San Francisco Mini Voter Guide, Nov 2025

About

This election has just one line on the ballot, so this is a much shorter guide than usual; see more about me, or read a previous voter guide for more on my political views and this guide.

In lieu of a full endorsement database, here are some other posts about Prop 50 I’ve found interesting (I don’t agree with all of them):

• SF Chronicle: Trump’s tyranny can’t continue to go unchecked
• Darrell Owens: Your Moral Duty to Vote in California
• Nate Silver: Democrats can win the redistricting war
• League of Women Voters of California will not take a position of Proposition 50
• Common Cause: California Meets, Texas Fails to Meet Redistricting Fairness Criteria

As always, if you think I’ve missed something important, or have any questions, let me know via the links in the header!

Prop 50: Yes

I don’t like Prop 50. But politics isn’t about what we like: it’s about what will produce the best outcomes. I’m sad that we’ve gotten here, but I’m voting yes.

First, the facts. In case you somehow haven’t heard, Prop 50 is “gerrymandering for good”: we will suspend our independent redistricting commission’s maps and add Democratic-majority seats to compensate for the extra seats Republicans are expecting to win in Texas from their mid-cycle gerrymandering. It is, fortunately, a narrowly scoped, one-time thing:

• It adds 5 more seats with Democratic majority to compensate for the 5 more seats Republicans hope to win in Texas.
• The maps apply through the next census, after which the redistricting commission would resume control.
• Outside of the changes to add more Democratic seats, there are limited changes (I’ve seen no suggestion that anyone other than those 5 Republican representatives is being targeted).

I wish the prop had some automatic rollback mechanism, such that if Texas went back to their previous map we would too. But this seems hard to implement in practice: what if Texas makes a change right before, or right after, the California filing deadline? And it seems unlikely that Texas, let alone all the states where Republicans are trying to do this, will in fact do so. So merely ending with the next census seems to me a fine concession to reality.

More generally, I don’t like the idea that we have to attack democracy in order to save it; I don’t think I would support such gerrymandering as a generic response to Republican attacks on democracy, concerning though they are. But this proposition is narrowly scoped as a direct counterbalance to what Texas did. (We could likely have drawn every single district in the state to have a Democratic majority — there are enough Dems in the state to do so — but here we draw only 5 more because that’s what Texas did.) There’s certainly potential for more states to jump in (North Carolina and Missouri already have and Kansas seems likely to follow), but the tit-for-tat approach seems, as in the classic prisoner’s dilemma, like the right one.

The proposition also formally calls for Congress to pass legislation and propose a constitutional amendment to “require the use of fair, independent, and nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide”. Such a request of course does nothing and seems unlikely to come to fruition immediately, but regardless it is the right approach. Prop 50 will still detract from Californians’ fair representation in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats¹, as will Texas House Bill 4: a federal approach would improve the situation for both states, as well as for the 34 states where the legislature still draws the maps.

So, alas, yes on 50: we shouldn’t attack democracy in order to save it, but a direct counterweight to even the scales is necessary and appropriate.