“Trump said he’s going to steal 5 Congressional seats in Texas and gerrymander his way into a 2026 win. Well, two can play that game.” — Gov. Gavin Newsom, July 15, 2025

Three weeks from now — June 2, 2026 — Californians will sort eight Democrats and two Republicans onto a single primary ballot for governor. Top two finishers go to November. That is the law every voter in that state ratified in 2010 under Proposition 14, and it has been the law since Jerry Brown beat Meg Whitman. Nobody is supposed to be surprised by how it works.

But the math, this time, is ugly for one party. Eight Democrats are splitting the Democratic vote like a Thanksgiving pie. Two Republicans — Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — are not splitting anything. Democratic strategist Paul Mitchell’s modeling puts the probability of a Republican-Republican November runoff at roughly 1 in 4. In a state where Democrats have not lost a statewide race in twenty years, voters could open their mail-in ballots this fall and find no Democrat for governor at all.

Christine Pelosi, daughter of the former Speaker, put it cleanly to CalMatters last month: “If it wasn’t a top two, people wouldn’t care.”

That is the giveaway line. We only care about the rule when the rule is hurting us.

So this is the moment to slow down and ask an honest question — the one we keep ducking on cable news because the cable-news business model can’t afford us to ask it.

At what point do we say to ourselves, enough is enough?

A Detour Through Last Summer

To answer that, you have to back up about nine months.

On July 9, 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the state legislature for a single purpose: redraw the congressional map five years early. Not after a census. Not after a court ruling. Because the President of the United States had told him to. Donald Trump had told reporters his team needed Texas to “pick up five seats” to protect the House majority in the 2026 midterms, and he wanted it done by August.

The Democrats in the Texas House did what Democrats in the Texas House do when they are out of options: they got on a bus to Illinois. Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to find them and arrest them. Senator John Cornyn asked the FBI for help. The first special session collapsed for lack of quorum. Abbott called a second one. The Democrats came back under round-the-clock police monitoring, and on August 22, 2025, Abbott signed a new map that targets five Democratic incumbents and turns the Texas delegation into a 30-8 Republican supermajority.

A federal court in El Paso called it a racial gerrymander and ordered the state to run 2026 under the 2021 map. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Supreme Court in early December, set that ruling aside on procedural grounds. The new map will be used. Five seats, more or less, will move.

If you are a Democrat — or honestly, if you are anyone who has read enough history to know what mid-decade redistricting at the order of the White House signals about the health of a republic — that is a chilling story. The pearls were clutched, and they were clutched correctly.

There is one wrinkle most of the pearl-clutching skipped past. In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 5-4 Supreme Court majority, held that partisan-gerrymandering claims present “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” The opinion conceded the practice was “incompatible with democratic principles.” It just concluded the federal judiciary had no “limited and precise standard” for fixing it. So the federal courts stepped back. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting, said the decision was important “beyond words.” She was right. The Texas map of 2025 — and the California map that came next — were drawn through a door the Supreme Court itself had opened six years earlier. That is the legal context. The grown-ups in the room have already left.

“Trump said he’s going to steal 5 Congressional seats in Texas and gerrymander his way into a 2026 win. Well, two can play that game.” — Gov. Gavin Newsom, July 15, 2025

Two Can Play That Game

That quote is from Newsom’s response. Six days after Abbott called his special session. Not six months. Six days.

On August 18, 2025, SB 280 was introduced in Sacramento. On August 21 — three days later — both chambers of the California legislature passed it with the two-thirds supermajority required to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The Assembly: 57 to 20. The Senate: 30 to 8. Newsom signed it the same day. The text was titled, with no apparent embarrassment, the Election Rigging Response Act.

On November 4, 2025, California voters approved it as Proposition 50 with roughly 65% of the vote. The proposition tore up the maps drawn by California’s independent redistricting commission — a commission California voters had themselves created precisely to take this power away from politicians — and replaced them with maps drawn by the legislature. The new lines are projected to flip five Republican-held seats. The exact number Trump told Abbott to take in Texas.

When the inevitable lawsuit reached a three-judge federal panel in January, the ruling was upheld 2-1. Judge Josephine Staton, an Obama appointee, wrote the majority opinion. The part you do not hear quoted on MSNBC is the cleanest sentence in the opinion:

“The evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats.”

A Democratic-appointed federal judge, in writing, confirming what a Democratic governor said out loud in July: two can play that game.

I am not interested, for the purposes of this piece, in whether Prop 50 was justified — whether Texas’s first move excuses California’s second. That is a real argument and a thoughtful person can land on either side of it. The question I want to put in front of you is different.

Where does this end?

Now The Primary

Before we go further on Proposition 14, it is worth knowing where the top-two primary itself came from, because the rule has a respectable pedigree that gets airbrushed out of the current grievance.

In 2000, in California Democratic Party v. Jones, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 7-2 Supreme Court majority, struck down California’s previous “blanket primary” as a violation of the First Amendment’s freedom-of-association right. A political party, the Court said, has a right not to have non-members select its nominee. But Scalia himself, in a dictum that would shape American election law for a generation, suggested a constitutional alternative: a nonpartisan top-two primary, in which voters were not choosing any party’s nominee at all — the top two finishers simply advanced, regardless of party — would solve the constitutional problem without taking the question away from voters. Washington State accepted the invitation. Voters there enacted Initiative 872 in 2004. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party in 2008, the Supreme Court upheld the system, 7-2, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas.

California followed two years later. Proposition 14 — placed on the ballot by a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a Republican lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado, and opposed by both major political parties — passed in 2010 with 53.7% of the vote. The top-two primary in California is not a left-field experiment. It is the Supreme Court’s own preferred answer to its own ruling.

Six months after the “Election Rigging Response Act” became California law, that same Democratic Party is staring at the math on the governor’s primary and discovering that this set of rules — endorsed by the Supreme Court, approved by California voters, lived with for sixteen years — is about to bite them.

So the conversation in Sacramento has turned. California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks published an open letter the week before the filing deadline asking low-polling Democrats to drop out of the race. (Translation: the rule is fine; the candidates are the problem.) Newsom told CNN he won’t endorse in the primary but will do “everything that needs to be done to make sure there’s not a lockout for a Democratic choice in the general election.” Christine Pelosi — to her credit, more honest than the rest — said the quiet part out loud: if it wa

And the trial balloons are airborne. CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times have both reported, citing operatives, that any push to repeal Prop 14 will come after the June 2 primary, when the political map is clarified and the grievance is concrete. If a Republican-Republican lockout happens, the campaign to repeal the top-two primary writes itself.

The pitch to voters in 2010 was that the top-two primary would force candidates to compete for moderate independents instead of pandering to their bases. The argument was that it would empty the extremes and refill the center. For sixteen years, the Democratic Party in California has lived comfortably with that argument, because for sixteen years it produced Democratic governors. The rule didn’t change. The math changed. And when the math changes, the rule has to go.

The Pattern

This is not the first time we have watched this play. And the terminology is borrowed from somewhere telling. The phrase nuclear option entered American political vocabulary around 2005, when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was contemplating ending filibusters on President Bush’s judicial nominees. The name stuck because the Senate understood, instinctively, what it was contemplating. Cold War strategist Herman Kahn had drawn, four decades earlier, a forty-four-rung “escalation ladder” that traced how a crisis between superpowers could climb from “ostensible crisis” through “limited evacuation” up to war by spasm. Each rung, Kahn wrote, made the next rung easier to take — not harder. The Senate borrowed Kahn’s metaphor, sat with it for a few years, and then borrowed his logic.

On November 21, 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stood up and raised a point of order: the vote on cloture for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court is by majority vote. The Senate ruled against him, and Reid promptly moved to overturn the ruling, and the Democratic majority sustained him 52-48. In one afternoon, the filibuster on lower-court and executive-branch nominations — a sixty-vote rule that had governed the Senate for most of a century — was gone. Reid’s stated motivation: he was tired of Republicans filibustering Obama’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit.

The other party warned him at the time. Mitch McConnell took the floor and said, almost verbatim, you’ll regret this, and you’ll regret this sooner than you think. Reid waved him off.

Sooner than you think turned out to be April 6, 2017. Republican majority. Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch. McConnell raised the same point of order Reid had raised, extended the precedent to the Supreme Court, won the vote 52-48, and confirmed Gorsuch on a simple majority. Then Brett Kavanaugh, also a simple majority. Then Amy Coney Barrett. The Reid precedent did not weaken Republican judicial power. It built the modern conservative Supreme Court.

The Reid rule change of 2013, designed to help one party past a temporary obstacle, produced the most consequential rightward shift on the federal judiciary in fifty years. The rule-changer’s grandchildren paid for the rule change.

That is the pattern.

“You’ll regret this, and you’ll regret this a lot sooner than you think.” — Sen. Mitch McConnell to Sen. Harry Reid, on the Senate floor, November 21, 2013

You see it in 2013. You see it in 2017. You see it in Austin in August 2025. You see it in Sacramento in November 2025. You will see it in Sacramento again, after June 2, 2026, if the gubernatorial math goes sideways for the Democrats.

The instinct is always the same. We are losing under these rules. These rules must be unjust. Change the rules. And every time, the other side notes the precedent, waits its turn, and uses the new rule to do something worse.

Why This Keeps Happening

There is a temptation to chalk this up to one bad senator, one bad governor, one cynical staffer with a polling memo. That is too easy, and it lets the rest of us off the hook.

In Nudge, behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe one of the most reliable findings in modern psychology. They call it loss aversion. The pain of losing something, Thaler argues — the same Thaler who later won a Nobel Prize for this body of work — “makes you twice as miserable as the prospect of gaining the same thing makes you happy.” That is not a political claim. It is a human one. It shows up in stock investors who refuse to sell at a loss. It shows up in marriages. It shows up in a Little League dugout when a kid drops a fly ball.

Now layer politics on top of it. A party that is winning under a procedural rule is psychologically indifferent to it — what Thaler and Sunstein call status quo bias. A party that is losing under the same rule feels every loss at double weight. It does not just want the rule to change. It feels morally obligated to change it. The asymmetry is structural. The winners shrug. The losers organize.

That is why every rule change in the last fifteen years has the same emotional signature: the rule is hurting us, the rule is therefore broken, the rule must go. It is also why the other side — the one currently benefiting — almost never says, you know, that rule is bad, let’s fix it together. Because they are not in pain. They are in possession. Humans, the research is unambiguous, will fight roughly twice as hard to keep something they have as to gain something they don’t.

This is the engine. It is not partisan. It is not American. It is human. The same wiring that makes us throw good money after bad on a losing trade is the wiring that tells a losing party the rules must be the problem. The trick is to know it is happening to you, in real time, and refuse to act on it.

That is harder than it sounds.

Where the Center Goes To Die

Here is the part of the argument I want you to actually carry home, because the news cycle is going to wash everything else away by Tuesday.

A republic does not die because of one bad rule change. It dies because each party gradually convinces its own voters that the rules are the problem. Filibuster. Maps. Primary structure. Electoral College. Court-packing. Voter ID. Mail-in deadlines. National Popular Vote compact. Pick your team and pick your grievance. The list grows.

Each individual change has a real argument behind it. Reid had a point about Republican obstruction. McConnell had a point about Democratic obstruction. Newsom had a point about Texas. Texas had a point about the 2021 California maps. California Democrats will have a point about the top-two primary if Hilton and Bianco end up on the November ballot. The arguments are real.

But the cumulative effect is not the sum of those individual arguments. The cumulative effect is a system in which every rule is provisional, every guardrail is renegotiable the moment one party loses under it, and every voter learns, slowly, that the only durable rule is win the next election and bend the rules your way before they come back for you.

That is how the pendulum gets wider. Not because the activists at the edges get more extreme — they have always been there — but because the good and decent people in the middle of each party keep agreeing to one more “just this once.” The rule that protects me when I am winning is the same rule that constrains me when I am losing. When you remove it, you do not get a better system. You get a system where nobody trusts the rules anymore. And when nobody trusts the rules, the only thing left is who has the votes today.

The center is not a place. The center is a practice — the practice of being bound by rules you would prefer not to be bound by, because the alternative is worse than the rule.

What This Means for You

I am not going to ask you to agree with everything in this piece. I want to ask you to do something smaller and harder.

The next time a politician you support says we have to change the rules, run a single check. Ask yourself: Are we changing the rule because the rule is broken — or are we changing the rule because we are losing under it?

If the rule is broken, change it. Some rules genuinely are. The Electoral Count Act needed fixing after 2021, and a bipartisan Senate fixed it. That is what reform looks like.

But if the answer is we are losing under it, and your politician is selling you a “reform” that just happens to also fix the math for the next election, your gut should knot. Not because your politician is a bad person. Because that move — that exact move — is how the other side will justify their own next move. And theirs after that. And ours after that.

A Senate without a filibuster on judges. A House determined every four years by which legislature blinks first. A primary system that gets rewritten every cycle by whichever party doesn’t like the result. That is not a system. That is a fight.

We are not there yet. We can still be the country that holds itself to the rules when the rules are inconvenient. But that requires the people in the middle — the veterans, the small business owners, the parents at the soccer game, the people who do not get a paycheck for being angry — to start treating rule-stability as a value of its own. To notice when a politician we like is reaching for the lever, and to say, on the record, no. Not this one. Not now. Not by us.

Three weeks from now, Californians will go vote. Then we will all watch the lever start moving on Prop 14. The next test is right there. Watch the people you trust. Watch how they react.

And then ask yourself, honestly:

At what point is enough enough?

❖ ❖ ❖

Sources & Fact-Check Trail

California 2026 gubernatorial primary, top-two structure, candidate field, lockout probability — CalMatters, “California Democrats can’t decide on a governor. Don’t count on Newsom or Pelosi for help” (April 2026); CNN, “Analysis: Why California Democrats are sweating the race to replace Newsom” (April 5, 2026); Ballotpedia, “California gubernatorial election, 2026”; abc10.com, “How California’s top-two primary could reshape the governor’s race”. The ~1-in-4 lockout figure is from Paul Mitchell’s modeling as quoted by CNN. The Christine Pelosi quote — “if it wasn’t a top two, people wouldn’t care” — is per CalMatters.

Newsom’s “two can play that game” remark, July 15, 2025 — verified against Ballotpedia, “California Proposition 50, Use of Legislative Congressional Redistricting Map Amendment (2025)”) and 2025 California Proposition 50, Wikipedia.

Texas 2025 mid-decade redistricting timeline (July 9 special session, August walkout to Illinois, DPS arrest order, August 22-23 signing, El Paso ruling November 18, Supreme Court reinstatement) — Texas Tribune, “Greg Abbott signs new Texas GOP congressional map” (Aug 29, 2025); Texas Tribune, “Federal court blocks new Texas congressional map for 2026” (Nov 18, 2025); Wikipedia, “2025 Texas redistricting”; NPR, “After Texas ruling, Trump and Republicans head to 2026 with a redistricting edge” (Dec 8, 2025); Houston Public Media (Dec 5, 2025).

California Proposition 50 — SB 280 timeline (Aug 18 introduction, Aug 21 supermajority passage in both chambers, Nov 4 voter approval at ~65%, three-judge panel ruling Jan 14 2026 with Staton’s majority opinion) — Wikipedia, “2025 California Proposition 50”; NPR, “In a win for Democrats, court allows California’s redistricting plan to proceed” (Jan 14, 2026); Legislative Analyst’s Office (ca.gov).

California Proposition 14 (2010) origin, Schwarzenegger/Maldonado sponsorship, both-party opposition — Ballotpedia, “California Proposition 14, Top-Two Primaries Amendment (June 2010)”); Wikipedia, “2010 California Proposition 14”.

Senate filibuster “nuclear option” — Reid 52-48 vote of November 21, 2013, removing the filibuster on non-SCOTUS nominations; McConnell 52-48 extension of April 6, 2017, applied to SCOTUS; subsequent Gorsuch / Kavanaugh / Barrett confirmations on simple-majority cloture — Wikipedia, “Nuclear option”; No Labels, “The Nuclear Option Explained: From Reid to McConnell to Thune”; NPR, “Senate Pulls ‘Nuclear’ Trigger To Ease Gorsuch Confirmation” (April 6, 2017); NBC News, “McConnell went ‘nuclear’ to confirm Gorsuch”. The McConnell “you’ll regret this” warning is well-documented in floor remarks on November 21, 2013 (Congressional Record); the phrasing used in this article is the widely-cited paraphrase.

Christine Pelosi blame-the-system quote and Hicks open letter — CalMatters (April 2026); CNN governor analysis as cited above.

Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019) — Chief Justice Roberts for a 5-4 majority; partisan gerrymandering held non-justiciable; Justice Kagan’s dissent (“beyond words”). Supreme Court opinion (PDF); Wikipedia, “Rucho v. Common Cause”; Oyez.

California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567 (2000) — Justice Scalia for a 7-2 majority; struck down California’s blanket primary; Scalia’s dictum suggested the nonpartisan top-two primary as a constitutional alternative. First Amendment Encyclopedia, MTSU; Wikipedia, “California Democratic Party v. Jones”.

Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, 552 U.S. 442 (2008) — Justice Thomas for a 7-2 majority; upheld Washington Initiative 872 (top-two primary). Justia; Wikipedia.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition — loss aversion (“the pain of losing makes you twice as miserable as the prospect of gaining the same thing makes you happy”), status quo bias, endowment effect. Queried via the writing-experts API.

Herman Kahn’s forty-four-rung escalation ladder, including “war by spasm” — Hal Brands, The New Makers of Modern Strategy. Queried via the writing-experts API. Background: Wikipedia, “Escalation ladder” (Kahn’s On Escalation, 1965).

“Nuclear option” terminology — popularized in the Senate during the 2003-2005 fight over President Bush’s judicial nominees, generally attributed to then-Majority Leader Trent Lott. Wikipedia, “Nuclear option”.

About the Author

Michael Komorous is a centrist writer and the host of Voice for Valor, a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of military veterans, first responders, and their families. A combat-rated Air Force officer, Mike served as a nuclear missile operator, C-17 pilot, and MQ-1 Predator pilot before managing rated personnel across the Air National Guard. His policy career spans legislative affairs, defense acquisitions, and geopolitical strategy at OSD Policy, including analysis of the war in Ukraine.

Today Mike builds AI systems and leads Alpha Zulu Solutions, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business focused on defense technology and government contracting. He writes the weekly DoD Industry Advisor newsletter and publishes evidence-based political commentary that challenges both parties from the center. He holds advanced credentials from MIT, Wharton, and the Eisenhower School at National Defense University.

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