent years, and tens of millions of dollars, fighting against previous ballot measures to establish independent redistricting. And they’ve sought to sabotage it ever since.
Why? Because state legislators and parties liked having the power to draw districts. It gave them a tool to keep wayward lawmakers in line (vote with the party or we’ll redraw your district). It also gave California’s relatively weak legislature important leverage in fights with the state’s powerful governors (compromise with us on this budget item, Governor, or we’ll screw your ally in redistricting).
The two parties still hate independent redistricting, despite what they claim in TV ads and through favored Internet influencers. They will say anything to win the Prop 50 battle. And so, they lie about their support for independent redistricting now because the commission is popular with California voters, who will decide whether Prop 50 passes.
But the bipartisan lie about loving the redistricting commission is a minor fib compared to the second noxious lie both sides of the Prop 50 campaign are repeating: that Democrats and Republicans are defenders of democracy.
In making this claim, in this moment, the Republicans and Democrats are demonstrating why their parties both pose dangers to democracy.
The same Republicans who claim to be supporting democracy by opposing Prop 50 are backing President Trump, a self-described dictator who has attacked American democracy repeatedly. He sought to overthrow the results of a democratic election. He’s cancelled laws, violated the constitution, [EB1] corruptly enriched himself, and ignored court rulings. He’s effectively ended our democratic republic, and replaced it with a system that scholars call “competitive authoritarianism.” All with Republicans cheering him on.
The Democrats’ anti-democratic behavior is less blatant, and less well-understood in California, where Democrats dominate the public conversation. But it is quite real.
Trump obscures the problem. Democrats have convinced themselves that any act opposing the authoritarian president is “defending democracy.”
Political opposition to an autocrat is one thing. Defending democracy is quite a different thing. Democrats are doing the first, but not the second.
Defending democracy means supporting the practice of people governing themselves. And Democrats simply don’t do that, even when they’re in power.
Over the past 15 years of total political dominance in California, Democrats have made the practice of democracy more difficult (with small exceptions). They made it 10 times more expensive for Californians to propose ballot measures. They sought to make it harder to petition the government. They reduced how often people can vote on issues. Democrats at the state level have reduced the power of local governments—where everyday people have the most power—to govern themselves, particularly around housing.
Even worse is what Democrats have not done.
Despite their overwhelming power in Sacramento, they have refused to enact the building blocks of modern democracy that are commonplace in the world’s democracy. They have not pursued proportional representation, which allocates representatives to parties based on the percentage of the vote they win (Democrats prefer the disproportionate representation the current system gives them in the legislature). They’ve made it harder for small parties to form and compete. They have refused to incorporate deliberative and participatory democratic practices into the routine of California governance.
Instead, they’ve prioritized protecting their allied interest groups—especially public employee unions and trial lawyers—and Democratic politicians.
Prop 50 is just another example of such self-protection. The Democratic establishment is not offering an agenda for boosting or defending democracy. Instead, it is embracing a baldly anti-democratic tactic—gerrymandering—to improve the prospects of its own politicians against Trump.
In other words, Democrats are interested in winning and power, not in democracy. The demise of the American republic under Trump makes their awful choice clear. Democrats are not trying to restore democracy or transform an American system that is now authoritarian. Instead, they are going all out to retake power in that authoritarian system.
Put simply, in Prop 50—and related gerrymandering fights—both parties are escalating their political warfare over control of an American dictatorship. In this fight, their promises of protecting democracy, or an independent commission, are cynical.
The terrible truth behind Prop 50’s two big lies is that neither of our major parties supports democracy. If we Californians want to be self-governing, to be truly democratic, both sides of Prop 50 must lose.
