If anyone has a reason to oppose gerrymandering, it’s U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa. For the past 12 years, LaMalfa, a Republican, has represented California’s first congressional district, a sprawling, mostly rural expanse in the northeast corner of the state. But thanks to Proposition 50—California’s counter to Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas—LaMalfa’s home will soon lie in a new district that reaches from the Nevada border all the way to the affluent wine country of Sonoma, near the Pacific Ocean. Another successor district will connect the remote Oregon-California-Nevada vertex to the suburbs of San Francisco, an eight-hour drive away. It will be shaped almost exactly like the 19th-century political cartoon that coined the term Gerry-Mander.

LaMalfa can still run for Con

See Full Page