Dems' California redistricting mastermind flips script after helping party win 5 GOP seats: 'Kill'
The architect of California's Democratic-friendly redistricting plan, which helped the party flip five Republican-held House seats in November's midterm elections, is now calling on Democrats to put an end to partisan gerrymandering nationwide.
Key points
- Mitchell acknowledged in his op-ed that Proposition 50 was designed to benefit Democrats, but defended it as a temporary response to Republican-led redistricting efforts before calling for an end to partisan mapmaking altogether.
- "Prop 50 was the right response to what Republicans in TX were doing, but recall that when TX started doing this, our approach wasn’t to just start redistricting ourselves, we did a lot of work trying to get TX to not start the redistricting wars," he told Fox News Digital.
- And I supported the legislation by Zoe Lofgren that would have [set up] national redistricting standards." Mitchell argued that Republicans' midterm losses could make them more receptive to redistricting reform after years of opposing it.
The California Democratic Party touted Prop 50 as a "direct response to a Republican power grab orchestrated by President [Donald] Trump and state leaders in Texas, who redrew congressional district lines to gain five more seats in the U.S.
Additional details
- "What makes now really important is that Republicans, who have opposed redistricting reform, should now realize that they lost in this war, so getting out of future wars is something maybe they would take more seriously now," he told Fox News Digital.
- BLOCKBUSTER SUPREME COURT VOTING RIGHTS RULING IGNITES REDISTRICTING WAR ACROSS SOUTHERN STATES "The incoming Congress should make national redistricting a priority, establishing minimum standards for how all states draw their districts," Mitchell wrote in the opinion piece.
- He called for Congress to prohibit mid-decade redistricting but argued that such a restriction alone would not prevent partisan gerrymandering when states redraw their maps after each census.
- "If then someone had said "congress will be banning mid-decade redistricting" we would have been all for it.
- Mitchell serves as the vice president of Political Data Inc., a California-based bipartisan voter data firm.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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