Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday praised actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) for an op-ed he penned discussing widespread gerrymandering across the country.
{mosads}Schwarzenegger wrote the piece for The Washington Post last week, saying that gerrymandering is “bad for democracy” and American voters “ought to be outraged over the way it debases free elections and fair results.”
Clinton tweeted support of Schwarzenegger’s message on Monday, saying, “We need to fix” the system.
“[Schwarzenegger] is right: Nearly 60 million Americans live under the rule of a party that didn’t win the majority of their votes. And we need to fix it,” Clinton tweeted.
In the former governor’s op-ed published in The Washington Post last week, Schwarzenegger wrote that having rigged maps “entrenches a party in power” and “pushes our politics to the extremes.”
“It entrenches a party in power, providing a firewall that preserves a majority even when the other side wins more votes,” he wrote. “It pushes our politics to the extremes and leads to policy outcomes that a majority of citizens disagree with but remain powerless to do anything about.”
Schwarzenegger made reference to North Carolina’s districts after a state court overturned the state’s legislative map for disadvantaging Democratic voters.
The former governor also called out Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania for having what he calls minority party rule in one or both state legislative chambers.
The governor responded to Clinton’s retweet, thanking her for sharing but asking commenters to remember the story does not reference the Electoral College.
The Electoral College determines the outcome of the national presidential election, not the popular vote. Clinton won the popular vote over President Trump by nearly 3 million votes in 2016.
The Supreme Court had ruled earlier this year that the U.S. Constitution prohibits challenges to partisan gerrymandering in federal courts. But the North Carolina case is being litigated solely at the state level.
–Updated at 3:48 p.m.