It didn’t take long after polls closed on Tuesday night for the special election to be called in favor of the redistricting ballot measure.
It took, perhaps, even less time for those on the Proposition 50 opposition side, largely state Republicans, to begin pointing fingers at who was to blame for their side’s failure.
After all, the side that vowed to fight Proposition 50 at the ballot box back in August, when Gov. Gavin Newsom kicked off the redistricting campaign, went into Election Day far outfunded and out-energized.
California voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 50, the effort meant to boost the number of Democratic-friendly congressional seats in California to offset similar mid-cycle efforts in other states to benefit Republicans.
Since the election, criticisms have been lobbed at Corrin Rankin, who only just became chair of the California Republican Party in March; former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who led one of the main opposition campaigns; former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who only tepidly opposed Proposition 50; and the national Republican Party.
“The ‘No’ campaign suffered from a disadvantage that no amount of money could fix: A lack of recognizable leadership for people to rally around,” said Andrew Clark, a Republican strategist in Orange County who was not actively involved with any of the campaigns against Proposition 50.
“Newsom and other high-profile elected Democrats stamped their name on Proposition 50, commanded big audiences and generated excitement,” Clark said, adding, “There was no equivalent on the ‘No’ side.”
The California Republican Party has started an “after-action review” of the Proposition 50 campaign “to measure what worked and what we will improve” going into the 2026 midterms, said spokesperson Matt Shupe.
Conversations with California Republicans and political experts in the days since the election was called suggest the opposition’s failure in the election simply boils down to two things: money and messaging.
Gambling on California
When it comes to finances, California Republicans were already starting at a disadvantage.
“There is no trove of deep-pocketed money in California on the Republican side to offset all of the public employee unions, private unions, business people who get money from doing business with the state of California,” said Jon Fleischman, a longtime political strategist and former executive director of the state’s GOP.
The only real way for Republicans to have competed in the Proposition 50 election, Fleischman said, was with a massive investment from national Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson.
But that’s a tricky gamble.
Spending that kind of money now, on hardly a surefire thing in California, takes resources away from other 2026 midterm campaigns around the country. National Republicans may consider, Fleischman said, that the path to maintaining a majority in Congress no longer involves California.
“It would have involved a massive investment to get in the hunt, and that doesn’t mean you win. That just means every Republican knows there’s an election,” Fleischman said.
As James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff, put it, President Donald Trump’s operation has to be “a bit brutal” in where it spends its money.
“There was some money spent and supported, but you do have to be a little bit brutal in your allocation of resources,” Blair, the political director for Trump’s 2024 campaign, said on a recent episode of “The Conversation” podcast. “Even though we have lots of money, we’re going to allocate it well.”
In contrast, Newsom had a highly unusual message for backers of Proposition 50 the week before Election Day: Keep your money, he said. “We’ve raised enough money to win this campaign.”
The Yes on 50 campaign has raised more than $114 million this year, according to the latest filings with the secretary of state’s office. It also had some $37 million on hand left to spend.
In comparison, the anti-Prop. 50 Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab campaign raised nearly $11 million this year and had about $2 million left to spend. This was led by McCarthy, who pledged early on to raise $100 million for the effort.
Another camp opposing the redistricting measure, called Protect Voters First, raised nearly $33 million and had about $336,000 still on hand.
Messaging Trump
The final ad from the Yes on 50 camp featured Newsom, along with several Democratic heavyweights, including former President Barack Obama, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to name a few.
What it didn’t include: A single mention of the term “redistricting.”
“Newsom and his team were savvy enough to know that educating voters about an arcane topic like redistricting wasn’t going to happen,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley.
“Once they made the strategic decision to recast the initiative as purely anti-Trump, they set themselves up with a huge advantage in a deep-blue state like this one,” Schnur said.
Democrats leaned into the narrative that Proposition 50 was a referendum on Trump and his policies, an effort to save democracy and protect access to reproductive health care and rights for immigrants.
Although she thinks that messaging is dishonest, once an issue becomes nationalized, Republicans lose, said Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.
“If it had been presented honestly as, ‘Hey, we’re going to burn down the village in order to save it,’ we would have won,” Hoge said, referring to the doing away of congressional maps drawn by an independent commission in favor of the partisan ones.
“It was brilliant marketing,” she added.
Losing unity
It wasn’t always for certain a losing battle.
California Republicans, going into their annual convention in September, were almost giddy about the redistricting fight, calling it a gift for momentum and unity.
And early polling suggested Californians weren’t all that on board with redistricting. In mid-August, only 48% of people surveyed said they supported Proposition 50. By mid-September, that only increased to 51%.
“That’s a pretty precarious place to be,” said Schnur. “It only moved to a landslide when the opposition stopped spending.”
“There’s a very plausible case to be made that Republicans are better off saving $100 million for contested House races around the country next election rather than gambling it on an all-or-nothing ballot measure in a deep-blue state,” Schnur said. “But given how close to 50% the polls were still showing the initiative at even in mid-October, it suggests a more even fundraising might have been able to beat it.”
“Republicans may look back and wonder if they had raised the kind of money they had committed from the onset, if they could have defeated it.”
That’s certainly a frustration expressed already by Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego.
During a Zoom call the day after the election with supporters of his Reform California grassroots organization, DeMaio said his party failed to defeat Proposition 50 because the Republican National Committee gave “token money” to the fight and “abandoned” California Republicans. He also ripped into GOP leaders at the state level, calling the California Republican Party “completely inept” and calling for Rankin to step down from the helm.
The state legislator said he wanted a full accounting from the California GOP, including how many phone calls they made and doors they knocked on to reach voters, how much money they spent campaigning and who profited from the campaign. DeMaio also noted in an interview that there were reports of Republicans still receiving campaign mailers from the California Republican Party after Election Day, raising questions again about whether the campaign was managed well.
He also criticized Schwarzenegger, who spoke out against the ballot measure during an event at USC in September and again during a talk with students at Chapman University late last month. But Schwarzenegger – who championed independent redistricting and was governor when Californians voted to have independent redistricting commissions draw state legislative and congressional maps – did not actively campaign against Proposition 50.
“You can’t be wishy-washy or half-in on a fight like this. Either go all in, or you sit to the side,” DeMaio said.
The Assembly member wasn’t alone in his criticism of the former governor. Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee, said Schwarzenegger “never showed up … was not helpful anywhere.”
A spokesperson for the former governor could not immediately be reached for comment. But in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Schwarzenegger’s team said he was clear from the get-go that he was not going to be a part of the opposition campaign.
“His message was very clear and nonpartisan,” said Daniel Ketchall. “When one campaign couldn’t even criticize gerrymandering in Texas, it was probably hard for voters to believe they actually cared about fairness.”
For DeMaio, it all boiled down to messaging. He believes more voters could have been persuaded to choose no on Proposition 50.
“We needed to simplify the moral question: Why is it wrong for California to rig its election if Texas is already doing it? That question went unanswered in all of the ads,” DeMaio said.
During a post-election press conference, Rankin defended the work of her organization, saying it raised and spent $11 million to try to defeat Proposition 50 during the last three weeks of the election. The state party had a “robust” mail program, sending out about 10 mailers, and spent millions on digital ads and text-messaging campaigns, she said.
She also credited central committees statewide for phone banking and door-knocking every weekend.
“We left it all on the field. We were the last man standing … to reach out to Republicans and make sure they turned out. And I think we did an excellent job,” Rankin said.
“We worked as a team. And we are 100% united,” she said.
And Steel, too, said he was thankful for some later support from the national party.
“At the end of the day, it was not enough, and it was late,” said Steel. “But I’m grateful for those who trusted us and gave us a chance,” he said.
In the meantime, the California Republican Party has filed a lawsuit challenging Proposition 50 and is committed to a review to reflect on the election and lessons learned.
“There’s no doubt we’re the first choice of California’s rural voters, and will continue to be. Yet, that’s not enough,” said Shupe, a Republican political consultant and spokesperson for the state party. “California is the least rural state in America. We have to be a party that’s big enough and strong enough to be the party of choice in suburban California and for our cities that are suffering under Democrats.”
“We are reimagining and recreating a California Republican Party that doesn’t just speak to the districts we hold, but those we want to win,” he added.