Sara Sadhwani is proud of her work on California’s independent redistricting commission, but now she wants voters to tear up the maps she and her colleagues spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours crafting.
The Pomona political science professor grabbed political insiders’ attention when she backed state Democrats’ move to counter Texas Republicans’ planned gerrymander with one of their own.
Sadhwani, one of the commission’s Democratic members in 2020, believes partisan gerrymandering should be outlawed nationwide. But she argued democratic institutions have been so weakened by President Donald Trump’s administration that slanting California’s maps toward Democrats is necessary to push back on a Republican power grab — which is why she’s inviting voters to override her own work.
“These are extraordinary times,” she told Playbook. “At this moment, I’m not so worried about California’s democracy.”
You got a lot of attention for calling for the maps to be redrawn. Can you talk me through your thinking?
First of all, I’ll say that I stand by the maps that the commission drew. They are fair, they are competitive, and those are the kinds of maps that we should have for congressional districts across the nation. We expanded opportunities for Latinos, in particular, to elect their candidates of choice in ways that the Legislature never bothered to do in California. I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did in the largest state in the nation.
That being said, not all of the states are playing by the same set of rules. Certainly, we see the showdown happening in Texas. President Trump has talked about getting the FBI involved to get Democratic members back to the Texas Legislature. These are extraordinary times. At this moment, I’m not so worried about California’s democracy. We have strong democratic institutions here in the state of California, but I’m also a political scientist, and at the national level, what we’ve seen over the last 10 or even 20 years is a backsliding and a decay of our institutions that should worry all of us….