Dems' California redistricting mastermind flips script after helping party win 5 GOP seats: 'Kill'
The architect of California's Democratic-friendly redistricting plan, which helped the party flip five Republican-held House seats in November's midterm elections, is now calling on Democrats to put an end to partisan gerrymandering nationwide.Paul Mitchell claimed in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed published Wednesday that lawmakers should "kill partisan gerrymandering for good." His comments come after California voters approved Proposition 50 in November 2025, temporarily replacing the state's independently drawn congressional districts with a Democratic-friendly map for elections through 2030.Mitchell acknowledged in his op-ed that Proposition 50 was designed to benefit Democrats, but defended it as a temporary response to Republican-led redistricting efforts before calling for an end to partisan mapmaking altogether."I wasn’t trying to do this [op-ed] to time with anyone’s efforts to do further gerrymandering," Mitchell told Fox News Digital on Thursday evening."I always planned on doing this as soon as the election was over, and I even did a CNN interview with Elex Michaelson during the election coverage where I said that the answer needs to be to stop this redistricting war and actually fix the problem."REDISTRICTING EFFORTS BLOW UP IN REPUBLICANS' FACES AMID HISTORIC HOUSE LOSSESGov.
Gavin Newsom spoke with supporters during a rally with the United Domestic Workers of America (UDW) about the urgency of the Get Out the Vote Kick-Off on Saturday, Nov.On Saturday, November 1, 2025, in San Diego.
(Nelvin C.Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune/Getty)Mitchell went on to say that Prop 50 was "the right response" to Texas Republicans' redistricting push."Prop 50 was the right response to what Republicans in TX were doing, but recall that when TX started doing this, our approach wasn’t to just start redistricting ourselves, we did a lot of work trying to get TX to not start the redistricting wars," he told Fox News Digital.
"If then someone had said "congres...