The first internal poll for Gavin Newsom’s redistricting ballot measure was, as one senior strategist saw it, as palatable as “warm spit.”
Just 38 percent of voters supported having the Legislature redraw the state’s congressional maps, according to the previously unreported mid-July survey. Forty-five percent were opposed. The California governor’s maneuvering to take on President Donald Trump wasn’t simply on slippery ground. It was underwater.
“It would have felt irresponsible to walk back into the room and to look people in the eye and say, ‘We should move forward with this,’” recalled Jim DeBoo, the campaign’s de facto quarterback.
A loss here would reverberate well beyond Sacramento: Trump could point to California — the state that sued, defied and mocked him — as proof that even a blue-state bulwark was no match for his drive to rejigger the midterm playing field, while Newsom would own a massive whiff against his favorite foil. It would be the Fox News chyron Democrats most fear: “TRUMP BEATS CALIFORNIA.”
It’s easy now — with 15 weeks of hindsight — to see Proposition 50’s decisive win as expected, even anticlimactic. The election was called as soon as the polls closed.
But the outlook was anything but certain back when Democrats were still clinging to hope they could bluff their way out of a precarious and costly redistricting arms race. The sobering initial poll was a fork-in-the-road moment for Newsom and his political inner circle. Perhaps, some on the team suggested, getting voter approval was too heavy a lift.
Nevertheless, they plowed ahead, building up a daunting cash advantage, unifying a bruised party and galvanizing voters around an anti-Trump message — all in a matter of weeks.
Their win will echo across the national political landscape — an unambiguous rebuke to Trump from the nation’s most populous state and for Newsom, a springboard in his likely presidential campaign. With Prop 50’s passage, Democrats could net as many as five additional House seats, which will be crucial to their party’s chances of flipping the House in the face of GOP gerrymandering efforts in several red states. And while California stood alone for months as the sole blue state to press ahead with mid-decade redistricting, now Democrats in other states such as Virginia are poised to jump into the fray.
As California goes …
Our country is under threat from a tyrannical president and a fascist movement and if we’re going to survive as a democracy we have to take risks.