When Charles T. Munger Jr. began hobnobbing with California\u2019s Republican elites two decades ago, he seemed more a political hobbyist than an aspiring power broker \u2014 a bow-tied scientist spending down a family fortune on the type of joyless procedural cause favored by nonpartisan reformers.<\/p>\n
He dedicated about $14 million to sell Californians on ballot measures to create an independent redistricting commission, which he argued would permanently take the partisan sting out of the state\u2019s politics. Munger then essentially disappeared as a major donor from California politics, his primary task achieved.<\/p>\n
But the threat of partisan gerrymandering is back, and so is Munger. In less than a month, he has spent more than $30 million to defeat Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that would disempower the redistricting commission so that Democrats can impose their favored maps. The 68-year-old Munger today looks a man out of time: a pre-MAGA Republican who may do more than any other American to maintain Donald Trump\u2019s hold on power.<\/p>\n
Munger\u2019s commitment to defending the new status quo has made his motives a focal point of the campaign over Prop 50. He is lambasted by California Democrats across the state for being an \u201canti-choice mega millionaire,\u201d mocked in advertisements as the Jack to Trump\u2019s King in a rigged card game<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cHe wears these attacks like a badge of courage,\u201d said Duf Sundheim, who served as chair of the California Republican Party when Munger first emerged as one of its largest donors. \u201cHe’s good at processing data, he’s good at processing what’s going on \u2026 but I just don’t know how he’s processed all this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n In November, voters will decide which version of Munger they believe \u2014 with the fate of Prop 50 hanging in the balance. Is he truly the quirkily attired avatar for electoral fairness? Or an oligarch perpetuating a world in his image, holding Trump at arm\u2019s length while abetting his schemes to solidify power?<\/p>\n Morality tales<\/p>\n As a child, Munger lived the well-to-do life of a young man blessed by wealth and privilege, attending Los Angeles private schools and taking family ski trips to Sun Valley.<\/p>\n His father, Charles Munger Sr., drew on his success as a real estate attorney and investor to impart wisdom to his children. At the dinner table, the elder Munger would spin his experiences into ethical parables in which a person had to choose between right and wrong. In what Wendy Munger called her father\u2019s \u201cmorality tales,\u201d the just and honest path is chosen, and success ultimately follows. In what she called \u201cdownward spiral tales,\u201d an unethical choice leads to inevitable catastrophe.<\/p>\n While Charles Munger Jr. was studying physics at Stanford University, his father would make a business choice that stood to transform the family for generations. In 1978, Munger Sr. joined Berkshire Hathaway as vice chair, becoming the right-hand man to his longtime business associate Warren Buffett. In the process, the Munger family went from well-off to fabulously wealthy, holding a significant stake in the rapidly increasing value of the multi-national holding company.<\/p>\n As his father became a major figure in American finance, Munger Jr. was mesmerized by the finer points of high-energy particle physics and atomic systems. Attracted to the intellectual energy of the Bay Area, Munger stayed in the region after his graduation from Stanford to earn a doctorate in physics from University of California, Berkeley in 1987. By the early 1990s he was working as a researcher at Stanford\u2019s Linear Accelerators and, between 2003 and 2007, helped the California State Board of Education develop the state\u2019s high school math and science curriculum as part of a special commission.<\/p>\n Politics were of only glancing interest to Munger, a registered Republican who voted regularly but did little with the growing wealth that his father began transferring to his children throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. That changed in 2005, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special election to propose a set of changes he said would fix California\u2019s broken politics by weakening the grip of unions and Democrats.<\/p>\n The physicist was receptive to one particular systems problem that Schwarzenegger identified. Every decade, after the Census updated population counts, Democrats and Republicans in the state Capitol worked together to develop district maps that protected incumbents. It worked \u2014 in 2004, not a single incumbent in California lost their election. In an effort to resolve that failure of competition, Schwarzenegger proposed a measure in 2005, Proposition 77, that would take the mapmaking power from the legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges.<\/p>\n Munger found himself as the protagonist at the start of one his father\u2019s stories \u2014 a man facing an ethical problem that he could either turn away from or help resolve. As a physicist, Munger had few weapons with which to arm himself for a campaign. But he could easily give $100,000 to Schwarzenegger\u2019s campaign to pass Prop 77. So he did.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernor,\u201d Munger said at a 2013 conference at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, as he recalled reading the pamphlet voters received outlining Schwarzenegger\u2019s argument for Prop 77. \u201cIf this is where you want to take my state, you have just got yourself a soldier.\u201d<\/p>\n The measure was rejected by voters, along with the rest of Schwarzenegger\u2019s ballot questions, as voters resisted a proposal that they felt would leave the power to draw political maps in the hands of still untrustworthy sources. But his newest soldier did not walk away from the political arena \u2014 and in redistricting Munger had found his cause. \u201cIt\u2019s really what he cares about,\u201d said Kevin Spillane, a Republican strategist who first met Munger in 2007. \u201cHe\u2019s not spending his money to buy a private island, or get himself a 747. He’s passionate about political reform.\u201d<\/p>\n After striking out on Prop 77, Schwarzenegger returned to the ballot three years later with another attempt to establish independent redistricting for state legislative districts in California. This time, the measure proposed to create a citizen’s redistricting commission, giving the power to draw maps to voters, rather than judges. Munger contributed about $1 million to the effort, his first seven-figure political spend.<\/p>\n It put Munger at the foreground of a coalition that included not just Schwarzenegger and the Republican Party. Venerable good-government groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters highlighted the dysfunction of the California legislature, arguing that “pampered” politicians<\/a> were failing to deliver results to voters.<\/p>\n This time voters bought it, approving Prop 11 by a two-point margin in November 2008. Emboldened by the success \u2014 and what his money could achieve \u2014 Munger dove into the political world.<\/p>\n In 2010, he became the chair and co-author of Prop 20, which aimed to expand the power of the independent mapmaking commission to cover U.S. House districts. This time, Munger helped to direct campaign strategy while spending another $13 million on the successful effort.<\/p>\n Those who encountered Munger during this period quickly realized he wasn\u2019t your average rich guy throwing money around to get his way. Political operatives who worked with him to pass redistricting reforms describe Munger as subdued, quiet and somewhat \u201cquirky.\u201d He approached politics with an engineering mindset, identifying a problem and then working step by step to resolve it.<\/p>\n \u201cHe sweats the details,\u201d said Zabrae Valentine, who worked to pass Prop 11 with Munger and first met him in 2007. \u201cFor big donor types, that\u2019s very unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the course of a half-decade, Munger had become the state\u2019s preeminent good-government philanthropist, and the most avid defender of its merits. He told a Los Angeles Times columnist that he wanted to \u201cuproot the evil\u201d of gerrymandering. He described himself as a \u201credistricting reform zealot.\u201d When Prop 20 was challenged in court, he defended it vociferously.<\/p>\n Soon, he would look to extend his influence.<\/p>\n Republicans on the beach<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, the annual Lincoln Club of Northern California\u2019s retreats to Pebble Beach were gilded affairs marked by fine dining, influential speakers and polite discourse. A home for moderate Republicans espousing limited government and fiscal responsibility, the group would gather at the iconic golf course near Monterey, nibbling hors d’oeuvres as they discussed their vision for the state beneath fog and cypress trees.<\/p>\n It was this version of the Republican Party \u2014 courtly, moderate, pragmatic \u2014 where Munger found his political home. After successfully passing redistricting reforms, he backed another pair of ballot efforts, in 2012 spending nearly $40 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat a measure that would raise taxes on the wealthy and a measure to weaken labor unions.<\/p>\n He then turned his attention to propping up the languid Republican Party in California in hopes that a more robust opposition would prompt better governance in Sacramento. Munger launched his own Spirit of Democracy committee that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect Republicans to the state legislature, favoring female, Latino and moderate candidates.<\/p>\n He also became a player in federal politics. Munger contributed large sums to the PAC of Rep. Kevin McCarthy once he became House minority leader in 2014. At the same time, the maps he helped enshrine \u2014 drawn by professionals charged with working in the public interest rather than either party \u2014 helped to strengthen Republican\u2019s House delegation from California, positioning McCarthy for a subsequent rise to speaker.<\/p>\n Spillane told the Los Angeles Times in 2015<\/a> that Munger had prevented the state party from being \u201cdriven into the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n But in 2017, his major donations stopped. Charlie Munger vanished from California politics.<\/p>\n The case of the missing zillionaire<\/p>\n Until this summer, it seemed Munger would enjoy a quiet retirement from politics, living out his days writing Japanese tanka poetry at his estate on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula.<\/p>\n Then in July, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would embark on a remarkable mid-decade gerrymander of California to combat a similar effort taking place in Texas. At first, few took Newsom\u2019s threats seriously. But Munger did, creating an X account to speak to what was then no more than a few dozen followers.<\/p>\n \u201cAny attempt to undermine the nonpartisan California Redistricting Commission will be strongly opposed in the courts and at the ballot box,\u201d Munger wrote in July<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Newsom proved he was serious about his redistricting plan, Munger emerged from his estate, ready to defend his signature achievement . He quickly assembled a campaign, recruiting consultants and commissioning polls to determine the contours of a No campaign. He reached out to Schwarzenegger, and donated to the League of Women Voters in an ultimately failed effort to reestablish the coalition he had led in 2008 and 2010.<\/p>\n After spending less than $1 million on political causes over the previous decade, Munger has now dropped $30 million into a No campaign that aims to defeat Prop 50.<\/p>\n Even his side\u2019s advertising has an old-fashioned quality: The most widely disseminated spot from the Protect Voters First campaign shows hand-carved and delicately varnished wooden blocks reading FAIR ELECTIONS being pummeled by a kettlebell.<\/p>\n “If we trade away California\u2019s independent redistricting for a partisan power grab, we kill the cure,\u201d Munger wrote in a New York Times op-ed<\/a>. \u201cWe send a dangerous message to the rest of the country that reform is conditional and principles can be abandoned when they are inconvenient. That is how cynicism spreads, trust in government erodes and citizen voices fade.”<\/p>\n Munger\u2019s high-minded language surrounding fairness and government reform has not changed much since 2008. But the political environment has. Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, erstwhile co-combatants in past fights to end gerrymandering, have kept to the sidelines, marginalized by their own internal conflict and incentivized to remain neutral by California\u2019s Democratic power structure.<\/p>\n Munger, in his op-ed, acknowledged the new partisan split of Prop 50, noting that he faced \u201ctwo difficult options\u201d in either allowing California to undo his achievements, or fighting Newsom and risk being labeled \u201ca cat\u2019s paw for Republicans seeking to gain House seats.\u201d<\/p>\n