Over the past few weeks, television, radio and streaming platforms have been flooded with advertisements for Proposition 50. Prominent political figures, including President Barack Obama, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren, have joined the campaign urging Californians to “vote yes on Prop 50.”
Prop 50 is a ballot measure that, if approved by voters, will allow the state of California to proceed with temporary redistricting until the 2030 census, meaning the current districting maps voted for and approved by California voters will be thrown out. However, it will only go into effect if another state implements partisan, mid-cycle gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the process in which, according to the Oxford Language Dictionary, is “the manipulation of an electoral constituency’s boundaries so as to favor one party or class.”
While the newly introduced ballot measure has quickly become a major talking point nationally, many voters remain uncertain about what the proposition would actually do and why it is being proposed. In an attempt to amend this element of uncertainty, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, the USF politics department hosted “California Redrawn, a conversation around CA Prop 50.” Professors Keally McBride and Patrick Murphy led the discussion and provided insight into the implications of the propositions, addressing what is at stake.
Their response, “shockingly little… and here’s why,” McBride said. The conversation addressed the following:
“The purpose of gerrymandering is to win,” McBride said. The way redistricting works is that it’s used to concentrate groups of voters into small districts or spread them to weaken their influence. Ultimately, the goal of gerrymandering is to give parties definite wins, therefore influencing the outcome of elections so that one party has power over the other.
As “our electoral map has already been gerrymandered to an inch of its life. At this point, we are fighting over 27 districts… 6% of the seats,” said McBride. Despite the small number of districts that remain competitive, Democrats and Republicans continue to fight in the hope of gaining an advantage in the House of Representatives. Prop 50 was created in response to the redistricting in Texas that redrew boundaries in order to gain five more seats for Republicans in the 2026 election. In an attempt to rebut Texas’s redistricting, Prop 50, would gerrymander the state of California to favor Democrats to win five more seats, as seen on the map. The symmetry is uncanny and purposeful, ensuring that neither party gains an advantage over the other.
On a broader scale, McBride highlighted how Prop 50 has illuminated a greater concern for the state of our democracy: “Lack of competitive elections is actually a reflection of what social scientists have identified as a trend that we have geographically separated ourselves along partisan lines,” she said. A study by Harvard doctoral student Jacob R. Brown and government Professor Ryan D. Enos confirms that U.S. voters have separated themselves along partisan lines by analyzing geolocation data and the exact addresses of all 180 million registered voters. They found that “98 to 99 percent of Americans live in areas segregated by partisanship.” Echoing the most persistent concern of the professors that “the country is becoming more segregated in distinct political bubbles,” McBride said.
As citizens and politicians become more polarized and geographically separated, we are in danger of “increased political fracturing and potential targeting of one another, which is also what we’re seeing in the fights over budget appropriations right now,” said McBride. According to the Center of Budget and Policy, the Trump administration has moved to “abuse its authority by adding new layers of political interference and control over agency spending to impose its policy priorities and preferences, even when doing so conflicts with the law.”
Building on these concerns of selective spending, McBride and Murphy reveal how structural flaws in representation have deepened political polarization. As “435 representatives is probably not enough… in the United States, that means for every House of Representatives person represents 749,000 people… while in the UK, in the House of Commons, each of those people represents 100,000,” said McBride. The imbalance in representation is extremely polarizing and exacerbates the disconnect between citizens and lawmakers, fueling distrust and discontent “we are already struggling under a profoundly under-representative system, that’s controlled by unrepresentative entities,” he said.
Ultimately, Prop 50 underscores more than just a restructuring proposal; it also highlights the fragile nature of democracy as political polarization continues to plague the nation.
