The Democratic National Committee is entering the campaign for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to gerrymander the California congressional map to flip five Republican seats to Democrats.
Politico reported Thursday:
The Democratic National Committee is jumping into Gavin Newsom’s redistricting campaign in California for the first time with an initiative to target Latino voters, a crucial voting bloc that helped Republicans make significant gains in California and across the country last year.
The DNC on Thursday announced a bilingual organizing effort designed to push Latino voters to back Prop 50, the redistricting measure. The organizing team includes 41,000 volunteers to make calls, send texts and knock on doors in English and Spanish.
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It’s a modest intervention. But the organizing and ad campaigns mark the first official support from the DNC for Newsom’s effort with less than two months until November’s election — a sign of the national stakes of this year’s redistricting wars. The California Democratic Party has assisted in organizing and fundraising, while House Democrats’ largest super PAC has contributed millions to the measure so far.
The special election will cost the state up to $250 million, and an additional $200 million will be raised by Democratic donors, along with a somewhat equivalent amount on the Republican side.
While more than half a billion dollars, public and private, will be spent, tens of thousands of Californians remain displaced by wildfires. Many will struggle to rebuild their homes due to a lack of money, even if they have insurance.
Newsom has described his effort as a necessary response to redistricting in Texas, which will undo several Democrat-held majority-minority districts that the Department of Justice says are unconstitutional, given recent jurisprudence.
However, California voters amended the state constitution in 2008 to require that an independent redistricting commission draw the map.
Newsom hopes that a referendum will give him legal authority to undo the commission — though the effort likely faces court challenges, given that he and the state legislature usurped the power of the commission to draw the map that they are placing before the voters.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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