Fifteen years ago, I helped make the case for what became California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission.

It was a first-of-its-kind body of 14 ordinary Californians, neither politicians nor their appointees.

It was balanced with equal Democratic and Republican representation, charged with drawing fair districts after the 2010 Census.

The argument was simple, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it: “Gerrymandering has created an absurd reality, where politicians now pick their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians.”

In this effort I often partnered with a type of Democrat one rarely sees these days: the reform-minded Democrat.

For over a decade, the commission worked. It wasn’t perfect. No democratic institution is. But it represented something important, a genuine attempt to remove the most self-interested actors from a process that shapes the fairness of every election that follows.

Earlier this year, California voters passed Proposition 50, effectively suspending the Citizens Redistricting Commission from acting until the 2030 Census, and returning its powers to the state legislature.

Gov. Gavin Newsom championed the measure as a necessary counter to what Republicans were doing in Texas to help preserve their control of the House of Representatives.

The proposition’s language does include a provision to restore the commission after 2030, but I think that promise is flimsy at best.

California is projected to lose between three and five congressional seats by that census, and the political pressure to protect Democratic incumbents will be intense.

When the moment comes, I fully expect the argument to be made, in the language of partisan interest, that now is not the time to return control to citizens.

This week, in Virginia, voters agreed with that view — by less than a 2% margin.

They not only approved new, extremely partisan electoral maps, but also became the second state to suspend what has been one of the few encouraging movements in political reform: the citizens’ redistricting commission. The referendum promises a return to the commission after 2030. 

That promise sounds familiar.

This is the moment I feared. What we are witnessing is not a Virginia problem or a Texas problem or a California problem. It is a contagion, a tit-for-tat cycle of partisan gerrymandering that is eating away at the basic premise of representative government.

Texas moved aggressively in 2025 to redraw its congressional map, a move the Supreme Court ultimately allowed to stand, potentially delivering Republicans five additional House seats. North Carolina and Missouri followed.

And then came the gut punch I did not expect: California.

And so here we are. Both parties have now embraced the logic of the gerrymander. Both will claim the other started it. Both will be right, and both will be wrong, and the voters — the people all of this is supposedly designed to serve — will be left out of the equation.

I teach at Pepperdine, an institution that takes seriously the idea that public service is a calling, not just a career. We believe what many universities are rediscovering: that higher education must return to its  greater purpose. It exists to form citizens capable of sustaining a republic.

At Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, we talk a great deal about civic virtue, that self-governance requires something of us beyond showing up every two years and pulling a lever.

It demands an engaged, informed citizenry willing to do the unglamorous work of democratic participation: serving on juries, attending local meetings, and yes, even volunteering to sit on redistricting commissions. 

That kind of participation is not a nice-to-have. It is the architecture of a functioning republic. If universities fail in that greater purpose — either through ideological capture, or by a lack of civics-oriented coursework — we should not be surprised when citizens grow cynical about the systems meant to represent them.

That is why what is happening now troubles me so deeply. When both parties decide that winning matters more than the integrity of the process, they are not just gaming an election, they are teaching citizens that the government is not, in fact, “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln said.

Cynicism is the most corrosive force in a democracy, and gerrymandering manufactures cynicism wholesale. The outcomes in Virginia and California demonstrate this, imperiling one of the only effective bipartisan, citizen-led processes we’ve seen in decades.

There is a path out of this. A federal framework supporting citizens redistricting commissions — genuinely independent ones, to every extent possible — that are insulated from legislative override could serve as a kind of ceasefire in this political arms race.

It would require both parties to give up a weapon they currently enjoy wielding.

The path to this bipartisan solution will have to be led by a bipartisan coalition, which will require the awakening of the dormant reform-minded wings of both parties.

That is precisely why it is the right thing to do.

Pete Peterson is dean of Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and its Braun family dean’s chair. He helped build the case for California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission, established in 2010.

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