California’s two biggest Republican names have both returned from retirement to fight Proposition 50, the mid-decade partisan gerrymander being promoted by top Democrats. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is raising money for a Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab committee, while former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has backed donor Charles Munger Jr.’s Protect Voters First.
But the two committees are not coordinating their efforts, according to interviews with people involved in each. That distance reflects a core divide among the Republicans jumping into the fray against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50 — one faction that hopes to manage President Donald Trump’s involvement, one that wants to keep him far away.
“You’re going to see different messengers, but it’s all going to be the same message,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, the former California Republican Party chair now running Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab. “That message is: California voters decided in 2010 that they didn’t want Sacramento politicians choosing who were who were their constituents. They wanted the people to have the power to decide who the representatives are, and that’s why we have the Citizens Redistricting Commission.”
McCarthy has said he hopes to raise $100 million for a campaign Patterson says will be aimed at a “right-of-center coalition and making sure that conservative voters are turning out to vote.” She says she has not made any attempt to recruit Schwarzenegger, who “is his own man and I think he’s going to be in his own lane talking to people.” (Representatives for the former governor did not reply to requests for comment.)
Munger has already given $10 million to Protect Voters First, which will “invite Democrats, Republicans, and independents to oppose Prop 50’s return to back-room, politician-drawn lines and to support a transparent, consensus-driven redistricting process,” said a spokesperson.
Californians are now starting to see differences in how the parallel campaigns will make the case for a No vote, as each launched its first voter-contact efforts in recent days. Mail that reached politically unaffiliated voters this weekend from a Patterson-affiliated group, Right Path California, has the cast of partisan messaging: it calls out Newsom by name twice, for “scheming” and ignoring cost-of-living issues over which Republicans have hammered Democrats for years.
A mailer from Munger’s Protect Voters First included testimonials from Common Cause and League of Women Voters, a quote from the chair of the Legislative Progressive Caucus and a Sacramento Bee columnist who argued that gerrymandering “suppresses minority thought, and racially discriminates against Black, brown, and other politically underrepresented neighborhoods.” (Common Cause issued a statement disowning Protect Voters First, claiming Newsom’s map meets its “fairness criteria.”)
Those divergent arguments are also a far cry from what Californians are hearing from many national Republicans, who are currently cheerleading red states to engage in the same type of partisan gerrymandering that Newsom says provoked Prop 50. That includes Trump, who said earlier this month that his party is “entitled to five more seats” through a partisan gerrymander in Texas.
Neither side seems eager to publicly embrace Trump, but it will probably grow more difficult for either of them to keep him out of the race. Today the president threatened to have his Justice Department sue Newsom over the redistricting plan. A third Republican faction may be about to enter the fray.
