For all the recent hue and cry, mid-decade redistricting is not a new thing. Texas did the same thing in 2003, and there was a similar walkout by Democrats then, with threats of arrest. Earlier in the current redistricting cycle, North Carolina drew its maps to be more favorable to Republicans — and New York responded with a modest tune-up of its maps to help Democrats.
What is different about this time is that both sides are shedding any pretense that this issue is about better representation for the states in question. It’s explicitly about engineering a specific outcome in the midterm elections nationally and about partisan payback for the states on the other side that did it first.
And what is specifically different about Gavin Newsom’s California ballot measure is that it’s the first effort to dismantle the whole architecture of nonpartisan redistricting that was at the core of the Democrats’ strategy for so long. After the 2010-12 redistricting cycle, the House map was biased tow…
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