In late August, California lawmakers voted to initiate a Nov. 4 special election to pass Proposition 50. As mail-in voting opened earlier this month, student groups, advocates and the union workers at UC Berkeley are advocating for Prop. 50 and urging students to “VOTE YES.”
Prop. 50 would replace the district lines drawn by a state nonpartisan commission with new boundaries created by partisan lawmakers — allowing Democrats to win up to five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, said Eric Schickler, the co-director of campus’s Institute of Governmental Studies, or IGS.
The five new seats could counteract the five seats that Texas lawmakers created and gained through unilateral redistricting by the state legislature earlier this year, Schickler added.
California lawmakers, in response, have positioned Prop. 50 as a defense against this Republican action and the President Donald Trump’s administration. However, in California, as opposed to Texas, voters will decide.
With the IGS, Schickler is working on polling registered voters in California on their plans for the special election. Schickler said the polling is “encouraging” for supporters of the proposition, but IGS will not have the results until the end of the month.
“The ability of Democrats to make this election about Trump gives an advantage,” Schickler said. “I wouldn’t make a prediction at this point. I want to see the final polls before doing that.”
For the past few weeks, student groups and workers’ unions across the UC system have begun to advocate for the proposition.
In an Instagram Reel, Cal Berkeley Democrats shared footage of a projection onto Sproul Hall that said “#Yes on 50, this November give Trump the finger” and “FDT” earlier this month. The student organization also posted infographics promoting the prop and passed out pins advocating for the measure.
Khalid Mahmood, an organizer with United Auto Workers 4811, the union representing 48,000 UC academic workers, said he has been working on talking to students about the proposition, making sure they have a plan to vote. Mahmood added that there are lots of organizations on other campuses in the state that are in a partnership with the California Labor Federation to “fight for shared priorities.”
“I think a lot of people are going to vote for this, not necessarily because they see an ad, but because somebody takes the time to have a conversation with them,” Mahmood said. “You can really connect to them peer to peer and say, ‘Hey, this is what I care about.’”
Mahmood said President Trump is attempting to maintain a permanent Republican majority in Congress, which Prop. 50 is attempting to combat. If the Republican Party maintains its majority, Mahmood said, increasing attacks against higher education may lead to significant changes to the university.
After talking to students, Mahmood said almost no one that he has talked to has expressed opposition to the special election measure.
“There’s this notion sometimes that politics can feel alienating or you can feel disconnected or that it’s just not worth participating in. I would kind of push back on those because all of us are dependent on the role the federal government plays in our day-to-day,” Mahmood said. “Prop. 50 is too important a moment to pass up.”