UPDATE, 6:04 p.m.: The official maps were released at 5:47 p.m. today, a Friday — curious timing! — and you can find them here.
The leaked maps are the same, at least insofar as we are concerned, but I see that I did read that leaked map wrong in one insignificant particular. The proposed Second District’s southeast corner does not extend as far down as Susanville, after all. Rather, it stops at the Modoc/Lassen county line.
###
ORIGINAL POST:
The kickoff party for the “Election Rigging Response Act” was yesterday — Gov. Gavin Newsom and various worthies made the case for new, mid-decade California Congressional maps rigged to favor Democrats — and now the maps themselves have leaked, presumably just an hour or so ahead of their official release. (See here, here.)
Feast your eyes on the ERRA’s proposed map of the Second Congressional District — our district!
To the left: Before. To the right: After.
Is this a gerrymander? You better believe it! That’s the whole point! Apparently “gerrymander” stopped being a bad word a few years back, when the Supreme Court decided that gerrymandering for political purposes was pretty much A-OK, at least as far as the Constitution was concerned. So nowadays a party in control of a state legislature can draw the lines in such a way that will ensure that they will stay in power more or less in perpetuity, and they can draw similar lines for a state’s delegation to the House of Representatives.
Usually, barring extraordinary circumstances, state legislatures draw those lines every 10 years, in response to the decennial federal Census. But this year, in the wake of that Supreme Court ruling, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – apparently at the urging of President Donald Trump – is trying to redraw lines in the middle of the decade, with the explicit goal of pushing out a few of that state’s Democratic representatives. This would be ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, in which Republicans are at risk of losing sole control of Congress.
So California Democrats are asking the left-leaning California public whether or not they should fight fire with fire, and the map above is the result. One of the most expedient ways to accomplish their goals, it appears, is to disenfranchise our neighbors in Redding by ridding them of the God-fearing Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), and to consign LaMalfa himself to the ninth circle of electoral Hell.
LaMalfa’s small Butte County hometown, just south of Chico, would suddenly be anchored not to Redding, but to Healdsburg, Cloverdale, Hopland, Ukiah and Willits, in addition to the large college town to his own north. The map we’ve seen shows that Democrats lead Republicans by five percentage points in this configuration of the First Congressional District.
So LaMalfa would face a challenge from a Democrat, most likely one from the chi-chi population center in the very southwest of this new district, in Sonoma County. Hmmm, who do we know who lives in Healdsburg?
And what happens to Redding? We inherit it! The new Second Congressional District – an absolute marvel of gerrymandering technology – would include all of Marin County, for starters. It then hugs the coast all the way north, dipping west to avoid Santa Rosa and all the towns on the 101 corridor until Humboldt County, at which point it marches east to conquer not only Redding but the vast swath of California east of I-5, all the way to the Nevada border and from Alturas down to the Lassen County line.
So in a congressional district where Democrats lead Republicans by 15 percentage points, Shasta County would be represented by Marin County’s Jared Huffman in the halls of Congress! Never let it be said that Sacramento politicians do not possess a sense of humor.
How do you stand up in the House of Representatives and represent polities so far-flung, both geographically and culturally, as San Rafael and Redding, Bolinas and Alturas, Mill Valley and Dunsmuir? You don’t. But once again, that is not the point. Once again, the point is to disenfranchise our Republican neighbors in response to the Texas Republicans’ disenfranchisement of their Democratic neighbors, lest the Texas Republicans succeed in disenfranchising us all. That’s the world we get to live in now!
So next week the legislature will call a special election for the Election Rigging Response Act, and we’ll all get to vote on whether we want it or not on Nov. 4. Wild times.
###
PREVIOUSLY:
CLICK TO MANAGE