Proposition 50 Would Shift Antioch, Pittsburg to Aid Democrats in Congress

On a recent Thursday evening, pastor Shantell Owens opened the doors of her Genesis Church in Antioch, an eastern Contra Costa County suburb, to two League of Women Voters volunteers.

Their mission: explain Proposition 50, the measure on California’s November ballot that would redraw the state’s congressional lines to help Democrats win more U.S. House seats.

Owens beamed as she described the church’s services in a neighborhood rocked by shootings last year. Genesis distributes free groceries every Saturday morning, hosts financial empowerment workshops — and on this evening offered a crash course on California’s Nov. 4 special election.

“My biggest fear is that when people don’t know, they don’t vote,” Owens said.

League volunteer Janet Hoy explained the basics of Proposition 50, which asks voters to replace California’s current congressional district lines, drawn by a nonpartisan citizens commission, with a new pro-Democratic map through 2030. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed it in response to a congressional redistricting in Texas designed to help Republicans.

Antioch and neighboring Pittsburg are key pieces in the shuffle, showing the inherent tension between maximizing national political outcomes and representing local interests.

“You can see how Antioch changes, right?” Hoy said, pointing to a PowerPoint slide comparing the current and proposed maps. “You can see it’s really moving around.”

If Proposition 50 is approved, heavily Democratic Antioch and Pittsburg would move to a Central Valley district, boosting the reelection chances of vulnerable Democratic Rep. Josh Harder.

The new map would break up the current 8th Congressional District, which pairs parts of Antioch and Pittsburg with Richmond, Vallejo and other cities along the Carquinez Strait, creating a racially diverse, working-class district where concerns about long commutes and oil refinery operations could be addressed.

When the lines were finalized in 2021, the new 8th District was championed by Bay Area activists as an example of a redistricting process that prioritized local needs over partisan goals. But even supporters now back a map aimed at helping Democrats gain House seats.

“I think if there’s any way that we’re able to get more seats [in Congress] so that we can level the playing field to help the people here on the ground, we got to do it,” said Contra Costa County Supervisor Shanelle Scales-Preston, whose district overlaps much of the 8th District. “Hopefully, when [the commission] goes back in 2030, they can be intentional again about making sure they create a district for communities of color and working-class people.”

During 2021 public hearings, groups such as Black Women Organized for Political Action and Lift Up Contra Costa warned that Black, Latino and Asian voices were diluted in the prior map. Richmond was paired with the wealthy Lamorinda and Tri-Valley suburbs, while Vallejo and Martinez were in a district with Napa.

Organizers presented testimony on local bonds, or “communities of interest,” arguing that by combining these communities into one district would make their shared needs visible to elected officials.

“There were communities of interest around the refineries and environmental issues,” said Pedro Toledo, the chair of the Citizens Redistricting Commission. “There were also certainly quite a few communities of interest for low-income populations that wanted to be together and advocate together.”

The commission’s final report said the 8th was drawn “considering communities of interest to create a working-class focused district.” At the time, it was the only district in California where white, Latino, Black and Asian residents each accounted for at least 15% of the citizen voting-age population.

But the district lines did not produce local representation. Since 2022, the seat has been held by 80-year-old Democratic Rep. John Garamendi, a white man with rancher roots who lives in the Sacramento County town of Walnut Grove.

Toledo said using the concept of communities of interest to draw political maps can strengthen representation, regardless of who is elected to the seat.

“The issues that a community in the Central Valley might care about — maybe water or health care — might be very different in a more urban setting,” he said. “That matters because one would hope that the official that a community elects would represent those issues in Congress.”

Proposition 50 would move more than 106,000 Antioch and Pittsburg voters to the 9th Congressional District. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in those cities by more than 40 percentage points, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan election guide California Target Book.

The shift would help Harder, who narrowly won the 9th District last year by just four points, while Donald Trump carried the district over Kamala Harris.

“Part of what this map is doing is shoring up those narrowly won seats,” said Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

Each congressional seat has to have roughly the same population, so in exchange for removing Antioch and Pittsburg, the Proposition 50 map adds the Solano County cities of Vacaville and Dixon to the 8th District, slightly increasing the share of white voters in the district.

Overall, McGhee said Proposition 50 maintains the current levels of racial representation across California. He found that the map on the ballot matches the number of districts (16) where eligible Latino voters currently constitute a majority. Proposition 50 also keeps the same number of districts where Asian and Black voters make up at least 30% of voters (6 and 2, respectively).

It is harder to assess changes to the map that split up communities of interest, McGhee said. These pairings often encompass racial or ethnic enclaves, but also can include neighborhoods that share socioeconomic status, places of worship, employers or means of transportation.

“The bottom line is that there’s no single definition that everybody agrees on,” McGhee said. “Probably the best way to know if you’ve violated a community of interest is if some people complain loudly and assertively after the map is adopted.”

So far, none of the advocacy groups that championed the current 8th District lines have organized against Proposition 50.

Scales-Preston, the county supervisor, has concerns about communities along the north shore of Contra Costa County having to share a district with parts of the Central Valley.

“Here in Pittsburg, you know, we touch the Delta, but it’s not like one of the Delta communities and the farming communities,” she said. “It’s totally different.”

But Scales-Preston is supporting Proposition 50 because she views the need to break Republican control of Congress as paramount.

She has seen longer lines at food banks in Pittsburg and more residents bringing fishing poles to Bay Point Regional Shoreline in hopes of catching a free meal. She knows painful shortfalls will soon be coming to the health care and food safety nets as a result of the GOP-backed budget bill.

“Prop. 50 for me is protecting health care for community members here, protecting our immigrant community…and protecting CalFresh,” Scales-Preston said.

Back at Genesis Church, just a handful of people have trickled in to hear the presentation about Proposition 50. Shantell Owens doesn’t recognize any local parishioners, but she vows to take the information she’s learned about the special election back to her congregation on Sunday.

“They don’t understand it because it’s not time for an election — but it’s happening, right?’ Owens said. “So it’s about really shaking people up to understand that this is happening and we need to be a part of it.”