Matt Margolis writes for PJMedia.com about the latest pronouncement from California’s last Republican governor.
Sometimes the truth doesn’t just contradict the narrative—it obliterates it entirely. When the liberal media sets up a segment to indict the Republican Party over an issue, the last thing they expect is for their guest to flip the script with bipartisan accountability. When Jake Tapper tried to make Republican redistricting the villain in America’s gerrymandering crisis during Sunday’s State of the Union, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t having it. The former California governor delivered a masterclass in bipartisan reality that left CNN’s host scrambling to change topics.
Tapper opened by framing the Texas redistricting debate as Trump “cooking the books” to prevent Democrats from retaking the House in upcoming midterms. He asked whether Schwarzenegger believed “the Republican Party is starting this.”
The Governator’s response was immediate and unequivocal: “No, Jake, there has been gerrymandering going on for 200 years.”
What followed was a data-driven takedown of the narrative that gerrymandering is solely a Republican problem. Schwarzenegger pointed to Massachusetts, where approximately 40% of voters supported Trump, yet the state sends zero Republicans to the House of Representatives. He then cited New Mexico, where 45% voted Republican, but again—zero GOP representatives made it to Congress.
“So there’s gerrymandering, crazy gerrymandering, going on all over the country,” Schwarzenegger explained, noting his own efforts to stop the practice in California. “And we wanted to try to stop it in California, and we did stop it in California and we went around the country.”
The constipated look on Tapper’s face was, of course, classic.
The former governor also dismissed the partisan finger-pointing entirely: “I think this whole thing about finger-pointing and say they did it, so therefore we should [be] doing it, that’s not really the way to go, that one party should outperform the other party. It should be performance.”
