Tit-for-Tat

The official name is "The Election Rigging Response Act."

It’s not the "Fair Representation Act" or "Democracy Protection Measure." It's a clear admission: we're rigging the election—but they rigged it first!!

Next Tuesday, California will ask its voters to suspend the independent redistricting commission they created fifteen years ago and replace neutral maps with partisan gerrymanders designed to counter Texas' latest power grab.

Polling shows it will be close. But the most interesting part is that nobody's pretending anymore.

I've spent the last month watching friends in San Francisco twist themselves into knots over this vote. Smart people who believe in fair elections, who donate to nonprofits, who lecture their friends about democratic norms. Every single one knows gerrymandering corrodes democracy, and most are voting yes anyway.

In game theory, tit-for-tat is elegant. Cooperate until someone defects, then mirror their betrayal exactly. No forgiveness, no escalation. Just cold reciprocity. Tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy in a world full of cheaters.

But tit-for-tat has a fatal flaw: it only works when players believe they'll meet again tomorrow. Remove that assumption, shorten the time horizon, and cooperation collapses. Every interaction becomes a last chance to extract value before the game ends.

It feels as if American democracy has entered that terminal phase. And Prop 50 is what it looks like when voters consciously choose the next round of retaliation.

California is seeking to devour the reform it invented.

In 2008, voters passed Prop 11, creating an independent citizens' commission for redistricting. Two years later, they extended it to congressional maps with 61% support. For over a decade, it worked. Maps got drawn by ordinary citizens (five Democrats, five Republicans, four independents) following strict transparency rules.

Arizona, Michigan, Colorado all adopted California's framework. Independent redistricting became synonymous with California-style reform.

Now California is asking voters to blow it all up.

Governor Newsom literally sent Trump a letter offering to cancel California's maps if other states canceled theirs, admitting that what we're doing is exactly what we condemn Texas for doing.

Nobody's hiding behind principle. This is a naked retaliation.

This game didn't start in California. It started in Texas, in 2003.

Texas had just completed its decennial redistricting. Maps were drawn and districts settled. Then Tom DeLay decided that wasn't good enough. Republicans controlled the state legislature for the first time in 130 years… so why not redraw the maps again? Mid-decade and mid-cycle.

Constitutional scholars called it unprecedented while Democrats called it a coup.

This is the moment cooperation died.

For decades, American redistricting operated like an implicit agreement: you can gerrymander during census years, but that's it. Both parties followed this norm because both expected future power. DeLay broke ranks. And once one player defects, cooperation becomes irrational.

The logic of escalation follows a predictable arc. First defection looks like innovation. Second defection looks like retaliation. By the third round, mutual suspicion becomes the norm. Both sides expect betrayal, which makes preemptive escalation the only rational strategy.

Twenty-two years later, this past summer, Texas did it again. This time, Governor Abbott called a special session to gerrymander five more Republican-safe seats. California's response was immediate: if Texas rewrites the rules, California will too.

This is the third stage: institutionalized retaliation masquerading as a defensive necessity.

Recent polling shows that 70% of Californians say gerrymandering is bad for democracy and should be illegal nationwide. Support for Prop 50 sits at 52%.

That 18-point gap is where principle and survival instinct collide.

Last week, a friend told me she's voting yes. Her logic: "I believe in independent redistricting, but if we don't fight back, Republicans control the House and we don't stand a chance in the midterms."

In other words: "This is wrong, but we have to."

This is the tit-for-tat trap. She understands that unilateral cooperation is futile when the other side keeps defecting. Game theorists would call this rational defection under prisoner's dilemma conditions. Psychologists call it moral injury, or the internal trauma of violating your own values to survive.

I call it what it is: choosing to lose slowly instead of losing fast.

When both sides assume the other will cheat, cooperation becomes impossible. You're not betraying your principles, you're acknowledging that the game has changed. That maintaining fair maps while Texas gerrymanders is like showing up to a knife fight with a strongly worded letter.

Michelle Obama once said "When they go low, we go high".

That was 2016 and it was peak Democratic moral authority. The party that believed in norms, institutions, and taking the high road even when it hurt. The adults in the room who would preserve democratic values while Republicans trashed them.

Eight years later, that sentiment reads like a suicide note.

Prop 50 is Democrats finally admitting what Republican strategists have known for decades: Americans prefer leaders who are strong and wrong over those who are weak but right.

Voters don't reward principle, they reward power. The party that wins isn't the one with better values, it's the one that looks willing to fight.

Democrats spent years believing moral authority mattered. That if they protected institutions while Republicans demolished them, voters would eventually reward the principled behavior. Instead, they watched Republicans gerrymander state after state, pack courts, and ignore norms, all while Democrats kept their hands clean and lost power.

Prop 50 is the formal surrender of that strategy.

California Democrats aren't trying to hide their hypocrisy anymore. They're not wrapping this in procedural language or claiming it's actually principled. They're saying: "We tried playing fair. It failed. Now we're fighting back with the same weapons."

And voters are rewarding them for it. Because fighting back looks strong. Taking the high road looks weak. And weakness in politics is worse than hypocrisy.

It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but moral authority might be a luxury only winners can afford. When you're losing, principle becomes irrelevant. Voters won't credit you for dying nobly, they will just replace you with someone willing to do what it takes to win.

The danger isn't that Democrats are abandoning the high road. The danger is what happens when both parties decide that strength matters more than principle. When "they forced us to" becomes the justification for any tactic. When the only constraint left is power itself.

If Democrats were the last party claiming to care about democratic norms, and they're now explicitly abandoning those norms in pursuit of power, what's left to stop the slide?

Last week I saw competing yard signs on the same block in San Francisco. "Yes on 50: Stop Trump's Power Grab" next to "No on 50: Protect Fair Maps." Both signs were in the same yard; homeowners unable to reconcile the contradiction.

This visual captures everything about the tit-for-tat trap we find ourselves in. These aren't stupid people, they’re just people caught between two incompatible mindsets that used to coexist: fairness and survival.

You can have independent redistricting or you can have Democratic control of the House. Pick one.

The tragedy is that this choice is artificial. California and Texas could both maintain independent commissions. Red and blue states could ban mid-decade redistricting. Congress could pass federal standards.

But those solutions require the one thing we lack: trust.

Once trust has collapsed, cooperation becomes a sucker's play. The time horizon shrinks to the next election cycle. Everyone assumes everyone else will defect, which makes defection the only rational move.

So voters face an impossible question: Am I willing to sacrifice my side's power to preserve a principle the other side abandoned?

I am betting that most will say no.

I've been writing lately about systems under siege. About how infrastructure determines political possibility more than institutions do. About what happens when the rails get built wrong and everyone just keeps running trains on broken track.

Prop 50 is that pattern manifest: we know the track is wrong, we're choosing to lay it anyway, and we're doing it through proper democratic procedure.

We're not just voting on whether to gerrymander five districts, we’re voting on whether democracy's immune system still functions.

The tit-for-tat trap only escapes through one of two paths: players rediscover long time horizons and rebuild trust, or the game ends. American politics shows no sign of the first. Nobody's trying to restore cooperation. Nobody's proposing disarmament. Nobody believes tomorrow's opponent will suddenly start playing fair. Even if they were, nobody would listen.

Which leaves the second option: playing until something breaks permanently.

On Tuesday, California voters will make a choice they know is wrong. Many will do it with clear eyes and full hearts. They'll tell themselves it's temporary… they had no choice… the other side forced them into it.

And they'll be right about everything except the part where this ends.

Because tit-for-tat has no exit strategy. Every retaliation justifies the next. Every defection makes cooperation less likely. Every "temporary" suspension of rules becomes precedent for the next emergency.

The game doesn't end. It just degrades until nobody remembers what cooperation looked like.

We saw it coming. We understood what we were doing. And we voted for it anyway.

Up and to the right.