A small army of union canvassers fanned out across a Los Angeles neighborhood, clad in purple and ready for a challenge.
Four months ago, none of them expected to be here. There was no election on the calendar, and redistricting was something that happened near the start of each decade in California. But here they were, trying to convince voters to support an esoteric measure that was placed on the ballot in August and aimed at redrawing California’s congressional maps.
They turned to a simple pitch: This is your chance to fight back against President Trump.
It wasn’t a hard sell.
California voters are well aware of the role their state is playing in the national redistricting war that began this summer when Mr. Trump asked Texas Republicans to deliver five more seats through gerrymandering.
Ordinarily, campaigns struggle to energize voters for an off-year special election like this one in California. But as the union canvassers found, Democrats here see Proposition 50 as the latest referendum on Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in the state. If it passes, the measure could help Democrats oust as many as five Republican House members next year in California.
Four days before the election, Democrats are feeling unusually confident in California. Polls show the measure passing by a healthy margin. Trailing in fund-raising by a wide amount, Republicans have all but abandoned the airwaves while Democrats are running ads that feel like something of a victory lap, featuring a who’s who of national party leaders, including former President Barack Obama and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who championed Proposition 50, has raised at least $114 million, roughly double what Republicans have accumulated. He has so much money that he asked small donors to stop giving more than a week before the election.
“We are fighting fire with fire,” Mr. Newsom told union members in San Jose this month. “We are fighting back. And we will win.”
Republicans have tried to sell voters on the ideals of independent redistricting, emphasizing that Democrats are trying to manipulate the process by sidelining the state panel that determines the congressional map according to nonpartisan guidelines. And former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is no fan of Mr. Trump, has spoken out against Proposition 50. But their message has been complicated by the fact that Republicans in Texas and other states have pursued the same gerrymandering efforts and turned their nuclear redistricting key first.
And Democrats still find that one message resonates above all others. “STOP TRUMP,” urged the campaign literature distributed by Service Employees International Union canvassers.
In the working-class Latino neighborhood of Pico-Union in Los Angeles, residents said they were angry that Mr. Trump was targeting Latino people for deportation.
“We’re not letting him win,” said Jennye Roman, 49, who told the canvassers that she was eager to vote for Proposition 50. “We’re tired of him stepping all over our families. These are our people.”
The door-knockers showed up ready to inform and persuade, aware that the average person might not be closely following headlines or steeped in the minutiae of midterm elections. But nearly everyone they encountered on an overcast October morning said they were at least somewhat aware of the ballot measure — and ready to vote for it.
Among those knocking on doors was David Huerta, the California president of S.E.I.U. He was arrested in June during a protest in Los Angeles against Mr. Trump’s immigration raids, a day before the president ordered National Guard troops to the city.
He said that voters in Los Angeles seemed to be paying closer attention to this election than they did to last year’s presidential race.
“This community’s suffered as a result of the federal operations that have happened,” Mr. Huerta said. “So they get it.”
Of course, the door-knockers were on friendly terrain, walking past old “Bernie 2020” signs still sitting in windows. Elsewhere in California, Republicans were frustrated that Democrats were trying to eliminate what little representation they had left in the state.
Democrats hold 43 House seats, compared with nine for Republicans in California. Proposition 50 could help Democrats win as many as five more, partly by splitting up Republican districts in Northern California and combining them with liberal areas like Marin County and Sonoma County.
Ryan Schohr, a rice and walnut farmer in Butte County, a rural region north of Sacramento, said he was happy with Representative Doug LaMalfa, the Republican who currently represents the area and is a rice farmer himself.
But under Proposition 50, Mr. Schohr’s district would lose some conservative areas and add Democratic voters in Sonoma County near the coast.
Mr. Schohr, 48, said he feared the changes would result in farmers like himself being represented by someone living far away, without an understanding or concern for rural issues.
“I think that a Republican represents this area’s interests much better than a Bay Area person can,” Mr. Schohr said.
While polls show a solid lead for Proposition 50, it can be difficult to predict turnout in an off-year special election. Opponents of the measure said they remained optimistic, even though they were being vastly outspent on the airwaves and had fewer volunteers on the ground.
“We’re continuing to turn out supporters and educate persuadable voters, obviously knowing we’re being outspent two to one,” said Amy Thoma Tan, a spokeswoman for an opposition group funded by Charles Munger Jr., a wealthy Republican who has long supported independent redistricting. “We’re definitely still running through the finish line.”
Still, Republicans have already begun pointing fingers, criticizing Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who led one of the opposition campaigns, for not raising enough money. Compared with the Yes on 50 campaign’s anti-Trump message, the opposition effort felt disjointed, ranging from taking shots at Mr. Newsom to praising the fairness of the current independent mapmaking panel.
The No on 50 groups have been outspent on television, $90 million to $34 million, according to the tracking firm AdImpact, and the disparity grew even more extreme during the crucial final month when Californians were filling out their mail ballots. After an initial ad binge in September, Mr. Munger’s committee has spent less than $6,000 on TV ads this month.
California Democrats have planned a series of campaign events for the final weekend before Tuesday’s election, designed to motivate volunteers and generate coverage on local television stations. Union members across the state are planning to make phone calls and knock on doors.
Earlier this month, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, and Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, each visited Los Angeles to support Proposition 50. Mr. Martin called it “a really critical priority” for Democrats nationally.
National Republicans have not responded in kind. House leadership has given money to the California Republican Party, but party leaders have been far less vocal on Proposition 50. Mr. Trump has scarcely weighed in, criticizing early voting and mail-in ballot options in a Truth Social post this month, but not the measure itself.
That has left embattled Republican House members in California as the face of the opposition.
Representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose Sacramento district would see an infusion of Democratic neighborhoods under the new map, has called for a nationwide ban on all mid-decade redistricting because, he has said, Americans oppose the gerrymander war between states. The idea has gone nowhere.
Still, Mr. Kiley said he was encouraged that polling showed California voters still supported independent redistricting in concept, even as they also backed Proposition 50.
“At least that part of it is heartening to me: that despite the barrage of messaging convincing Californians that gerrymandering is somehow good for our state, people are not persuaded by that message,” he said.
National Republicans may have concluded that the fight in California was costly and close to unwinnable, and that it was better to focus on convincing other states to redraw their maps instead, some strategists said. Even if California neutralizes the Texas gerrymander, Mr. Trump has convinced other Republican-led states, like North Carolina and Missouri, to follow suit.
“It could be that they decided that they’re going to pick up so many seats in red states that it wasn’t necessary,” said Duane Dichiara, a Republican political consultant in California who is unaffiliated with the Proposition 50 fight. “Plus, all these California seats are so expensive to defend.”
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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