The November ballot measure would redraw congressional districts to favor Democrats. Learn how the map affects representation.
Does Prop. 50 divide California communities? Depends how you measure it By Jeanne Kuang, CalMatters Jerome Jones, 56, casts her ballot while holding her two-year old grandson at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration polling station in Los Angeles on Nov.
8, 2022. Photo by Pablo Unzueta for CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. There’s no question that the proponents of Proposition 50 have a partisan goal. By seeking to adopt a map to put more Democrats in power in areas currently represented by Republicans, they are asking voters to temporarily bypass the state’s independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission, which for the past two decades has prioritized maps that keep similar communities together and provide more electoral opportunities for communities of color. Does that mean that the proposed new congressional districts would be less representative of voters, beyond party preferences? We looked into some common questions. Who drew the Prop. 50 map? Paul Mitchell, a veteran Democratic redistricting expert in Sacramento, and a group of similar consultants drew the map. Mitchell explained in an interview that he took input from California’s Democratic congressional delegation before sending a proposed map to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The committee then sent the proposal to the state Legislature, which adopted the map as part of its vote to put Prop. 50 on the November ballot. The proposition would allow the state to temporarily use those proposed district lines. Isn’t California already gerrymandered? Not quite. Many Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance, already complain that under California’s current map, Democrats control over 80% of congressional seats even though the party got just under 60% of statewide votes in the 2024 presidential election. But that doesn’t mean the maps are intentionally drawn to give Democrats an unfair advantage. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. The citizen commission that drew the maps, composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans as well as four independents, were specifically forbidden from considering party registration in deciding how to draw the lines. They did have to consider geography, and Democrats and Republicans don’t live in an even distribution across the state. Plus, several of the current blue districts are highly competitive, with the incumbent Democrats winning them last year with razor-thin margins. Two academic institutions that rate states’ redistricting plans say California’s current map is mostly fair. PlanScore found the map is tilted toward Democrats by two measures and balanced by two other measures. Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project gave California’s map a “B” score on partisan fairness, docking it only for giving incumbent politicians an advantage. Would the new map further divide communities? Both proponents and opponents of Prop. 50 claim their favored map – the existing one or the proposed new one – keeps cities and counties together more often, resulting in better representation by keeping similar communities under the same congressmember. So which is it? It depends how you look at it, and each side phrases their claims differently. The proponents of Prop. 50 are correct in saying their map splits fewer total cities and counties into two or more districts than the current map. That’s according to analyses of both maps by HaystaqDNA, the firm that assisted with the nonpartisan redistricting in 2021. An analysis by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that difference to be nearly negligible. But the Democrats’ map has more cities and counties that are split among three or more districts, rather than only two. That’s why opponents are also correct in saying Prop. 50 splits communities more times — though in their argument mailed to voters, they overcounted the number of times. But keeping cities and counties intact isn’t the only way to judge the quality of a congressional district. For starters, big cities have to be split into multiple districts to ensure that each congressmember represents the same number of people. Both maps give each district 760,066 Californians, give or take one constituent. Plenty of California cities are split in both maps because the state constitution requires independent map-drawers to consider not just keeping cities and counties together but also “communities of interest,” which the law defines as “a contiguous population which shares common social and economic interests” that should be in one district to be represented fairly. In any region that could mean everyone who sends their kids to the same school district, or everyone who works in farming, or everyone who relies on I-5 for their daily commute. But there’s no set definition of all communities of interest, so once you consider them, it becomes a matter of opinion how well each map represents Californians. Prop. 50’s opponents have highlighted Lodi, a 66,000-person city north of Stockton currently represented in one congressional district that would be split among three districts under Prop. 50. The Lodi City Council opposes the measure. Mitchell said the split stemmed from efforts to strengthen a northern Central Valley district for Democrats by moving in more voters from Stockton. The resulting shuffle forced Lodi residents to be split up, but also unified Antioch and Martinez residents into one district and Vacaville and Solano County together in another. All four of the latter cities and counties are split up under the current map. “It’s a tradeoff,” he said. “You could have competing communities overlapping. Which one’s more important?” But opponents say those tradeoffs should only be made with public input and without partisan goals. In deciding which cities, counties and communities to keep together or split up, 2021 independent redistricting commission member Patricia Sinay said the commission held numerous hearings and received tens of thousands of written comments. “Saying one splits more than the other, it’s not that informative,” said Sinay, a political independent who opposes Prop. 50. “What did the people want? What did the communities of interest ask for?” How does Prop. 50 affect representation for people of color? In the weeks leading up to the election, opponents have highlighted regions that Prop. 50’s maps would split up against local community leaders’ wishes. Students and voters cast their ballots at Modoc Hall at Sacramento State on Nov. 5, 2024. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters In a press release issued by the other No on 50 campaign funded by House Republicans last month, local politicians in Temple City and Azusa denounced the proposed maps for drawing lines through Asian American and Latino communities in east Los Angeles County. But in general, the proposed map doesn’t actually change much, according to the analysis by PPIC. If there are enough minority voters in a region to make up the majority of a congressional district, it could trigger the federal Voting Rights Act, which requires states to draw districts protecting the communities’ ability to elect representatives of their choosing. There are 16 such congressional districts in California, all with a majority of Latino voters. Other concentrated racial communities that don’t have enough numbers to be in the majority still have districts that are drawn with their interests in mind, like Asian voters in east Los Angeles County, or Black voters in south L.A. In six districts, Asian voters are at least 30% of the population — enough to influence an election. California also has two districts where Black voters reach that threshold and seven where Latino voters do. Prop. 50 wouldn’t change any of that. The public policy institute even found the proposed map would add one more district where Latino voters make up at least 30% of the population. “Some communities may have complaints about specific lines drawn by the proposed plan,” senior fellow Eric McGhee wrote. “But the plan as a whole is very similar to the current one in most respects: it deviates mostly by creating more Democratic seats.” This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
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