The national redistricting battle enters its next phase Thursday as California Democrats are scheduled to pass a new congressional map that creates five winnable seats for their party, a direct counter to the Texas House’s approval of a new map to create more conservative-leaning seats in that state.
Watch the California Senate meet in the player above.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has engineered the high-risk strategy in response to President Donald Trump’s own brinkmanship. Trump pushed Texas Republicans to reopen the legislative maps they passed in 2021 to squeeze out up to five new GOP seats to help the party stave off a midterm defeat.
Unlike in Texas, where passage by the Republican-controlled state Senate and signature by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott are now all that’s needed to make the maps official, California faces a more uncertain route. Democrats must use their legislative supermajority to pass the map by a two-third margin. Then they must schedule a special election in November for voters to approve the map that Newsom must sign by Friday to meet ballot deadlines.
The added complexity is because California has a voter-approved independent commission that Newsom himself backed before Trump’s latest redistricting maneuver. Only the state’s voters can override the map that commission approved in 2021. But Newsom said extraordinary steps are required to counter Texas and other Republican-led states that Trump is pushing to revise maps.
“This is a new Democratic Party, this is a new day, this is new energy out there all across this country,” Newsom said Wednesday on a call with reporters. “And we’re going to fight fire with fire.”
Texas Democratic lawmakers, vastly outnumbered in that state’s legislature, delayed approval of the new map by 15 days by fleeing Texas earlier this month in protest. They were assigned round-the-clock police monitoring upon their return to ensure they attended Wednesday’s session.
That session ended with an 88-52 party-line vote approving the map after more than eight hours of debate. Democrats have also vowed to challenge the new Texas map in court and complained that Republicans made the political power move before passing legislation responding to deadly floods that swept the state last month.
A battle for the US House control waged via redistricting
In a sign of Democrats’ stiffening redistricting resolve, former President Barack Obama on Tuesday night backed Newsom’s bid to redraw the California map, saying it was a necessary step to stave off the GOP’s Texas move.
“I think that approach is a smart, measured approach,” Obama said during a fundraiser for the Democratic Party’s main redistricting arm.
The incumbent president’s party usually loses congressional seats in the midterm election. On a national level, the partisan makeup of existing districts puts Democrats within three seats of a majority.
Trump is going beyond Texas in his push to remake the map. He’s pushed Republican leaders in conservative states like Indiana and Missouri to also try to create new Republican seats. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps as well.
However, more Democratic-run states have commission systems like California’s or other redistricting limits than Republican ones do, leaving the GOP with a freer hand to swiftly redraw maps. New York, for example, can’t draw new maps until 2028, and even then, only with voter approval.
