Does Prop. 50 Divide California Communities? Depends How You Measure It

While you’re here: On Nov. 4, Californians will decide whether the state should gerrymander its congressional districts. Sign up for key updates on the special election.

By Jeanne Kuang

There’s no question that the proponents of Proposition 50 have a partisan goal.

By seeking to adopt a map to put more Democrats in power in areas currently represented by Republicans, they are asking voters to temporarily bypass the state’s independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission, which for the past two decades has prioritized maps that keep similar communities together and provide more electoral opportunities for communities of color. 

Does that mean that the proposed new congressional districts would be less representative of voters, beyond party preferences? We looked into some common questions.

Who drew the Prop. 50 map? 

Paul Mitchell, a veteran Democratic redistricting expert in Sacramento, and a group of similar consultants drew the map. Mitchell explained in an interview that he took input from California’s Democratic congressional delegation before sending a proposed map to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

The committee then sent the proposal to the state Legislature, which adopted the map as part of its vote to put Prop. 50 on the November ballot. The proposition would allow the state to temporarily use those proposed district lines. 

Isn’t California already gerrymandered?

Not quite. 

Many Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance, already complain that under California’s current map, Democrats control over 80% of congressional seats even though the party got just under 60% of statewide votes in the 2024 presidential election. 

But that doesn’t mean the maps are intentionally drawn to give Democrats an unfair advantage.

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. The citizen commission that drew the maps, composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans as well as four independents, were specifically forbidden from considering party registration in deciding how to draw the lines. They did have to consider geography, and Democrats and Republicans don’t live in an even distribution across the state. Plus, several of the current blue districts are highly competitive, with the incumbent Democrats winning them last year with razor-thin margins.

Two academic institutions that rate states’ redistricting plans say California’s current map is  mostly fair. PlanScore found the map is tilted toward Democrats by two measures and balanced by two other measures. Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project gave California’s map a “B” score on partisan fairness, docking it only for giving incumbent politicians an advantage. (The proposed new map got an “F” from the organization.)

Would the new map further divide communities?

Both proponents and opponents of Prop. 50 claim their favored map – the existing one or the proposed new one – keeps cities and counties together more often, resulting in better representation by keeping similar communities under the same congressmember. 

So which is it? It depends how you look at it, and each side phrases their claims differently. The proponents of Prop. 50 are correct in saying their map splits fewer total cities and counties into two or more districts than the current map. That’s according to analyses of both maps by HaystaqDNA, the firm that assisted with the nonpartisan redistricting in 2021. 

An analysis by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that difference to be nearly negligible.

But the Democrats’ map has more cities and counties that are split among three or more districts, rather than only two. That’s why opponents are also correct in saying Prop. 50 splits communities more times — though in their argument mailed to voters, they overcounted the number of times. 

But keeping cities and counties intact isn’t the only way to judge the quality of a congressional district.

For starters, big cities have to be split into multiple districts to ensure that each congressmember represents the same number of people. Both maps give each district 760,066 Californians, give or take one constituent.