When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”

A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of Orange County’s school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add as many as five Democratic seats to the party’s column in Congress. The outcome of the November 4 referendum could determine whether Democrats have a real shot at winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections.

Advocates and opponents of Prop 50 have already spent more than $200 million on ads starring political luminaries such as Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the “yes” side and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the “no” side. In an era of permanent campaigning, this race has become the closest thing America has to a snap election: At Newsom’s urging, the California legislature placed the initiative on this fall’s ballot in August as a response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, directed by Donald Trump and his allies.

The campaign’s final weeks have turned into a statewide scramble to persuade California voters to temporarily override the independent redistricting commission that they approved less than two decades ago. The Democratic Party’s organizers have found plenty of voters who are eager for the chance to stand against the president and, in Newsom’s words, “fight fire with fire” in the gerrymandering wars. “When you talk to people, it’s not nuanced. Democrats react really well to an anti-Trump message,” Florice Hoffman, the chair of the Democratic Party in Orange County, told me.

Read: How Democrats tied their own hands on redistricting

But organizers have also encountered a worrisome amount of confusion and apathy among Democrats who are not yet sold on matching the GOP’s ruthlessness, Smaaladen told me. “Democrats are a group that loves transparency and equity,” she explained. “And so lining things up in a way that’s nonequitable is difficult.