‘No’ campaign advisor and Prop 50 map architect respond to election results

Following a two-month campaigning sprint, and amid a national gerrymandering fight, California’s special election on Proposition 50 Tuesday was over quickly.

The race was called minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m, The state is now set to temporarily bypass its own voter-approved independent redistricting commission and redraw its congressional maps to give Democrats an edge in five Republican districts ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Election night was a resounding success for Governor Gavin Newsom, who pushed the ballot measure as a response to Texas Republicans gerrymandering their state’s maps at the urging of President Donald Trump.

And just hours after the race was called, California Republicans filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block the new maps from taking effect. 

The suit was brought by the California-based Dhillon Law Group founded by Harmeet Dhillon, currently the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Lawyers from the firm argue that the new districts under Prop 50 were drawn to favor Latino voters in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

As lawmakers and prospective challengers weigh their options in newly-shaped districts, politicos are looking at the election results and voter turnout in preparation for the midterms and beyond.  

Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and strategist who advised the No on Prop 50 campaign. He is also the author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.

Paul Mitchell is a Sacramento-based data consultant and leads the demography firm Redistricting Partners. His company drafted the new maps that will come into effect with Prop 50’s passage.

Both spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez on the heels of the special election about the results, and the potential lessons learned.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

Mike Madrid

What's the big takeaway so far for you?

This was a resounding defeat. It overperformed most of the polling by six or seven points. What you saw was a real miss on the enthusiasm that Democrats and independents, with a massive break, have had to kind of vote against Donald Trump with their middle finger for the first time in 10 months, and they certainly seized the opportunity to do that. Also at least nationally…it seems to be a slightly depressed Republican turnout. Big night for the partisan Democrats.

You advised the No on Prop 50 campaign. Were there missed opportunities leading up to election night?

Look, this was never going to turn out any way other than, I think, a victory
for the ‘Yes’ side. It’s still California, it's still very partisan. I was a little bit disappointed not just in the ‘No’ campaign, but in the ‘Yes’ campaign as well. It just seemed like a retread of both Republican and Democratic messaging, which I guess kind of makes sense for Democrats, but Democrats have been slipping with voters for the better part of a decade. I think they’re just starting to realize that, and they’re probably convinced that this will be a retrenchment back… making the same mistakes they did in 2018.  

For the ‘No’ side, there's been no adjustment to really understand what is driving some of the sentiment of disaffection from working class voters, younger voters, and Latino voters. And so without providing a message you're ended up defending Donald Trump, which is kind of kryptonite in California. That’s why I think you saw the drubbing that you saw. 

You focus heavily on the Latino vote. What does turnout currently look like for the Latino vote on Prop 50? 

It’s a little bit lower than non-Hispanic voters, but it always is. You're asking the right question. In my mind, as somebody watching the Latino vote change over time and is predicting a lot of these dramatic shifts we’ve seen in recent years, it’s not that a lot of Latinos have moved away from the Republican Party. These voters are not Democrat-based voters anymore, but they're very much anti-Republican the same way they were anti-Democratic in November of last year.

Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and strategist who advised the No on Prop 50 campaign.Courtesy of Mike Madrid

This is a dealignment. A lot of people have kind of considered this right word shift of Hispanics as a racial realignment. I've always rejected that, there's no evidence to suggest that. There's overwhelming evidence to suggest that Latinos are rejecting both parties in greater and greater numbers and this is more evidence of that. So turnout matters because if you see turnout getting worse, what it means is people are just checking out completely from the process.

I think the raw numbers are higher than they've been in a very long time, especially for a special election, but the gap between Latino voters and non-Latino voters remains a persistent problem that we've got to pay attention to and not dismiss anymore.

More Latinos voted for Trump for his second presidency back in 2024. Early returns show that some Latino-majority districts that voted more conservative just last year are voting yes on Prop 50, or are very split.  Do you think the politics of the second Trump administration have shaped that change in voting behavior for Latinos?

I think it's a number of things, but I want to really challenge the assumption of the question. I don't think that Latinos voters were voting for Donald Trump as much as they were not voting for Kamala Harris, and there's a very big difference there. That's fundamentally why people don't understand this vote and why they keep making the same mistakes in assuming that they're proactively voting for some agenda.

As the largest ethnic group in the country, Latinos are, last election cycle, basically evenly split. But where most people would look at it and say, “half of Latinos are voting for Republicans, half are voting for Democrats,”  my perspective is “half of Latinos are voting against Republicans and the other half are voting against Democrats.” When you understand it that way the turnout problem and the weak partisan anchor that our community has really start to come into context. 

You look at these really wide swings that happened… massive swings towards Republicans 10 months ago and back, that is not an aberration. At a certain point we’ve got to stop our old ways of looking at these voters through a partisan lens and start realizing that something foundationally different is happening here.

How should Republicans rethink their strategy coming out of this election, not only in California but across the country?

This is the advice I’ve been giving to no audience in the Republican Party for three decades. One of the great ironies of Tuesday night was if Donald Trump had just gone golfing, took the inherited economy he got from Joe Biden (already course-correcting) and not felt the need to do anything [like] militarizing our streets, cracking down on those that are here undocumented, he'd probably be sitting at a 57-58% support level and this would have been a very different night, but he can't. 

There’s no courage in the Republican Party to stand up and say, “this is clearly bad politics. It's bad morally and it's bad economically.” And when you have a party that's essentially devolved into just a fealty test, this should not be a surprising result. The short answer is, whichever party is able to get back to a working-class aspirational economic message is going to be dominant for the next generation, but neither party has shown any proclivity to be moving in that direction. 

Going back to Prop 50, it’s meant to be temporary for six years, or three election cycles. Do you believe that the independent redistricting commission will come back? 

No, certainly not in its old form. You’re not going to have these members just give this up. There will be another excuse, there will be another crisis. And maybe we come up with something better, but is it going to stay the same… like this is just the way we’re going to do things? Absolutely not.

Paul Mitchell

Did election night meet expectations?

Well, it depends on what your expectations were. So, on election day, I think most people thought that with the polling and how stable it had been, and looking at the voter turnout that we were seeing and tracking in the weeks leading up to election day, that that was what we expected. 

If you would ask me this when we last talked, or when we first started this process, I would say no. I think from the three-month viewpoint this is pretty astonishing. 

This special election spanned just over 70 days. From election results and returns you've seen so far, what stands out to you about the voter turnout?

Voter turnout we always expected to be around 50%, and I think that's what it's going to end up being. We were seeing in the early data that the turnout was extremely partisan, so not a lot of independents were voting, a lot more Democrats and Republicans. We also saw a Democratic turnout advantage in these numbers, which was greater than the 2024 general election advantage. It sounds kind of silly, but the No Kings protests? We saw a huge push of additional mail-in ballots right after that protest, to the point where the numbers of ballots that had come in as of the Wednesday before the election was higher than the 2024 generation election [at the same time.] 

And then something that [Madrid] had mentioned was potentially a drop-off of Republican turnout. I think it's important for people who are going to look at this election in the rearview mirror to recognize that the ‘No’ side spent tens of millions of dollars mailing voters even before the bill was passed by the Legislature, and then went completely dark in the last 10 days. It's the opposite of what you would expect in a campaign, especially when the data suggested Republicans were likely to turn out at the end or in-person on election day and they were getting zero messaging from TV or digital. Essentially the campaign had hung it up and that might have depressed turnout… when you'd expect there to be a big Republican surge.

How do you respond to people like Mike Madrid who say they don’t believe California’s independent redistricting commission will come back in the same way that it previously existed? How confident are you that this redrawing will last as written, six years? 

I love Madrid, we’ve been friends since college. But he’s just wrong on that. I think anybody saying that the commission isn't going to come back hasn't read the ballot measure: the ballot measure institutes this plan for three cycles and goes away. What is left in the Constitution is the independent redistricting commission, every aspect of it. Nothing has been touched. So what would it take to do this again? It would take another huge statewide ballot measure.

Paul Mitchell is a Sacramento-based political data analyst. His firm Redistricting Partners drafted the congressional map that California voters decided on through Prop 50.Courtesy of Paul Mitchell

Voters, when you ask them [if] they want to get rid of the redistricting commission, support was at 12%. Nobody wants to get rid of the redistricting commission. The only way this passed was because it was this existential crisis, and it was temporary. I don't know how you could go back to voters in four or five years and say, "hey, the commission hasn't even drawn new lines, but we want to do another temporary one because of some new existential crisis.” Voters would not buy that, and I would not be drawing maps for that. 

This is a one-time thing, and I think it was probably a good message for the ‘No’ side to try [and] stir up the fear that it would be permanent. And I understand people who watch [th]e government… if the government says we’re going to suspend this law for five years and bring it back in the future, [they] kind of know they’re never going to do that. But this is a different scenario. It would take another $100 million dollar campaign and voters just wouldn't buy it.

Should mid-decade redistricting be banned after this? 

Absolutely, with a caveat that sometimes you do have court decisions and things like that. There’s nothing inherently bad about that. But yes, the idea of legislatures being able to snap their fingers and draw new lines, I don't think that that's something that we should continue going forward. That’s not the way to have a clean democratic process.

I think the further answer is that we do need national reform to create independent registering commissions of the California-Michigan model around the country. Redistricting commissions [that] are appointed not by the politicians, but by an independent panel. They are bipartisan, they work together on drafting lines that don't go back to the legislature for approval [but] go straight into being implemented. It takes the politics out of the process and creates an opportunity for a government structure that voters can have more trust in. I 100% embrace it.

We might have an opportunity where Charles Munger [Jr.] supports this [and] Gavin Newsom supports this. We might have people who come out of this horrific national redistricting drama [and] say, ”we never want to do this again.” We might have momentum to put together a clean bill nationally to implement national redistricting reform. I think that would be the ultimate thing that I'd like to see. 

As an election expert, what are you interested in seeing in the months until the next election day?

When you step back it’s almost like the recall election, where [that] election was like a pit stop… and it did have its footprint on the actual 2022 general election. You saw, as an example, the Republican Party had exhausted a lot of their resources in the recall and then just really didn't have a substantial campaign in 2022. I don’t know that that’s exactly what’s going to happen, but I do think the 2026 primary will have elements to it that we can point back to, and look at what we had here.

As an example, Democrats are extremely energized, they're organized. I think a lot of them feel like the wind is at their back again. They have a message of fighting back against Trump. If you’d asked [Democratic-registered voters] four months ago they would say, “my party likes to write sternly worded memos and give a long speech." That was the most they thought their party could do, and this shows their party can do more.

I'm not speaking as a partisan, more just looking at the landscape of what we're seeing around the country. And this is true if it was a Democratic president, and Republicans were winning races in the midterms, we'd be saying the opposite thing.

Given that you've been relied upon in non-partisan redistricting for years, what do you say to someone that thinks you’re professionally partisan now? 

I was called upon to do this, and I did it in a way [where] we tried to maintain as many of the core values of how California does redistricting. We’re now facing a lawsuit because we followed the Voting Rights Act. We kept cities and counties together. We protected communities of interest.

Cal Poly Pomona came out with a study that said that we created districts that help strengthen Latino voting power. The Asian [America] Studies Center at UCLA said this helps strengthen Asian voting power, and groups like the NAACP endorsed our maps. Groups that generally would be opposed to this like Common Cause showed that their checklist of good redistricting practices were followed in the work that we did.

I can say yes, we participated in this because of an existential crisis, but we did our best to bring values, good values to this registering process.