In November, Californians passed Proposition 50, redistricting the state’s Congressional districts in response to Texas’s extreme, mid-cycle gerrymander. Many Trump-supporting areas backed the move.
By Colin Woodard
Voters across the country have been registering their disapproval of the Trump administration up and down the ballot in both special elections and in November’s off-year elections, with Democrats seeing eyebrow raising gains from Mississippi to Tennessee. Chaotic tariffs, open corruption, invasions of U.S. cities by law-breaking immigration agents, the lawless destruction of a third of the White House, measles outbreaks, warmongering and murder in the Caribbean — it’s hard to know what specific outrages voters are reacting to, but reacting they are.
We’ve previously posted a regional analysis of the two most watched off-year elections, the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey, both of which showed marked Dem-ward shifts compared to prior cycles, including a significant erosion of support in Trump’s most reliable region, Greater Appalachia, and in the critical swing region of the Midlands, which had been shifting toward Trump over the past decade. Now that California has essentially finished their (notoriously slow) statewide count, we can add their Congressional redistricting ballot measure to the pile of evidence, and it’s a doozy.
The measure, made in response to Texas’s unusual mid-Census-cycle gerrymander of their already severely gerrymandered Congressional map, aggressively gerrymanders California’s U.S. House districts to compensate for the five Democratic seats the Lone Star State’s move sought to seize. It’s about as clear a litmus test for voter approval of the Republican House caucus, which has been so subservient to Trump as to go into stasis for months just to delay releasing the Epstein files. And it’s a devastating rebuke.
California comprises three historic regional cultures which don’t see eye to eye. To the south, there’s El Norte, once Republican, now solidly Democratic. To the north, along the narrow coastal plain, is Left Coast, the most reliably progressive of all the American Nations regions. And in the interior, north of Imperial County, is the Far West, which has been reliably Republican for decades. In the 2022 U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Alex Padilla and Republican Mark Meuser, for instance, the Far West went for Meuser by five points, even as Padilla won the state by 22.
Not this time. Far Westerners supported Propostion 50 by 2.4 points, with the anti-GOP measure flipping multiple counties that had backed Meuser in 2022, including San Bernardino, San Jouquin, Merced, and Fresno. The section’s urban counties backed Meuser by 4.1 in 2022, but last month they voted to redistrict out an estimated five Republican House members by 4.3, a more than eight point swing. The Far West’s rural counties rejected the measure by 18.8, which is a whopping margin, but still a nearly 2 point loss compared to 2022.
In the other regions, Republicans lost strength too. Prop 50 won by 49.9 points on the Left Coast and 30.9 in El Norte, which represents a modest blue shift of 0.9 in Left Coast, and a substantial 9.9 in El Norte. The measure won in every single county in both regions, save tiny Del Norte County (population 27,000) on the border with coastal Oregon. There aren’t any rural counties in the state’s El Norte section, but those in Left Coast voted for the measure by 23.3 points, yet another data point for the rural-urban determinist crowd to chew over. (Rural Left Coast also backed Padilla by 25 in 2022.)
Voters aren’t happy with Trump and his allies. If there are free and fair elections in 2026, all indications are they will be receiving a shellacking.
Thanks, as always, to our partners at Motivf, where Tova Perlman wrangled the data in this post and John Liberty created the maps.
— Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America and American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, is director of Nationhood Lab.