Really—please do. The post My Disenfranchised California Republican Neighbors Should Take It Up With Their Party appeared first on Washington Monthly.
California’s 1st congressional district, a vast, rugged expanse in the state’s northeast corner, is definitive Trump country. With nary a town over 100,000, the region abounds with soaring peaks, fire-prone conifer forests, “Don’t Tread on Me” merch, and obscenely large four-door trucks. Its population bases are a network of former Gold Rush boomtowns, complete with excellent saloons. In these parts, timber and farming still reign supreme, locals help locals, and outsiders—especially city folk—face an uphill battle to become anything else. Since 2012, it’s been represented by Republican Doug LaMalfa, a fourth-generation rice farmer and climate change skeptic who voted against certifying the 2020 election. In 2024, California 1st voters supported Donald Trump over Kamala Harris nearly two-to-one.
I hail from the adjacent 2nd congressional district, which runs along the Pacific Coast from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border. Here, back-to-the-landers built geodesic domes as centerpieces to their communes and Earth First! activists chained themselves to old-growth redwoods. Since 2012, our congressman has been Democrat Jared Huffman, who has stood up (and sat in) against gun violence and joined tribes in their decades-long fight to remove the dams choking the Klamath River. In 2024, the 2nd district’s voters supported Harris over Trump by more than two-to-one.
When I venture inland, getting up off what high country folks colloquially call “the coast,” it’s usually to backpack. If you try to buy a bottle of whiskey in Callahan, an unincorporated community with around 50 residents in Siskiyou County, you’ll get told, “If you want spirits, you’ll have to go on down to Etna”—the area’s bustling metropolis of about 670. Moving north, Yreka—Siskiyou’s largest town with 7,765 residents—is considered the capital city of the “State of Jefferson,” a long-running dream of rural Southern Oregonian and Northern Californian secessionists to shed the shackles and purported neglect of Sacramento and Salem’s bureaucracies. (Needless to say, they have not as of yet succeeded in seceding.)
Once, when I was seeking medical supplies while bleeding in a Walmart in Shasta County, just south of Siskiyou, a woman asked if she could pray for me. I said yes, and she rested her hands on my shoulders while I tried to avoid dripping blood onto the floor.
Frequenting the California 1st, I don’t talk politics with the locals. But I’m pretty sure there’s plenty we wouldn’t agree on, and that Representative LaMalfa faithfully represents their views—which is how the political system is supposed to work.
Thanks to Donald Trump, however, that’s no longer the case for the good people of California’s 1st congressional district, nor for many others around the country. This past summer, fearful that his party would lose its narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, Trump ordered Texas Republicans to engage in mid-decade redistricting—gerrymandering—to carve out five more GOP-friendly seats. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott complied and began the process, California Governor Gavin Newsom responded in kind: throwing his considerable political power behind a ballot measure, Proposition 50, that asked Californians to gerrymander more Democratic-friendly districts. On Tuesday, the voters agreed by a wide margin.
Practically, that means that much of the 1st district of California, including Shasta, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties, will be absorbed by the 2nd district, and its Trump-supporting voters will be represented in Washington by Huffman, a progressive, who also represents and lives in the North Bay’s Marin—one of the richest counties in America, where the median annual income tops $142,000. Conversely, the conservative 1st district picks up enough Democratic voters from Sonoma County to make Representative LaMalfa’s reelection highly unlikely.
While Texas’s redraw is still tied up in court, with plaintiffs arguing the map intentionally dilutes the power of minority votes, the Golden State’s gerrymandering will ostensibly create five Democratic congressional seats to match Texas’s new Republican five. “The point is to disenfranchise our Republican neighbors in response to the Texas Republicans’ disenfranchisement of their Democratic neighbors, lest the Texas Republicans succeed in disenfranchising us all,” wrote veteran North Coast journalist Hank Sims. “That’s the world we get to live in now!”
Contrary to Trump’s pre-Proposition 50 claim that “California is gerrymandered,” Tuesday’s vote marked a departure from how the state normally redistricts. Since 2010, California’s maps have been drawn by an independent commission with equal representation of both parties. But because the president had to go and mess with Texas, Californians were forced into a bleak choice between doing their part for America’s democracy by leveling the playing field or holding to long-held principles of fairness and independence within their own state. Now, a slew of other states are also looking to get in on the “gerrymandering arms race.”
My inland neighbors and Republicans across the county should take Prop 50 as a wake-up call. If voters want their ballots to count under fairly drawn maps, there’s a decades-old fight they can join. Unfortunately, their party has been the villain of that story so far. I would say it’s never too late to do the right thing, but—given the year our democracy has had—I’ll stick with it’s not too late yet. We can still call a ceasefire, name fairness a bipartisan virtue, and let voters pick their politicians. We can still get out of this mess.
To catch any would-be fighters up: Mid-decade redistricting was widespread in the early days of the Republic, largely dormant throughout the 20th century, and aggressively revived by Republicans beginning around the early 2000s. Following Democratic victories in 2008, the GOP also focused on flipping statehouses in time for regularly scheduled post-2010 census redistricting, ultimately winning 700 state seats and enacting a “sophisticated” redraw campaign nationwide. A decade later, as the 2022 midterms approached, the proportion of competitive districts in America hit a new low.
Throughout, Democratic lawmakers have decried the redistricting race to the bottom. In both 2019 and 2021, House Democrats introduced a bill, titled the “For the People Act,” that would have required states to establish independent redistricting commissions. Both times, the bill was passed by House Democrats and died at the hands of Senate Republicans. On its first go-around, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote, grinningly telling reporters, “I get to decide what we vote on.” On its second, after Democrats unanimously voted for the bill in a 50-50 party-line split, Republicans deployed the almighty filibuster.
Democrats have made clear that partisan redistricting isn’t their chosen way. But today, blue states are setting their democratic values aside in service of national democracy. If Republican redistricting locks in the right’s control of Congress for the rest of Trump’s term, and Capitol Hill continues to abdicate its constitutional responsibility to check an “authoritarian curious” White House, there’s no telling what America will look like on the other side. “It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil, and talk about the way things should be,” Newsom told reporters. “We have got to meet fire with fire.”
Fire with fire—done. Prop 50 is a go. But we can still be talking about the way things should be and laying the groundwork to get there. For one, mid-decade redistricting could be banned. Representative Kevin Kiley, a California Republican who may lose his seat post-Prop 50, proposed a bill to do just that, which he said House Republican leadership is so far unwilling to bring to the floor. “I think if it did come to the floor, it would have a lot of support,” Representative Kiley told The New York Times.
Legislators could also revisit the For the People Act to establish independent state commissions. Or, they could take the examples of other democracies to remove congressional redistricting from the hands of states altogether. Canada transferred that authority to a national commission in 1964, and has since seen redistricting evolve into an exercise “widely seen as legitimate” and devoid of “public cynicism and disenchantment.” Among contemporary democracies, America’s approach is “uniquely awful,” New America wrote.
Now, with California’s fight in the rearview, it is a fine time to come clean about what Prop 50 doesn’t do: give power back to the people, as campaign ads claimed. Voiding votes of California Republicans—who were already feeling pretty powerless in a deep blue state—won’t restore fair representation to voters of color in Texas, because the function of congressional representation is not simply to add another “D” or “R” ballot to a party-line vote in Washington. Our members are intended to bring the interests, concerns, and voices of far-away constituencies to the House of Representatives, the federal government’s most locally accountable, place-based arm.
Of course, institutional design and electoral practice have diverged over the last half-century. American elections today are more about national party politics than they have been or were crafted to be. A “D” or an “R” next to a candidate’s name alone can tank a campaign. This nationalization upends a central premise in our political system: that local interests, inherently diverse across a massive country, matter and warrant responsive representation. If we consider five California Democrats gained to be an equal trade for five Texans lost, we accept a complete shift to party affiliation over individual candidates or the local concerns they speak to.
That isn’t where Americans want to be. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, voters increasingly name “polarization” the most important problem facing the country. And some politicians are reading the room: As the Monthly’s Nate Weisberg pointed out, successful Democratic candidates in swing districts today appeal to localism lost. They employ a “moral vocabulary” around place and talk about “the closing factory and the bridge that finally got fixed” rather than jumping into partisan fights.
As the redistricting battles rage on, and more Republican communities are silenced, Democrats may be able to recruit soldiers from across the aisle in the broader war for fair maps. For now, Prop 50 means as many as five new Democrats voting to protect programs that aid low-income Americans in every state, which House Republicans have slashed in service of the president’s agenda. “When someone does the bidding of Donald Trump, you’re essentially represented by Donald Trump in Congress,” Doug Greco, Democratic Party chair for Texas’s Travis County, told me. And after the 2030 census, California’s congressional maps will once again be in the hands of its independent commission.
In the meantime, Huffman says he’s already been reaching out to his new constituents. “When there are community problems … I could care less about what anyone’s party label is,” he said.
Gerrymandering and political polarization have risen hand-in-hand over the last three decades–each feeding the other, and both undermining voters’ trust in their democracy. Perhaps now, the all-out maps war taking place between red and blue states will push the injustices of partisan redistricting to the breaking point. And if so, perhaps they’ll actually break.
One can dream. In fact, one should.
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