Exclusive: Schwarzenegger ready to fight Newsom on redistricting
'He calls gerrymandering evil, and he means that. He thinks it's truly evil for politicians to take power from people,' said Schwarzenegger spokesperson Daniel Ketchell. 'He's opposed to what Texas is doing, and he's opposed to the idea that California would race to the bottom to do the same thing.'
California's last Republican governor was the leading man behind the pair of constitutional amendments that more than a decade ago yanked authority for drawing legislative districts from politicians and placed it in the hands of a newly created independent commission. After the successes of those two measures at the California ballot, Schwarzenegger campaigned for similar changes (with mixed results) in Michigan, Colorado, Virginia, and Ohio.
Now, the fight has returned to his home state, as Newsom aims to redraw California's U.S. House maps before the midterm elections to offset a similar Republican-led effort unfolding in Texas. Since such a move would undo the constitutional language added by the Schwarzenegger amendments, it would require voter approval. Newsom said today he is 'very' confident he can secure the two-thirds legislative supermajority he would need to put the question on a November special-election ballot.
Schwarzenegger is preparing to take a starring role in a No campaign, reuniting many of the forces that came together in 2008 to pass Prop 11 (which created the commission for California legislative maps) and in 2010 for Prop 20 (which extended its authority to congressional maps). Several of the leading outside groups that gave good-government ballast to the earlier efforts — including the League of Women Voters and California Common Cause — are challenging Newsom's proposal.
Philanthropist Charles Munger Jr., the most significant benefactor to the redistricting measures, began last month to commission polls and focus groups as he assembles a team for another ballot campaign, we reported last week. Munger, the son of Warren Buffett's business partner, emerged as one of the California Republican Party's leading funders during Schwarzenegger's governorship.
Schwarzenegger was first elected upon the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis and went on to win a full term in 2006. After leaving government and returning to acting, he has remained involved in politics on a few issues that advisers say he considers central to his legacy, including climate change and independent redistricting. His Netflix action comedy FUBAR is currently in its second season.
Schwarzenegger has also emerged as a prominent antagonist of President Donald Trump, whom he called 'un-American' while endorsing Kamala Harris in last year's election. A redistricting campaign could find the two former Celebrity Apprentice hosts campaigning alongside one another, as Trump argues a Democratic gerrymander would be a threat to Republican dominance and Schwarzenegger argues for the integrity of a nonpartisan process.
'It's too early right now for him to fully unleash the standard Arnold gerrymandering stump speech,' Ketchell said. 'But it'll come.'
NEWS BREAK: Alameda County lawsuit sheds light on Oakland FBI probe… Gifford Fire in southern California burns more than 65,000 acres … New York Post plans to launch California edition from LA.
Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM focused on California's lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
TOP OF THE TICKET
A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures — past and future, certain and possible — getting our attention this week.
1. Education flex-savings account (2026): Former Thousand Oaks Mayor Kevin McNamee said he will file his constitutional amendment today, after a legal review. The proposal would offer parents displeased with the quality (or content) of public-school options to bank the $17,000 California allocates per pupil and apply it to the type of education that they see fit.
2/3. Clinic spending and hospital executive pay (2026): The powerful SEIU-UHW union is pushing forward with two initiative efforts for the 2026 ballot, one requiring community health clinics to spend at least 90 percent of their budget on providing primary care to communities and another to cap compensation for hospital executives at $450,000 per year. SEIU-UHW has shown with its dialysis initiative efforts that it has the financial and organizing might to qualify its proposals for the ballot, but the goal may also be to get clinics and hospitals to the negotiating table.
4. Save Prop 13 Act (2026): The anti-tax group Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association continued fishing for favorable ballot language by filing an amended third version of its constitutional amendment last week. HJTA president Jon Coupal has complained about the title and summary that Attorney General Rob Bonta's office drafted for the first two versions, which differ largely on stylistic terms.
5. Affordable housing tax (Santa Cruz, 2025): Santa Cruz's city council is expected today to put competing transfer and parcel taxes on the Nov. 4 ballot. The two measures pit Mayor Fred Keeley and affordable housing groups against the Santa Cruz Association of Realtors, which qualified a watered-down version of the initiative with a similar name in an effort to sow confusion. Keeley donated $50,000 to the campaign, telling Lookout Santa Cruz that he poured the entire inheritance received from his stepmother into the cause.
6. Health care sales tax (Santa Clara County, 2025): County supervisors are expected to put a sales tax increase before voters this fall, aimed at shoring up chronically underfunded hospitals. The money would help offset an expected drop in federal revenue within the county's health system but has faced some resistance from the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association.
7. Voter approval for event centers (Los Angeles, 2026?): Los Angeles city officials are warning that five venues slated to hold events during the 2028 Olympics could be affected by a labor-backed initiative that would require voter approval to develop or expand 'event centers' like sports arenas and convention facilities. The initiative, one of four filed in recent months by Unite Here Local 11, is part of a broader pre-Olympic battle unfolding between the union and the city's travel industry.
DOWN BALLOT
The unlikely duo hoping to put the question of California's independence before voters next year isn't splitting up — even after the Calexit movement's new CEO was exposed as a fraudster who appears to have misrepresented the wealth and connections the campaign has promoted as essential to its ballot success.
Those were among the findings of a POLITICO Magazine investigation into Xavier Mitchell, the man who was tapped to lead the business side of Calexit's campaign in March. The truly strange story published last Friday undermined many of the claims that Calexit has made for its viability – namely that Mitchell could raise money for a project with few evident stakeholders.
Instead, Mitchell's résumé is, at a minimum, heavily exaggerated, our Will McCarthy found. The Calabasas mansion where he has hosted Calexit meetings is owned by a bank. His company's stock is trading at one ten-thousandth of a cent. Supposed business discussions with politicians like San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria never happened.
Last month, proponents failed to meet a deadline for submitting signatures that would have asked voters in November 2026: 'Should California leave the United States and become a free and independent country?" If the measure passed, the state would have been required to study the possibility, potentially leading to a future referendum. The campaign said it planned to refile the initiative so that it would come before voters in November 2028.
Marcus Evans, who has been promoting California's sovereignty since 2012 and first attempted to place a measure on the 2018 ballot, has indicated he is unlikely to end his partnership with Mitchell, defending him at length in response to a series of questions. Although Mitchell recently filed for bankruptcy and was released from county jail on parole last fall, Evans said voters should still trust him to lead the movement.
ON OTHER BALLOTS
Republican activists in Michigan formally launched their campaign for a constitutional amendment that would require photo ID to vote and bar noncitizens from voting in local, state and federal elections, which they hope to put on the November 2026 ballot ... Backers of a constitutional amendment that seeks to protect aspects of Arkansas' direct democracy system have seen their ballot language approved after state election officials rejected two previous versions for violating reading-level requirements ...
A former state election watchdog in Montana filed paperwork for a constitutional amendment that would block corporations from election-related spending in the state by changing the constitutional power of 'artificial persons' to exclude their political spending ... The Washington, D.C. Council voted to partially repeal a 2022 ballot initiative that gradually raised the minimum wage for tipped workers up to the general minimum wage by 2027. Instead, the city's new plan will raise tipped workers to 75 percent of the general minimum wage by 2034 ...
And a trio of water sport enthusiasts in Oregon launched a referendum effort to repeal a new state law requiring paddleboarders and kayakers to purchase a $20 yearly permit.
POSTCARD FROM ...
… SAN DIEGO: In tens of thousands of homes where trash bags are piling up uncollected, some residents are pointing the finger at a garbage policy approved by voters in 2022 — and say it's time to go back to the ballot next year to clear the air.
'There's something rotten going on here,' said Mat Kostrinsky, a local activist and political consultant whose home in the city's Del Cerro neighborhood is one of those affected.
The mess has its roots in a 1919 ballot measure called the People's Ordinance, which required the city to pick up residents' trash without charging a fee. That weighed on the city's finances, prompting local lawmakers to amend the People's Ordinance to allow the city to charge a trash collection fee per household.
'The People's Ordinance was causing a huge problem for the city,' City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera told Playbook. 'In a way completely unique to San Diego, we were having an $80 million hole blown in our general fund by not recovering costs for trash collection.'
Voters approved the measure narrowly in 2022, but it took nearly three years for the city to begin assessing a new $43.60-per-month fee for weekly trash pickup from homes. In some parts of the city, and in larger buildings with more than four units, there is no longer any public trash option at all.
That fee is higher than Measure B's backers initially suggested it would be, and private haulers have responded to the captive market by charging as much as two and a half times the city fee. In neighborhoods across San Diego, the hottest month of the year is being marked by the stench of dysfunctional direct democracy.
Kostrinsky said the city needs to stop private haulers from 'exploiting' households with no other options, and has called for potentially fixing the problem via the June 2026 ballot when nearly half of San Diego's city council districts will be up for grabs. A measure could be drafted so that certain ineligible categories like multi-unit buildings could receive city trash pickup services in the future, he suggested.
Elo-Rivera, meanwhile, was cool on the prospect of a 2026 ballot measure, saying residents need relief sooner and that the city council is working on potential solutions that wouldn't require voter approval.
'No fault to the people of San Diego in the 1910s, but trying to craft policy for something like trash collection via the ballot box is not ideal,' Elo-Rivera said. 'It created a multigenerational problem in San Diego.'
THAT TIME VOTERS ...
… WERE ALL OVER THE MAP: Newsom said today at a press conference that 'we're not drawing lines to draw lines' by pursuing a constitutional amendment that would disempower the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. Americans have seen state-level ballot measures on a wide range of questions related to the shape of their congressional districts, including to:
Divide South Dakota into two congressional districts and elect any additional representatives after the next census as at-large members until the state is redistricted (1910, failed) ... Repeal a Missouri law that divided the state into 16 congressional districts (1922, failed) ... Create six new congressional districts in Oklahoma with adjusted populations based on the 1950 U.S. Census, replacing the existing map with one that has districts distributed more evenly by population (1956, failed) ... Redraw Maryland's district lines to create an eighth congressional district (1962, failed) ... Revise the boundaries of Washington state's first, second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh congressional districts (1966, passed) ... Transfer legislative and congressional redistricting in California from the state legislature to a panel of three retired judges (2005, failed) ... Establish standards for drawing congressional district boundaries in Florida, including that they cannot be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or a political party, be contiguous and not deny any racial or language minorities an equal opportunity to participate (2010, passed) ... Create a 12-member independent commission responsible for approving maps of Colorado's congressional districts (2018, passed) ... Transfer line-drawing authority in Michigan from the state legislature to an independent redistricting commission (2018, passed) ... Establish the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission, a 15-member non-politician commission, to adopt legislative and congressional redistricting plans (2024, failed).
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