Even before Democrats finalized their plans to gerrymander California, anti-redistricting mailers were already landing in droves in Bay Area mailboxes.
The plan pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies, according to one mailer distributed widely last week, would “strip away California’s constitutional voting protections” and “set a dangerous precedent” by temporarily pausing the state’s independent process of drawing district lines for seats in Congress.
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“We cannot save democracy by burning it down in California,” reads the message. The sender? A political committee led by a billionaire’s son, Charles Munger Jr., who once led the Santa Clara County Republican Party.
Since then, Newsom has unleashed a torrent of emails seeking donations for the redistricting brawl.
“And God help us if we’re not successful,” the governor said in one such appeal on Tuesday. “We may have enjoyed our last free and fair election.”
Voters can expect to be bombarded by political advertising and messages like these for the next two months. On Nov. 4, California voters will consider Proposition 50, which would temporarily replace congressional district maps drawn by the state’s Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission with partisan maps drawn by Democrats with the explicit goal of flipping five GOP seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Newsom and his party did so to counter Texas Republicans’ mid-cycle gerrymandering campaign there.
Because California’s competitive seats are key to control of the House, the fate of Prop. 50 could prove consequential for Republicans and President Donald Trump in the second half of his term, after the 2026 midterm elections. A constellation of interest groups will be campaigning fiercely to influence voters, and analysts expect money to pour in, with cost estimates between $100 million and $200 million. While expensive, that still would fall far short of the priciest ballot measure battle California has seen to date, the $460 million fight over dueling measures to legalize sports betting in 2022.
So far, the Yes on Prop. 50 campaign has raised more than $12 million in large donations since mid-July, campaign finance filings show. A spokesperson for the committee, Hannah Milgrom, said it has raked in another $12 million in small donations from about 400,000 people. Those donations aren’t yet reflected in filings.
Committees fighting to quash the ballot measure have raised a combined $10 million — almost exclusively from Munger.
The battle lines are drawn. Newsom will be leading the campaign for the ballot measure with the state and national Democratic Party behind him, as well as the California Federation of Labor Unions, SEIU, Planned Parenthood and other allied groups.
Their pitch to voters: “Prop. 50 is the country’s best hope to counter Trump’s Texas power grab and ensure a fair 2026 national midterm election, and Americans who love democracy are counting on California to act,” Milgrom said in an email.
The campaign has said that small donations have flooded in from across the U.S. Newsom had used the ballot measure committee to stump for measures in previous years, including 2024’s Prop. 1, a bond for behavioral health treatment centers. As of late June, Newsom held $5.8 million in the committee, giving Democrats a sizable head start in fundraising.
Central to their argument is Trump himself, whose office engineered the Texas gerrymandering strategy to buoy the GOP in the midterm elections. Trump’s ability to execute his agenda will in large part depend on his party maintaining control of Congress after 2026.
“I think both sides have their challenges,” said UC San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser, “but the hardest sell in California is always defending Donald Trump’s actions. The Yes on 50 campaign wants to make this most of all a referendum on Donald Trump and his attacks on democracy through other states redistricting.”
On the other side, two separate campaigns led by Republicans will try to thwart the Democrats.
So far, the better-funded of the two is Munger’s committee. Munger is a physicist and the son of a billionaire Berkshire Hathaway executive. He played a key role in the establishment of California’s independent redistricting commission more than a decade ago. This week, Munger dumped more than $10 million into a political committee and had already begun papering the homes of voters throughout the state with anti-gerrymandering mailers.
Committee spokesperson Amy Thoma Tan said they’ll maintain their focus on the value of independent redistricting and the pitfalls of gerrymandering. So far, that pitch is rooted more in civics than partisan battles between Democrats and Republicans.
“We’re going to be communicating with voters about the value of California’s citizen-led redistricting process,” Tan said. “We believe that people, not politicians, should be drawing the lines.”
Tan said good-governance groups will play a role in their committee, but she declined to say which groups. Prop. 50 has proved controversial for the California branches of two such groups, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, which generally support independent redistricting. A spokesperson for Common Cause California said the group supports Prop. 50, and the local branch of the League of Women Voters announced Wednesday it will be neutral and stay on the sidelines.
However, mailers sent by Munger’s committee prominently feature a comment by the League’s president, Gloria Chun Hoo, urging voters to “reject the dangerous idea of mid-cycle redistricting.” The organization has since distanced itself from Munger.
The other Republican committee is led by former state GOP chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. In an interview with Bay Area News Group, Patterson projected confidence and noted that voters twice supported independent redistricting in 2008 and 2010. As of Wednesday afternoon, the committee had reported about $6,000 in contributions.
“The good news is, we don’t have to do a whole lot of convincing,” Patterson said.
She said the committee will take aim at Newsom and state Democrats, arguing that Prop. 50 is a “power grab” that would destroy fairness in congressional elections. The former chairwoman didn’t directly answer when asked if the White House would be involved in the opposition campaign.
“I think that there’s a lot of conversations that are happening,” Patterson said.