In just a few weeks, California voters will start getting ballots in the mail for Proposition 50, dubbed the Election Rigging Response Act by its authors. 

Will the debate leading up to our redistricting election be one of substance or brute politics? Well, I have good news for partisan hacks and congressional nerds alike: On Nov. 4, there’s a little something for everyone.

Let’s start with the basics: The ballot question is to authorize a “temporary change” to the 52 congressional district maps through 2030, explicitly to counter the recent redistricting effort in Texas. It promises to retain the independent citizens redistricting commission established, and generally well regarded by, the voters. If it passes, Democrats will be poised to claim five Republican-held seats in the state, balancing out a possible five-seat pickup for Republicans in Texas.

• Is it a proxy battle between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom? You bet.

“We have a lot of people who are kidding themselves if they think this is a redistricting measure,” said Matt Rexroad, a redistricting expert based in California. For him, it clearly boils down to “Are you voting for Gavin Newsom or are you voting for Donald Trump?” 

And in California, those numbers don’t look great for the president. He managed to earn nearly 6.1 million votes last November, his best performance yet in the state, but that was still just 38 percent of the vote.

Newsom, who has won every statewide ballot he’s appeared on, easily defeated a 2021 recall effort with 62 percent of the vote. Prop 50 already is feeling like a national referendum in the nation’s most populous state, giving partisans something to do.

Paul Mitchell, the vice president of voter data firm Political Data Inc., said he expects the vote in November to closely resemble the recall election. 

The messaging will be “Team Red, Team Blue, go put your jerseys on and go vote,” predicted Mitchell, who leads Redistricting Partners and drew the maps for Newsom’s Prop 50 proposal. 

“Californians need to stop fighting with both hands tied behind their backs,” Newsom says to the camera in some of the first advertising for the Yes on 50 campaign. The images on the screen include Trump and raids on the streets of Los Angeles.

CalMatters has a great story out of the Sept. 5-7 state GOP convention about the strategic discussions related to Newsom, and not everyone is in agreement about whether they should make him the boogeyman or ignore him. 

• OK, we get it, national politics. Can we still do a Steve Kornacki-esque deep dive into the data and be smarter for it? 

In fact, my ask is that we look beyond the red and the blue and start examining the lines. 

To hear Mitchell tell it, he drew maps that strictly adhere to the Voting Rights Act and left eight congressional districts untouched. Twenty districts changed less than 10 percent, and 80 percent of voters will live in the same districts as before, he said. 

Mitchell argues that the maps he drew split fewer cities and generally make more sense, especially between Los Angeles and Orange counties. He said he wanted to make the maps acceptable enough so that the campaign can be about what’s happening in Texas.

The goal was clear: redraw the lines to find five Democratic seats. But Mitchell said he took a different approach from how the lines were drawn in Texas. The final maps needed to make sure Democrats would win even if voters don’t turn out in huge numbers, and he did not presume Latinos, for example, would be a permanent voting bloc for the party. 

Keep in mind that in the Texas plan, Trump would have carried 79 percent of the new districts, the Texas Tribune reports. 

To hear Republicans tell it, California’s election will give gerrymandering a bad name. “They’ve made it now look kind of like an elephant,” Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley said recently on Fox News in describing the proposed shape of his district. He won last fall with nearly 56 percent of the vote. But the plan would carve up his district and fellow Northern California Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s and add more Democrats to each.

• Is this really the end of the road for five Republicans? Probably, although Republican Rep. David Valadao proves comebacks are more than possible. 

Rep. Ken Calvert, the longest-serving member of the state’s GOP delegation, is seeing his district get swallowed up as the maps add a district back to Los Angeles. Calvert kept his seat last fall by about 12,000 votes, about the same as his margin in 2022 despite the different dynamics of presidential election turnout.

The proposed maps also greatly shore up the battleground seats where Republicans would otherwise have wanted to spend their money offensively in 2026. Democratic freshman Reps. Adam Gray, Dave Min, Derek Tran and George Whitesides can breathe a little easier if voters approve Prop 50. 

Gray won by just 187 votes last fall in a surprise flip, while Tran was declared the victor weeks after the election by 653 votes. “It would be malpractice to lose” those seats, said Rexroad, chief legal counsel at Redistricting Insights, who has worked on the issue extensively.

You might get a little cross-eyed if you think about what might happen after the 2030 census if the independent commission does indeed get back to work to redraw lines without a partisan goal in mind. Let’s just say national political reporters should park themselves in California during the 2032 midterms. 

• Can we get back to the sexy stuff? Of course!

I’ve got a pro tip for anyone who just can’t wait to start thinking about the 2028 presidential race. I note with interest that Newsom’s Prop 50 ads attacking Trump could air in two presidential battleground states (Arizona and Nevada), thanks to media markets at both ends of the state stretching beyond California state lines.

Rexroad calls it a “political gift” to Newsom. “It’s really not a redistricting campaign, it’s a presidential campaign,” he said.

There’s going to be a lot more to say in this space about this election and the midterms ahead. I will always be fascinated by congressional lines, and I try to take my nerdiness and meet my audience in the middle with a little understanding of why any of this should matter to them. 

That’s one reason I devoted my 2022 political reporting class to redistricting. When I first advertised the class, I got blank stares. But by mid-semester, it all started to click, and by the time I took them to see districts in Virginia and Texas up close, they understood why mapmaking is such a serious subset of the Political Industrial Complex. Now, with students fanned out across the country in jobs at NBC, Fox, newspapers and local TV in Sacramento and Jacksonville, Fla., they tell me they are glad we did such a deep dive into redistricting. 

In speaking with experts for this column, everyone warned, like so much in politics these days, that no matter the result, this is a “genie out of the bottle” moment. The very definitions of democracy are fraying, and both parties are to blame. 

“Prop 50 is a direct attack on democracy, a dangerous idea,” says the narrator of a No on 50 ad that echoes the mailers that started arriving in our mailbox the day the legislation passed. 

As a newsroom leader, I would always caution my reporters against writing about process because you can lose your audience faster than you can say “shapefile attributes.” Now, as a college professor teaching journalism, I beg the students to consider understanding and explaining the capital-P Process instead of making everything feel so feverish. You can’t blame them; that’s the world they’ve come up in. Most of my students were in elementary school when Trump was first elected. 

I’ll be using this election to prime the journalists of tomorrow for what’s to come. They must be prepared for every possible scenario, even if that means in 2031 they will probably be sitting through hours of commission hearings about putting California’s lines back to where they started.

Christina Bellantoni is a former editor-in-chief of Roll Call and is now a professor of professional practice and the director of the USC Annenberg Media Center. Contact her at Christina.Bellantoni@usc.edu.