‘Gavinmander’: Tit-for-tat gerrymandering isn’t a shortcut to victory | Opinion

Gov. Gavin Newsom is pressing the state legislature to vote on proposing a constitutional amendment that would change California’s redistricting system to take power from the existing independent redistricting commission and allow the legislature to redraw the lines five years before the next map is due.

Governors in other blue states have followed Newsom’s lead in a coordinated national strategy to squeeze as many Democratic seats into the next Congress as possible through a nationwide mid-cycle redistricting. All this is to counter efforts in Texas to redistrict that state prior to the 2026 elections, which kicked off this cascade of escalating responses.

Whatever its prospects elsewhere, in California this idea revives inept legislative map-drawing and likely neuters the independent commission. A war of counterstrikes sacrifices nonpartisan redistricting for speculative short-term partisan gains in national politics. It’s a perfect fit for politicians with a national agenda — running for president, say — seeking national headlines.

But for the rest of us Californians? It’s an awful plan.

Drawing voting district maps to benefit one party is called gerrymandering, and it has a long and storied history nationally. The nation’s high court has called partisan gerrymandering “incompatible with democratic principles.” Yet, in Rucho v. Common Cause, it ruled that federal judges are powerless to review complaints that political gerrymanders exceed constitutional bounds. That leaves it to the states to decide how partisan (or not) to make their maps.

California has a tortured history with legislative redistricting: The legislature deadlocked on a map twice (after the census in 1970 and 1990), forcing the California Supreme Court to sort it out. Back then, bungling the map was — with the always-late state budget and lifetime legislative service — one of three perennial state government failures.

Fed up, voters seized control of those processes with their initiative power. In 1990, Proposition 140 imposed legislative terms limits, ending lifetime legislative service; in 2010, Proposition 25 abolished the two-thirds majority budget vote requirement; and a pair of measures (2008 Proposition 11 and 2010 Proposition 20) wrested redistricting from the legislature and vested it in the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Creating the redistricting commission was a major good-government win. The commission’s maps have been upheld as fair by the courts. Combined with the open primary (2010 Proposition 14), nonpartisan redistricting in California has become drama-free, and — most importantly — produced competitive districts.

This system is a public good because the alternative of legislative control means politicians choose their voters. That’s problematic because it contributes to incumbency and entrenched party power, and it undercuts popular control of representative government.

Instead, the independent commission empowers the people to choose their representatives. That, after all, is the point of a republic.

Reversing this progress in California to permit a mid-decade legislative redraw has serious legal challenges. The first issue is that 2008’s Proposition 11 shifted all redistricting power to the citizen commission. California courts interpret initiative measures to achieve the apparent voter intent, and it’s clear that voters intended to seize this power from the Legislature.

Even if voters agree to dilute that power now, doing so opens a new avenue of attack against the commission when it draws a new map after the 2030 census: its enemies will argue that the commission has been divested of its line-drawing powers. And once the precedent for mid-cycle legislative redistricting is set, there may be sequels to what Newsom is suggesting now.

California’s maps could change every five years — maybe more often — and no one will really be in charge of redistricting.

The governor’s proposal is unlikely to fly at the ballot. Recent polling by Politico–Citrin Center–Possibility Lab shows that about two-thirds of California voters want to keep the redistricting commission. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since it was the voters who birthed this baby, and by 60% those same voters already rejected one attempt (2010 Proposition 27) to put the legislature back in charge. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s godfather of nonpartisan redistricting, has vowed to terminate this proposal and defend the commission he championed.

Finally, this is a bad idea nationally. Injecting even more chaos into the redistricting scrum might grab a few headlines, but it further damages already-low public confidence in the electoral process. Instead, the Texas gambit should spur reforms to make line-drawing more fair. And there’s good reason to question whether this charade would actually further Democratic interests: there are more red states than blue, and more Republican voters overall. More counties and congressional districts went red than blue in 2024. And, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans control more state legislatures.

There is a way forward that doesn’t undermine either the will of the voters or sacrifice electoral integrity: play by the rules and win at the ballot box. Tit-for-tat gerrymandering isn’t a shortcut to victory. The “Gavinmander” will nationalize zero–sum politics and cement one-party control in California. Sacrificing California’s fair-contest system for speculative and marginal national gains is not worth the costs to our state.

At Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center David A. Carrillo is the executive director and Stephen M. Duvernay is a senior research fellow.

This story was originally published August 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘Gavinmander’: Tit-for-tat gerrymandering isn’t a shortcut to victory | Opinion."