Voters in California on Tuesday approved a high-stakes redistricting measure, a national triumph for Democrats hoping to stop Donald Trump and Republicans from retaining full control of the federal government in next year’s midterm elections.
It was a decisive victory for Democrats in deep-blue California, who had raced to counter a gerrymander in Texas, engineered at the US president’s behest, to carve out new safe Republican districts. The Associated Press declared Proposition 50 had passed almost instantly when polls closed statewide.
“We stood stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom, the California governor, who spearheaded the initiative said in a speech at the Democratic party headquarters in Sacramento.
Celebrating the parade of Democratic victories across the country, Newsom added: “We are proud here in California to be part of this narrative this evening.”
In approving the measure, voters chose to toss out the work of California’s independent redistricting commission and temporarily adopt maps drawn by the state legislature to help Democrats pick up five additional seats in the US House of Representatives.
Newsom and Democrats framed the measure as a way to safeguard US democracy from Trump’s “wrecking ball” presidency. By contrast, opponents offered a mixed message, with Republicans alternatively attacking Newsom and praising the work of the independent mapmaking panel.
Kevin Kiley, the California Republican representative whose district would be reshaped under the new maps, said the state’s gerrymander “fell well short of the ideals we ought to strive for in our democratic process”.
“I believe fighting fire with fire burns everything down,” he said, referring to the governor’s mantra in support of a retaliatory gerrymander. “With California’s new gerrymander, the redistricting arms race has no end in sight.”
Democrats hold 43 of the state’s 52 House seats. The new maps are drawn to help Democrats flip as many as five of the nine Republican-held seats in the state. It could also help make several swing seats easier for Democrats to win.
Five seats could be decisive in the fight to retake control of the House, a chamber likely to be decided by razor-thin margins. The party that wins the majority will shape the final years of Trump’s second term in the White House – whether a unified Republican Congress will continue to deliver on his agenda or whether he will be met with resistance, investigations and possibly even a third impeachment attempt.
Historically, the president’s party loses ground in the midterm elections. According to recent polls, Americans broadly disapprove of the way Trump has executed his powers in office and disapprove of the job he is doing.
Trump has persuaded several Republican states, including Missouri and North Carolina, to approve maps, while others are poised to follow suit. Some Democratic states have announced counter measures, but California’s maps are the first major response to Republicans’ unprecedented efforts.
On Tuesday, Newsom implored Democratic governors to move ahead with redistricting in their states.
“We need to see other states, the remarkable leaders that have been doing remarkable things, meet this moment head on,” he said, arguing that Democratic control of the House would “de facto end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it”.
Heading into election day, Democrats were unusually confident, with the California governor telling donors to “stop donating” after the yes campaign vastly outraised the collection groups working against the ballot initiative.
But victory wasn’t assured. Initial surveys showed a hesitancy among Californians to override their voter-approved independent commission. While polls show independent redistricting remains popular in the Golden state, Trump is decidedly not and voters angry with him fueled the “yes” campaign.
In the final weeks of the costly campaign, one of the most expensive for a ballot measure in state history, the opposition had largely retreated. According to California’s secretary of state’s office, supporters of the ballot measure raised nearly $170m – roughly twice as much as opponents, who raised about $84m.
Newsom said late last month that the campaign had raised $38m from about 1.2m “small-dollar donations” in addition to nearly $15m from a Democratic Super Pac, $10m from a lobbying group funded by George Soros and almost $4m from a state teachers union, among others. Tom Steyer, the billionaire and former Democratic presidential candidate, spent $12m in support of the proposition.
While prominent Democrats from Barack Obama to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lined up behind the measure, national Republicans mostly stayed on the sidelines. Trump had been unusually muted for much of the campaign. Hours before polls opened on Tuesday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social, with no evidence, that California’s voting process is a “giant scam” and that the state is under “very serious legal and criminal review” for its system which allows any registered voter to vote by mail. Trump did not elaborate on which agencies are investigating.
Later, the White House press secretary repeated Trump’s baseless claims that voting in California is “rigged”, and said that the administration is still working on an executive order that Trump telegraphed earlier this year which would seek to ban mail-in voting. A move that voting rights experts say is almost impossible, legally.
“It’s absolutely true that there’s fraud in California’s elections,” Leavitt said. “It’s just a fact. It is just a fact.”
She offered no proof to the question, posed by PBS News’s Liz Landers: “Rigged fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections. There’s countless examples, and we’d be happy to provide them.”
Leavitt said the White House is working on an executive order that would ban mail-in voting in California.
Trump’s justice department had deployed federal election officials to monitor polling sites in five California counties, a move state officials said would lead to voter intimidation. In response, California dispatched its own observers to watch the federal monitors.
The success of Proposition 50 caps a lightning campaign that came together earlier this summer, when Newsom, House Democrats and state lawmakers introduced the proposal, known as the “Election Rigging Response Act”, and raced the gerrymander through the legislature at breakneck speed.
The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who championed the commission’s creation, harshly criticized Proposition 50, but never formally campaigned against it. Meanwhile, Charles Munger Jr, a wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, poured more than $30m into opposing the effort.
The new maps will be in effect for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 election cycles, at which point the state’s independent commission will resume its work drawing congressional lines based on the next census.
On Tuesday, voters waited in line in Los Angeles to cast a ballot at the Cochran Avenue Baptist church.
“It’s time for Americans to say, ‘This is not right and it’s not acceptable.’ It’s like we’re going back to when they said we’re three-fifths of a person,” said Charles Johnson, the church’s pastor, who voted yes on Prop 50. “So if we really think [Texas redistricting] is an isolated incident, no, this is an attack. Donald Trump is saying ‘I can do what I want, I can make myself king, and you’re gonna lie down and take it.’”
Abené Clayton contributed to this report from Los Angeles
