Anti-Prop. 50 megadonor warns California redistricting will further gridlock Congress

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on Oct 8, 2025

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — If California voters allow lawmakers to redraw congressional districts next month, it will spell the end of any competitive races and further entrench partisan gridlock in Washington.

That’s the message Charles Munger Jr., one of the anti-redistricting effort’s chief financers, gave Wednesday in his longest public remarks since starting the No on Proposition 50 coalition this summer to oppose Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting campaign. Voters will decide Nov. 4 whether to pass Prop. 50, which would draw liberal voters into five Republican-held congressional seats to help flip control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm.

Munger, a former Santa Clara Republican Party chair, has tapped his family fortune to fund his political interests, including two successful ballot initiatives in 2008 and 2010 that wrested the power of redrawing congressional and state district lines from legislators and gave them to an independent nonpartisan state committee, the Independent Redistricting Commission.

He has poured $30 million of his own funds into the No on 50 Protect Voters First campaign account.

“The people standing the way of independent redistricting were, first of all, the entire California Legislature on the majority side,” Munger told reporters during a virtual press conference. “The majority party in any state is against this, because the power wielded by the gerrymander is enormous. You can fortify yourself in a district where you never have to be accountable to the voters. You can draw a district for your friend so they get in. You can end the career of your political enemies by dicing their political support among multiple districts.”

Democrats have held a legislative supermajority in the Capitol since 2016.

In addition to Newsom, organized labor and top Democrats like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and the House Majority PAC have thrown their weight behind Prop. 50. Munger referred to them as the “cabal” that opposed Prop. 20, his successful 2010 initiative handing the power of redrawing state legislative boundaries to the redistricting commission.

“I’ve been fighting that particular faction, well, since forever, and I’m still fighting it now, since she (Pelosi) and two of her former members of Congress are signing the ballot arguments in favor of Prop. 50,” Munger said. “It’s the same cabal for the same reason.”

Munger has positioned himself as a moderate good-governance advocate and distanced himself from a competing anti-redistricting campaign led by former state Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Newsom’s campaign has depicted Munger as a MAGA sympathizer helping bankroll the Trump administration’s threats to California. The governor has said he supported redistricting as a drastic last-resort tactic to stop Congress carrying out Trump’s agenda despite his personal reservations, which Munger waved away.

“This is not the first time President Trump has faced a midterm,” he said, pointing to when Democrats retook the House in 2018. “We have fair districts now, and Californians are perfectly capable of flipping five seats Democrat, if they so wish.”

Munger said he “loathed” gerrymandering from either party, including the original redistricting Trump pushed for in Texas.

“I loathe mid-decade gerrymanders, and I think that’s an excellent national issue for the Democrats to go and beat the Republicans on. It was a national outrage, but the way to beat it is not to become like it,” he said. “And if you tear down the only model in the United States where redistricting reform is universal ... then there is no refuge ...The nation is so badly gerrymandered that there used to be 60 seats that either party could win in the Congress. Now it’s down to 40, and if these gerrymanders in Texas and California pass, it’ll be down to 30, and Congress is going to become ever more ideological, landlocked and partisan.”

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