In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom kicked off the campaign to pass his mid-decade redistricting measure Proposition 50 with a warning to Democrats that it would be a hard fight to win.
Less than three months later, it’s looking more like a cakewalk.
While early polling showed bipartisan skepticism for Prop. 50, which would temporarily set aside congressional maps drawn by an independent redistricting commission and replace them until 2030 with lines that favor Democrats, recent surveys show it’s likely to pass — easily. Fifty-six percent of likely voters (opens in new tab) in an October poll by the Public Policy Institute of California said they supported Prop. 50, while 60% favored the measure (opens in new tab) in a new Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey.
Now Newsom and his party are preparing to take their first major victory lap since the 2024 election sent Donald Trump back to the White House and handed Republicans full control of Congress. And boy, did Democrats need this.
“It definitely was uncertain at the beginning,” said Juan Rodriguez (opens in new tab), a senior strategist on the Prop. 50 campaign. “And what we saw really quickly is just a broad coalition of folks really step up, and step up in record speed.”
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The campaign marketed Prop. 50, with the help of celebrities and Democratic heroes like former President Barack Obama (opens in new tab), as a way to check Trump and restore Democracy (opens in new tab), dubbing the measure the “Election Rigging Response Act.”
Democrats appear to have convinced naysayers that Prop. 50 is a temporary fix to a problem started in Texas when Trump called Gov. Greg Abbott this summer to demand five more Republican seats, in an effort to give the GOP better odds at retaining its House majority in the 2026 midterms.
Newsom, who in recent days has acknowledged that he is considering a 2028 presidential run (opens in new tab), became Democrats’ champion against what he has characterized as the Trump administration’s increasingly authoritarian tactics: the federalization of National Guard troops, painful health care cuts, widespread immigration raids, and aggressive attacks on universities and courts.
The call to arms worked, at least financially. Newsom’s ballot measure committee had raised roughly $114 million (opens in new tab) as of Oct. 18, and with some $37 million leftover, the governor told donors last month that they could stop giving (opens in new tab), thank you very much.
Meanwhile, a splintered Republican effort to block Prop. 50 raised far less — roughly $44 million from the two main ballot measure committees — with party leaders now pointing fingers over who is to blame for the mess. (opens in new tab)
In the end, the race has resembled more a national candidate competition than a typical ballot measure campaign, said Paul Mitchell, a redistricting data whiz who drew the maps Democrats used to craft the legislation that became Prop. 50.
“The race became very focused on red versus blue, Newsom versus Trump,” said Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc. “And in California, we know what happens when you do that.”
Democrats, for the first time since Kamala Harris’ crushing defeat, were galvanized by Prop. 50, Mitchell said.
“Registered Democrats think their party are losers,” he said. “They get kicked in the nuts, and then they want to write a sternly worded memo to the White House. That is not what [Democratic voters] want. They want someone who is going to fight back, and that’s what Newsom has been able to do.”
California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks agreed that the blue base is “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and that Prop. 50 has given voters a meaningful chance to resist an “administration that has been out of control for a long time.”
“So this has really been an opportunity for California to fight back and give us at least some semblance of a fighting chance in 2026,” he said.
But winning the battle is not the same as winning the war, and Democrats have a long fight ahead of them to regain the political power — and relevance — they so dramatically lost in 2024.
Democrats may claim victory with Prop. 50, but has it solved the broader problems that handed Republicans absolute power in Washington?
“Oh God, no,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “This came at the right time. It was really good. It allows us to do something. But in itself, it does not signal a change.”
Gonzalez said Prop. 50 is “super important” to the organization’s members, who have worked hard to rally support for it over the last several weeks. But she is also clear that Prop. 50 is a separate issue from Democrats’ continuing disconnect from working-class voters who don’t trust the party on kitchen-table issues.
“We’ve got to talk about the economy. We have to talk about jobs. We have to talk about AI and what’s going on,” Gonzalez said. “We need leaders who really understand what working-class voters are facing and are willing to fight for it.”
Democrats’ likely success Tuesday doesn’t translate to automatic victories for the party in next year’s election, in California or nationally.
Prop. 50 did nothing to convince national voters that Democrats have something to offer besides being the “anti-Trump” party, said Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican strategist who worked with the Lincoln Project in 2020 to elect Joe Biden (opens in new tab). Meanwhile, Republicans in other GOP-led states have joined the gerrymandering war (opens in new tab), which could dilute Prop. 50’s overall effect.
“[Prop. 50] was always going to end up like this,” Madrid said. “But that’s not what you build a party on. … These victories paper over the extraordinary chasm in their coalition.
“You all are stuck,” he added. “You don’t have a party anymore. You have anti-Trump politicians.”
Rodriguez agrees that Democrats have a hard battle ahead, and that Prop. 50 solves only one problem on a long list of issues for the party to untangle.
But he and other Democrats contend that it is a step in the right direction that has given voters a jolt of energy in a year that started in despair. Look at the army of volunteers who have turned out for phone banks and field operations, and the thousands of individual donors who have given anything from $1 to $100,000. For these liberal stalwarts, there is a sense of hope, for the first time since November 2024.
“All these things aren’t going to be turned off Tuesday,” Rodriguez said. “Do Democrats have work to do? Absolutely. And that’s something they are going to have to argue heading into the election. But from my perspective, Prop. 50 is something to build off of.
“In fact, it’s just the beginning.”