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- Newsom Actually Has One Good Idea
In his flailing around to make himself relevant for 2028 — again, this is disqualifying IMO — Newsom actually had a good idea:
Gavin Newsom suddenly can’t stop talking about Texas gerrymandering — and a provocative idea to counter it in California.
On podcasts and social media, the California governor has threatened that if Texas follows President Donald Trump’s advice and redraws its congressional districts to shore up the GOP’s slender House majority, California should throw out its own maps to boost Democrats, circumventing or overhauling the state’s voter-approved redistricting commission.
First, this is Newsom, who has the political attention span of a mosquito, but it’s a good idea. New York tried to do it and there was a whole bunch of reasons it failed. It also sends some people to the fainting couch:
“Trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish,” said Assemblymember Alex Lee, the head of the state Legislature’s Pprogressive Ccaucus. “By legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose.”
Or as one Democratic political consultant granted anonymity to speak freely put it, “The idea of taking away the power from the citizens and giving it back to the politicians — the optics of that is horrendous and indefensible.”
So why would the head of the progressive caucus oppose this? I believe it’s because long-elected Democrats loooove their majority minority D+infinity districts.
Here’s my take on Congressional re-districting in general, but first a refresher on how Republicans gerrymander to harm minorities, via pack and crack:
“Cracking" is the splitting of a geographically compact minority population among two or more districts, thereby reducing the group’s ability to elect a representative in any district.
“Packing” is the dilution of minority group voting strength by improperly placing more minority voters into a district than is necessary to elect a representative of their choice.
With that in mind, a few points:
US Congressional Districts are huge, almost 1 million people.
The notion that you’re going to get a homogenous group of a million people for someone to represent more closely is damaging to Democrats. We end up with districts that are racially homogenous but with 100K more voters than needed to elect a Democrat.
If we accept (1) and (2) we need to accept that we need to district urban areas like pie wedges. The narrow part of the wedge will be the densely populated urban area. The wide part of the wedge is going to be the less densely populated suburbs. The narrow part is probably going to have more minorities, the wide part will probably have fewer.
If you think that more Democrats in Congress is, in general, good for minority populations, you have to accept fewer majority minority districts. We will also have to accept fewer “safe” districts. We need a lot fewer D+25 districts and a lot more D+8 districts. This might lead to more “centrists” but, frankly, most Democrats espouse a similar set of beliefs on core issues, the question is whether that’s just talk or if it’s talk and action. This might also lead to fewer minority representatives in Congress, but in theory a politically talented minority representative can’t can represent a non-majority-minority district.
We have to recognize that a number of incumbent Dems are fine with pack and crack, and we’ll have to fight them to change the status quo. We also have to recognize that, for example, Staten Island might have a couple of CDs that are gerrymandered into other boroughs after we’ve unpacked and uncracked, but all of those Staten Island CDs are hopefully going to be represented by Democrats.
Newsom is probably just yakking, but a real redistricting to benefit Democrats would be incredibly controversial with engaged Democrats and especially elected Democrats.
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