Caucuses were briefed. Polls are being shared. And the push to swing California bluer is taking shape.
California’s Texas-thwarting gerrymander has swiftly transformed from fantasy to reality.
Democrats in the House and the state Legislature are coalescing around a plan to draw a half-dozen Republican incumbents into oblivion — and persuade California voters to approve the new congressional maps before next year’s midterms. Party leaders are closely tracking the dual-track developments in which lawmakers in Texas and California are moving, in partisan parallel, to shore up their respective party’s House majorities. California Republicans are casting about for a way to avoid extinction.
It all points to a high-stakes, big-dollar brawl thrusting California to the center of the political universe.
That game theory assumes only two agents though, the republicans and the democrats, when there is a third agent that is losing if this escalates, the democratic will of the people. If Texas gerrymanders to win 5 seats and California gerrymanders to win 5 seats then it’s not just a wash as the people of California have lost there right to determine there districts democratically.
If anything both sides have a perverse incentive to gerrymander to further entrench there power in the areas they already have and make it harder for challengers, again at the cost of the people’s democratic will. Tit for tat assumes there’s some cost to the agents to incentivize stopping, but the democratic party of California may not necessarily care about Republicans getting elected in Texas, especially if there gonna get a majority in the house anyway, which all signs point to that outcome. They do care about getting democrats elected, and this tit for tat will help them with that, so they have an incentive to escalate.