00:00National Democrats, the national media, but it's almost the same thing, are very excited about Gavin Newsom's plan to gerrymander California to add House seats in order to counter Texas' own gerrymander now underway.
00:14Problem is, this gerrymander was really only going to help Gavin Newsom. The entire fight is only going to help Gavin Newsom. It's not really going to help California. It's certainly not going to help Democrats nationally.
00:27The party faces a real problem, as the New York Times reports today. Between 2020 and 2024, election day to election day, Democrats lost roughly 2 million registered voters. Republicans picked up about 2.4 million registered voters. That's purely in the 30 states where people register by party. It's probably worse once you count the rest of the country.
00:51Democrats are losing voters. They can't make up for that by playing games, by shuffling here, adding here, redrawing districts to manage their diminishing resources. They've got to get people back. They're losing Latinos. They're losing young voters. They're losing across the board.
01:10It went from only Trump winning on a fluke, in a sense, in 2016, to Trump winning commandingly in 2024. And it's only going to get worse from here on out, unless Democrats actually change course.
01:24But the party's base, the elite donors, they don't want to hear it. They want to believe that, oh, Republicans are just playing tricks, and we can play tricks to win back. Not so.
01:33The fact of the matter is, California is already pretty gerrymandered. In 2024, Republicans won 40% of the House vote there, yet only won about nine House seats. That's about 17%.
01:45That's actually about what will happen in Texas under its new gerrymander. In other words, it's just catching up with California.
01:53Newsom is planning to override the state's constitution, hopefully get away with it, with the complicity of the Democrats in the legislature, in order to add perhaps five seats, to gerrymander the state to the roof. It's insane.
02:08More important, California voted in 2010 and 2008 for nonpartisan gerrymandering, which hasn't really been nonpartisan, but at least has the appearance.
02:18Californians, just before this started, in early August, polls showed them, by two to one, supporting keeping things the way they are, supporting the system that at least tries to be nonpartisan.
02:30Newsom is now floating polls that say, oh, no, voters support me, but they're done by his own pet pollster. They're meaningless.
02:36It's ridiculous for the legislature to be going along with it, except they have no ideas either, because California is falling apart under Democratic Party rule.
02:45The state has been hemorrhaging people since the pandemic, especially. It's unaffordable for too many people.
02:52They're set to lose five House seats in the 2030 census. They are literally just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
03:01That's not going to help anyone, except maybe Gavin Newsom's hope to become the Democratic nominee in 2028.
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