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Since he first floated the idea on a podcast this summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been the face of a plan to redraw California’s congressional lines to favor Democrats.
Now, as the state hurtles toward a Nov. 4 special election in which voters will decide whether to adopt a new gerrymandered map, opponents are grappling with how much to center Newsom in their campaign to defeat the proposal.
At the California Republican Party convention in Garden Grove this past weekend — which aimed to mobilize conservatives against Newsom’s measure, known as Proposition 50 — the governor was a curiously negligible presence.
In strategy sessions and trainings, GOP leaders largely looked beyond Newsom, whose slick style, celebrity stature and unabashedly liberal politics have for years offered California Republicans a delicious foil. Even the merchandise tables were missing their usual fare depicting the governor as a dictator with a Hitler mustache.
“I don’t think this is about Gavin Newsom. This is what he wants to do, but this is about Californians,” Corrin Rankin, the party chair, told reporters. She said the party will run a get-out-the-vote operation educating Republicans about how the new map would effectively take away their right to choose who represents them.
“We’re going to make sure that fine print is in bold letters and people see what exactly they’re voting for and that they’re not fooled again by the Democratic Party,” Rankin said.
Make it about the map
During a presentation Saturday afternoon about legal challenges to the redistricting gambit, Orange County Republican Party Chair Will O’Neill told attendees their most effective talking point to defeat Proposition 50 is to simply show voters the new map.
Newsom’s plan would toss out congressional districts drawn by an independent citizen commission in 2021 and adopt lines that flip the partisan lean of five Republican-held seats while shoring up the Democratic registration advantage in five more swing districts. The GOP could be left with as few as four of California’s 52 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Will O'Neill, chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County, speaks during the California Republican Party fall 2025 convention in Garden Grove, Orange County. He encouraged delegates to highlight the most "absurd" changes in the proposed congressional maps as part of the anti-Proposition 50 campaign. Sept. 6, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters O’Neill told delegates to find the most “absurd” changes in their communities and post them on social media. He highlighted a proposed district around Lake Tahoe that’s been compared to an elephant head, because of a trunk-shaped swath that dips into the heavily Democratic suburbs of Sacramento, and a line drawn down the middle of a residential street in Mission Viejo, splitting houses on either side into different seats.
To win, O’Neill said in an interview, Republicans have to broaden the election to be about the detrimental impacts of Proposition 50 and reach the vast majority of Californians who are not living in hyperpartisan online environments. Only 25% of voters in the state are registered Republican, compared to 45% who are registered Democratic and 22% who have no party preference.
“Whether the person likes Donald Trump or Gavin Newsom isn’t really the issue,” O’Neill said. “If this is a straight Republican vs. Democrat election, we lose.”
There's no escaping Newsom
For many voters, Proposition 50 will be a choice between Newsom and Trump. That’s exactly how Newsom himself has framed it.
The governor began talking about redistricting in July, after Trump pressured Texas Republicans to call a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map and bolster the GOP’s narrow control of the House. The new lines in Texas will likely flip five Democratic seats to Republicans.
Newsom has argued that California’s retaliation was necessary to save democracy — preserving Democrats’ chances of winning back the House in the 2026 midterms and preventing Trump from dragging the United States into authoritarianism.
The president, who remains deeply unpopular in California, is everywhere in Newsom’s campaign for Proposition 50, which he has dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act.” It echoes the governor’s successful strategy for defeating a recall attempt in 2021.
But Newsom is everywhere as well. He stars prominently in one of the first ads for the campaign, which features footage from a rally he held in Los Angeles last month, where he urges voters to “stand up for our democracy.”
And some opponents are putting Newsom at the forefront of their pitch to voters.
First: A vendor talks to attendees at the California Republican Party fall 2025 convention in Garden Grove. Last: The California Republican Party's North Region vice chair and Placer County chair, Mark Wright, holds a "No on 50" sign at the convention. Photos by Jules Hotz for CalMatters Former California GOP Chair Jessica Millan Patterson is leading one of the campaigns against the measure, which has taken the name No On 50 – Stop Newsom’s Power Grab. She said in an interview that Newsom “turns out Republicans,” who are frustrated by their belief that he has treated his governorship like merely a stepping stone to the White House.
It makes Newsom a potent symbol for what Patterson called “the corruption and those backroom deals when Sacramento politicians have that type of power” to draw their own districts, which in this case would leave vast swaths of conservative Californians without representation in Washington, D.C. She slammed the governor for wearing gerrymandering “like a badge of honor.”
“It’s a sense of justice. I think people get really fired up about it,” Patterson said. “We’re going to make sure the rest of the country sees that even Californians aren’t falling for his lame vanity project here.”
A split campaign strategy
Around the convention, Assemblymember David Tangipa was the rare voice making Proposition 50 about Newsom. He urged attendees to ask everyone they know one question: Does Gavin Newsom deserve more power?
Tangipa, a Fresno Republican, said he expected that question to carry weight even in heavily Democratic California, because enough people have woken up to the problems created by the state’s liberal policies. Voters, he noted, overwhelmingly approved a tough-on-crime measure last year that Newsom fiercely opposed.
“He’s not running a redistricting campaign. He’s running an anti-Trump campaign,” Tangipa said. “They love that we want to get into facts and data and everything else and they’re getting into emotion.”
Not everyone is so convinced. Olivia Valentine, president of the Hawthorne Lawndale Gardena Republican Assembly, was in search of door signs and other materials she could use to canvass against Proposition 50. She said she would refrain from bashing Newsom because she didn’t want voters to think she was a “partisan hack.”
“I don’t want that response. I want them to understand why it’s going to be bad for everybody,” Valentine said. “Everyone should be concerned that their vote is being taken away. That’s scary.”
Shawn Steel, RNC National Committeeman for California, speaks during a panel at the California Republican Party fall 2025 convention in Garden Grove, on Sept. 6, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters The conundrum over how much to involve Newsom — who Republicans seem uniformly convinced is using the redistricting fight to boost his prospects in an expected 2028 presidential run — is visible everywhere in the campaign.
Charles Munger, Jr., a longtime California GOP megadonor who poured millions into the ballot measure that created the independent redistricting commission, is running his own operation aimed at liberal-leaning voters. The ads have a good government message about the inherent corruption of politicians drawing their own districts, eschewing mention of Newsom and Trump altogether.
Republicans also hope that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the party’s last statewide officeholder and another champion of the commission, will rally independents against Proposition 50. Schwarzenegger has spoken out against the measure, posting himself online in a “terminate gerrymandering” T-shirt, but he has not announced a formal role in the campaign.
The motivating factor: fairness
On Saturday morning, California GOP delegates from the north state, a deeply conservative area that would be chopped up and redistributed into Democratic-leaning districts under the new congressional map, packed into a small hotel ballroom.
Most are currently represented by Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Chico Republican, whose chief of staff, Mark Spannagel, visited the session to discuss the bifurcated strategy for defeating Proposition 50.
“What motivates our center-right is not the mealy-mouthed stuff that’s going to motivate our friends on the left,” he said. “So you need to speak to them differently and you need to motivate them in a different way.”
Then Johanna Lassaga, chair of the Yuba County Republican Central Committee, stepped to the front to show off a campaign sign she had made: black and yellow, featuring simple language (“No on 50: Defend Fair Elections”) with no mention of Newsom.
California Republican Party Yuba County Chair Johanna Lassaga at the California Republican Party fall 2025 convention in Garden Grove, on Sept. 6, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters She had thousands available for delegates to buy and distribute around their communities. She asked if anyone had property along the highway where they would be willing to hang banners that could be seen by drivers — even liberals who might be drawn to the intentionally nonpartisan message.
In an interview, Lassaga said she is deeply worried about losing a member of Congress who understands her rural community. Her family farms rice and raises cattle, and she doesn’t think a Democratic representative from a more urban area would fight for them to get water.
But Lassaga said she is trying to lift people up by focusing on what they can do to win. She is trusting in the “power of seven” — encouraging everyone to tell seven people they know to vote against Proposition 50 and then have them pass on the word to seven more people. She recently talked to the salespeople at the dealership where her husband bought a new car.
“We can’t sit and wallow in our self-pity,” she said. “The whole thing is a multilevel marketing scheme with no product.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
