By Laura J. Nelson

Charles Munger Jr. didn't like what he was hearing this summer.

President Trump was pressuring Texas Republicans to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to help the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections. California Gov. Gavin Newsom began musing that his state should strike back with a gerrymandered map of its own.

For two decades, Munger, son of the late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, had thrown himself -- and millions of dollars -- into wresting California's redistricting process out of the hands of politicians. The wonky Republican physicist fretted that the brewing fight would explode into a national gerrymandering arms race.

Munger told people close to him that he had inherited a fortune from his father and would use every penny he could to defeat the re-gerrymandering of California.

That vow set Munger, 68 years old, down an expensive and lonely path, as one of the few people taking a public stand against the gerrymandering measure. Munger declined to comment.

California voters on Tuesday will decide whether to abandon 15 years of nonpartisan redistricting and to again allow politicians to draw the lines. The map on the ballot would flip as many as five seats blue, further isolating the Republican delegation.

Polling by two nonpartisan groups last week found the measure, which needs a majority to pass, was likely to succeed.

Newsom and other supporters of Proposition 50 have argued that the only way to defeat Trump is to "fight fire with fire." They have reached angry Democrats with a $120 million war chest built by donors such as investor George Soros, Netflix Chairman Reed Hastings and venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

Fundraising to oppose the measure has slowed to a trickle. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has become the anti-gerrymandering campaign's celebrity spokesman, but Munger, who has spent nearly $33 million, is the only major individual donor. His argument: Two wrongs don't make a right.

"Somebody has to just bang their money down and say, 'I am willing to do what is necessary, to elevate the voices in opposition to this so they can be heard and not drowned out,'" Munger said during a press conference last month that was recorded. "It's a form of public service."

Getting political

Munger grew up in Los Angeles as one of eight children. His dad, a successful lawyer, joined Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway while Munger was studying physics at Stanford.

The younger Munger got a doctorate in physics at University of California, Berkeley, married and settled in Palo Alto. His foray into politics came much later, when a multimillionaire former tech executive launched a campaign for a California State Assembly seat in Silicon Valley in 2003.

Munger recalled last month during the press call with reporters that he showed up at campaign headquarters and was put to work stuffing envelopes. He progressed to knocking on doors and making his first campaign contribution, of $3,200, to the Republican candidate, who lost to a little-known Democrat.

In the week after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Democrats and Republicans in Sacramento had quietly reached an agreement on electoral districts that was designed to preserve the balance of power between the two parties for the next decade.

Munger said he realized that he had to fight to change that system for "the ordinary person who wants to make a government work for them, who finds out that it's hopeless from the beginning because some hack in Sacramento decreed it should be."

When Schwarzenegger put nonpartisan redistricting on the ballot in 2005, Munger wrote a $100,000 check. Voters rejected it.

A coalition that included Munger tried again in 2008. He brought about $1 million to the campaign and a scientific eagerness to interrogate ideas from every angle, long after most people would have stopped. He became known for his detailed inquiries, sent from an AOL email address, and his signature bow ties, which he sometimes carried in a little case.

Munger has embraced some of the guiding principles of his father, who once said that people should work to "deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end."

Zabrae Valentine, who helped draft the 2008 measure, remembered getting an email from Munger and typing out a multipage response. Someone told her: "Oh, my God, he's never going to read all that." Instead, she said, Munger "responded with glee, and we were off to the races."

Changing how electoral districts are drawn means wresting power away from those who wield it. Both Democrats and Republicans fought the change, because they were afraid that if they didn't make the rules, they would lose seats, said Duf Sundheim, who was chairman of the state Republican Party in the mid-2000s.

"That bugged Charles," he said. "He was a true-blue Republican, but he was just as upset at the games the Republicans were playing as the Democrats."

The measure passed. Two years later, Munger spent more than $12 million on more overhauls and won by wider margins. Voters extended nonpartisan redistricting to Congress and stripped party affiliation from primary elections, forcing every candidate to duke it out for two spots on the November ballot.

Losing battles

The next election cycle, Munger broke his winning streak. He spent nearly $40 million on two unsuccessful efforts, one aimed at defeating a measure that raised taxes on the wealthy and one that supported weakening the political power of California's labor unions.

Munger became a fixture at the Lincoln Club of Northern California, a gentile collection of old-school Republicans who gathered annually at a five-star hotel at the famous Pebble Beach golf course.

He also waded into an internecine battle over the identity of the state Republican Party, pulled right by the Tea Party and to the center by Schwarzenegger, who warned that the party was "dying at the box office" because of its conservative positions.

Munger spent millions to back moderate candidates, including those willing to take steps that were anathema to conservatives, including raising taxes and compromising with the Democrats who controlled Sacramento.

In the official ballot arguments for Prop 50, supporters of the measure describe Munger as an "anti-choice mega-millionaire," referencing contributions he made through his charitable foundation to conservative religious groups and crisis pregnancy centers. (Munger said during the press conference that he is "pro-choice" but no one ever asked.)

He told reporters he also worked to eliminate "every single antigay plank" in the state Republican Party platform, "including a particularly disgraceful one which at the time opposed gay child custody and gay adoption -- I kiddest thou not." He recalled that at the next party convention after the vote, members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group for gay conservatives, showed up wearing bow ties in a silent show of thanks.

Conservative Republicans remember Munger's stamp on the party differently: that his moderate views and insistence on compromise helped drive the party further into the minority.

"He wanted malleable people who felt that everything was up for negotiation," said Jon Fleischman, a Republican strategist and former state party official who disagrees with Munger's approach.

Munger watched closely as redistricting took shape in California, appearing at some public meetings with multipage handouts, neatly typed. He also helped defend the practice in other states, paying several hundred-thousand dollars for an amicus brief when Arizona's nonpartisan redistricting was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Around 2017, Munger's political spending slowed to a trickle, and he declined to get involved in more recent campaigns, Valentine said. But the reopening of the debate over gerrymandering "brought him back," she said.

This time, though, Munger is doing it without many of his longtime allies that helped pass California's first electoral overhauls.

After California votes, Munger told reporters, he would be happy to tackle nonpartisan redistricting across the U.S. "If anybody wants my help, they should call me," he said.

Write to laura.nelson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 01, 2025 19:30 ET (23:30 GMT)

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