Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. The passage of Prop 50 in CA will offset the Texas gerrymander. The D victory in VA will partly offset GOP gerrymanders elsewhere.
Proposition 50’s landslide win owes its success in part to the abject failure of a disarrayed No on 50 campaign low on funds and unable to keep up with the Yes side’s deluge of savvy advertising.
McCarthy reportedly told his former Republican congressional colleagues that he would help raise up to $100 million to defeat the measure. But that money never materialized. Instead, his No on 50: Stop the Sacramento Power Grab committee only pulled in $11.6 million, with $1 million of that from McCarthy’s defunct congressional campaign account.
While the House Republicans’ super PAC pitched in $5 million to the Stop the Power Grab committee and $8 million to the state Republican Party, no financial help came from President Donald Trump or the White House donor circle, and the president only engaged at the last minute to call the election “rigged” and discourage Republicans from trusting mail-in voting.
Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political strategist, said he didn’t know what happened to the promised $100 million, but his best guess is the decision came from Trump and the White House to not open the fundraising floodgates. After all, a Republican from Texas, Missouri or North Carolina is just as valuable to building a House majority as a Republican from California — and far less expensive to elect.