When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”
A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of Orange County’s school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add as many as five Democratic seats to the party’s column in Congress. The outcome of the November 4 referendum could determine whether Democrats have a real shot at winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections.
Advocates and opponents of Prop 50 have already spent more than $200 million on ads starring political luminaries such as Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the “yes” side and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the “no” side. In an era of permanent campaigning, this race has become the closest thing America has to a snap election: At Newsom’s urging, the California legislature placed the initiative on this fall’s ballot in August as a response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, directed by Donald Trump and his allies.
The campaign’s final weeks have turned into a statewide scramble to persuade California voters to temporarily override the independent redistricting commission that they approved less than two decades ago. The Democratic Party’s organizers have found plenty of voters who are eager for the chance to stand against the president and, in Newsom’s words, “fight fire with fire” in the gerrymandering wars. “When you talk to people, it’s not nuanced. Democrats react really well to an anti-Trump message,” Florice Hoffman, the chair of the Democratic Party in Orange County, told me.
[Read: How Democrats tied their own hands on redistricting]
But organizers have also encountered a worrisome amount of confusion and apathy among Democrats who are not yet sold on matching the GOP’s ruthlessness, Smaaladen told me. “Democrats are a group that loves transparency and equity,” she explained. “And so lining things up in a way that’s nonequitable is difficult. It takes a few steps to get people to understand that it’s not just about California. It’s about the nation.”
The Democrats’ simplest message is to make the election about Trump, who is leaning on Republican lawmakers to aggressively gerrymander as many states as they can in the hopes of pushing the House majority out of reach for Democrats. In addition to remapping Texas, the GOP has already redrawn the lines in Missouri and North Carolina, and it could target seats in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, and Florida in the coming months. Democrats will try to redraw the map in Virginia and might try to squeeze additional seats out of their strongholds in Maryland and Illinois, but they have fewer opportunities to gerrymander than Republicans do.
California is by far the Democratic Party’s best chance to cut into the GOP’s nationwide advantage. In addition to targeting five seats that Republicans currently hold, the Democrats’ proposal would shore up several of the party’s incumbents in competitive districts. GOP lawmakers in Texas were able to redraw the state’s map on their own. Yet in California, because a 2010 referendum took redistricting power away from state legislators, Democrats have to put their plan to a vote. Prop 50 would implement a newly gerrymandered map that would hold until the next decennial census, in 2030, when an independent commission would again draw the lines. “There is no Plan B,” Representative Pete Aguilar, the third-highest-ranking House Democrat, whose district includes the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, told me. “We have to win this.” I asked Aguilar if Democrats could still win the House majority next year if the measure fails. He said they could, but “it would be incredibly, incredibly hard.”
Republicans have tried to counter the Democrats’ anti-Trump campaign by framing the ballot initiative as a power grab by Newsom and the opening shot to his all-but-certain 2028 bid for the presidency. But to win in such a heavily Democratic state, a partisan appeal won’t be sufficient. “The challenge for the opposition,” says Dan Schnur, a longtime GOP strategist in California who is now an independent, is convincing voters “that their belief in democratic reform is as strong as their feelings about Trump.”
As I traveled around Orange County—the state’s most closely divided political battleground—I heard a version of the same argument from critics of Prop 50. “I believe they’re wrong in allowing Texas to do what they’re doing,” Mary Kay McElmeel, a retired real-estate agent, told me in Mission Viejo. But, she added, “if somebody does wrong, you don’t try to do a bigger wrong.”
When Smaaladen hears this line while speaking with voters, she turns the conversation toward parenting. “I’ve always told my children never to hit people. But if somebody were to bully your child on the playground and assault them, that child has a right to hit back,” she told me. “I believe that Texas assaulted democracy and that California is allowed to hit back.”
“So sometimes,” Smaaladen concluded, “two wrongs do make a right.”
Will O’Neill, the 42-year-old former mayor of Newport Beach, was standing in the middle of a quiet street on a chilly morning earlier this month, complaining about all the evils of gerrymandering. “We need voters to have the ability to push back on their representatives when they get too far out of line,” he told me. “And congressional gerrymandering for partisan purposes tends to lead to more extreme outcomes. It’s not good for communities.”
If the argument sounds familiar, it’s because Democrats spent the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency making it, as part of their failed effort to ban gerrymandering across the country. But O’Neill is no Democrat: He’s the chair of the Republican Party of Orange County. O’Neill had brought me to this unusual meeting spot in Mission Viejo because the congressional map that Democrats have proposed for California includes a district line drawn down the center of the suburban street we were standing on. If the measure passes, the houses on one side of the street would fall into a Democratic district that’s currently represented by Dave Min, and the houses on the other side would stay with GOP Representative Young Kim. Other lines, O’Neill told me, cut through backyards.
It’s not actually all that unusual for a congressional district to bisect a street; map makers in both parties are notorious for drawing lines that split communities of interest, stretch hundreds of miles in one direction or another, and generally look silly on paper. Courts have repeatedly struck down Republican-drawn maps on the grounds that they constitute illegal racial gerrymanders designed to dilute the electoral power of Black voters, who overwhelmingly cast Democratic ballots. To O’Neill, the crude partitioning of Mission Viejo is evidence of the Democrats’ haste and hypocrisy. “You can’t say that you’re keeping communities of interest together at the same time you’re drawing maps like that,” he said.
O’Neill isn’t necessarily wrong. Democrats readily concede that they are betraying principles of good governance in trying to gerrymander California. But in the face of Trump’s naked aggression, they no longer care. “I support and love an independent redistricting commission. I want one in all 50 states,” Aguilar told me. But, he said, “I’m tired of Democrats disarming and doing the right thing while 42 other states play by a different set of rules. It’s just ridiculous.”
To motivate their base, Republicans are trying to make a distinction between what Texas did to its map and what Newsom has proposed for California. In Texas, they argue, Republican lawmakers were acting to avoid a lawsuit by the Trump administration, which wrote a letter to Governor Greg Abbott accusing the state of using a congressional map that violated the Voting Rights Act. California is facing no such threat.
“California and Texas are completely different scenarios,” Mark Meuser, a lawyer who plans to challenge California’s new map in court should voters approve it, told me. Meuser was in Laguna Hills to speak at a luncheon of the Southern California Area Republican Women, where he made an impassioned case that although Texas Republicans had been merely trying to fix unconstitutional districts, California Democrats would be taking a perfectly legal congressional map and rendering it unconstitutional.
The argument was a hit with his audience, a group of staunch Republicans who ate their salads in a hotel ballroom decorated with cardboard cutouts of Trump. And Meuser hopes that if the case makes it to the Supreme Court, the conservative majority will agree with him. But politically, it’s quite a stretch. Meuser works for the law firm founded by Harmeet Dhillon, a California Republican who left to become the Trump administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. In that role, Dhillon wrote the July letter that launched this year’s nationwide gerrymandering battle, informing Abbott that the Justice Department believed several Texas districts constituted “illegal racial gerrymanders” under the Voting Rights Act.
Dhillon’s objection was both creative and, to the administration’s critics, deeply cynical, considering that the Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to weaken the same voting protections it accused Texas of violating. In the months since, Republicans in Texas and Washington, D.C., have acknowledged that the Dhillon letter is little more than legal pretext for a political power play. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, and we are entitled to five more seats,” Trump said in August.
[Listen: If the Voting Rights Act falls]
The president’s candor doesn’t help his party’s cause in California. After Meuser’s speech, I asked him whether Trump’s statements—and similar admissions by other Republicans—make his task harder. “It shouldn’t, but probably to some degree it does. Judges are human beings,” Meuser replied. “The political narrative—I can’t just wash it away.”
Meuser’s frustration is a familiar feeling for Republicans in California, who could end up suffering for the national party’s redistricting offensive. No Republican has won a statewide election in nearly 20 years; the state GOP’s most influential federal official, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, was booted after just nine months in 2023. After next year’s midterms, if Prop 50 passes, Republicans might hold just four of California’s 52 House seats.
In Washington, Republicans now wield more power than they have in more than a century. But as their statewide clout continues to diminish, California Republicans can celebrate only so much. Kira Davis, a GOP podcaster and member of the club Meuser spoke to, compared the awkward dynamic to “waking up with your dad’s new family on Christmas morning.”
“All of his new kids are opening their PlayStation 5 and their remote-control cars,” Davis told me afterward, “and you’re in the corner opening the lump of coal in your stocking. That’s what it feels like to be a Republican in California.”
Long a bastion of Reagan Republicanism, the sprawling suburbs south of Los Angeles have shifted leftward during the 21st century. Orange County’s population is now close to evenly split among white, Latino, and Asian residents, and beginning in 2018, Democrats narrowly overtook Republicans in registration advantage. Since then, its congressional races have been some of the hardest-fought—and most expensive—in the country. “Orange County has become the quintessential purple county in America,” Jon Gould, the dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, told me. “All of the trends that we have seen in American politics over the last 30 years show up, and in some cases, show up first in Orange County.”
Although Kamala Harris narrowly carried the county last year, the margin was much lower than Biden’s edge over Trump in 2020. In a rare point of pride for local Republicans, their Senate candidate, the former Dodgers and Padres star Steve Garvey, won more votes than Adam Schiff in Orange County, even as Schiff won in a rout statewide.
Democrats know that they can pass Prop 50 without carrying Orange County. But a win there would guarantee victory statewide, and the county party sees the campaign as an unexpected opportunity to reconnect with voters who soured on Democrats and stayed home in last year’s election. “This is an organizer’s dream,” Jeffrey Cárdenas, the Orange County Democrats’ organizing director, told me. “It’s exactly what we needed.”
[Jonathan Lemire: Fear of losing the midterms is driving Trump’s decisions]
We were speaking at the party’s county headquarters in Anaheim, where on a Wednesday night a small group of volunteers was phone banking. A half-eaten pizza sat on the table, and the volunteers rang a bell every time they secured another commitment of support. Louise Larsen was making calls to Democrats in her GOP-leaning community of Westminster, trying to recruit volunteers to knock on doors. She told me that she understood the unease over the initiative but that she didn’t want “to give Trump one more crumb of leverage” in Washington. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do” to win back power, Larsen told me. “And then we can play fair.”
Cárdenas told me that the number of no-shows at canvassing events—what organizers call the “flake rate”—was much lower than in the past. “Our base is fired up,” he said. Still, he wasn’t quite ready to predict victory.
Polling has trended in the “yes” side’s direction lately: A CBS News survey released last week found that 62 percent of California respondents were planning to vote for Prop 50, up from a slim majority in polls earlier in October. Historically, undecided voters tend to break against contentious ballot measures in California. Yet Prop 50 is different from most other referenda because its support is so tied to party lines. Californians also have to want to vote for the measure—it’s the only thing on the ballot this year.
Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it will monitor polling sites in five California locations, including Orange County, next month. Republicans have also been growing more pessimistic as the election nears. “Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop vote is!” Trump fumed on Truth Social over the weekend.
On the day I met Darshan Smaaladen, she had deployed canvassers to knock on doors on the streets surrounding the “No Kings” rally; their list included the houses of Republicans and independents. As we walked, the volunteers told me they had generally been encouraged by the support they’d found for Prop 50. But the compressed nature of the campaign was evident in the confusion they encountered among some voters—especially those who have not closely followed the news. One canvasser said she had swayed some Democrats who wrongly assumed the party wanted them to vote “no.” Faye Carroll, a retiree in her 80s, told the volunteers that she would definitely be voting but needed to read more about the issue. When I asked her what she thought about the Republican gerrymandering in Texas that had spawned the ballot initiative, Carroll replied, “I didn’t know about that.”
One of the canvassers, a 51-year-old history teacher named Heather Chapman, said the group has also met Democrats who don’t particularly like the referendum and the brass-knuckle politics it represents. These are the voters who could ultimately decide its fate and, with their choice, tip the balance of power in Congress. “They’re like, ‘In normal times, I would so not be for this. This is not how it’s supposed to work,’” Chapman told me. To that she simply replies: “Yeah, there is nothing about this that’s normal.”
