congressional

Gov. Gavin Newsom spearheaded a bold overhaul of California’s congressional map, a move that could dramatically shift the state’s political landscape.

A Times analysis of recent election results found the redistricting effort, which will go to voters on Nov. 4 as Proposition 50, could turn 41 Democratic-leaning congressional districts into 47. Democrats currently hold 215 seats in the House, while Republicans control 220. If California voters approve the new map, the shift could be enough to threaten the GOP’s narrow majority.

Newsom’s plan was pushed by state and national Democratic leaders, following a move by Texas to approve its own maps that could give the GOP five more House seats. There’s also a push by the Republican-led states to redraw their lines before the 2026 midterm elections to help the Republicans remain in control. The governor’s plan was approved by the state Legislature last week and now goes to the voters in a November special election. This week California Republicans filed a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court to block the ballot measure.

To get a sense of how the proposed maps might alter the balance of power in Congress, The Times used results from the 2024 presidential election to calculate the margin of victory between Democrats and Republicans in the redrawn districts.

In some cases, districts were split apart and stitched together with more liberal areas. In one area, lines have been redrawn with no overlap at all with their current boundary. As a result, four formerly Republican-leaning swing districts would tilt slightly Democratic, while two others would shift more heavily toward the left. Four out of the five remaining Republican strongholds would become even darker red under the proposed map.

1st District: Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale)

In its current form, California’s 1st Congressional District sweeps south from the Oregon border almost to Sacramento. For the last 12 years, it has been represented by Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who won reelection last November with nearly two-thirds of the vote.

But under the proposed map, that district is split in two. The new 1st District would run inland from Santa Rosa through Chico to the Nevada border. The redrawn 2nd District would follow the north coast from Marin County and the border with Oregon. It would also include deep red Shasta County.

The Times analysis found the proposed 1st District experienced the largest Democratic shift, among all the districts that flipped from red to blue, moving from a 25-point advantage for Trump to a 12-point advantage for Harris. That gain was made possible in part by pulling in more Democratic-leaning areas from the 2nd District, making it slightly less blue.

3rd District: Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin)

Rep. Kevin Kiley has represented the 3rd District since 2022. But he would face an uphill battle to keep the seat on the redistricted map. The new lines lop off the conservative-leaning Eastern Sierra and instead pulls in Democratic voters from Sacramento.

In the 2024 presidential election, the current 3rd District backed Trump by 4 points. Under Newsom’s proposed map, that same area would have gone for Harris by 10 points, creating a 14-point swing that transforms the district from purple to solidly blue.

Kiley, whose district is targeted for elimination under Newsom’s plan, has called for a ban on all mid-decade congressional redistricting. The 3rd District’s boundaries are significantly reduced in the new map, and shifting demographics, including growth in the Asian American population, could further tilt the seat away from Republicans.

41st District: Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona)

Rep. Ken Calvert’s 41st District, long centered in the competitive western Inland Empire, would be eliminated and completely redrawn in Los Angeles County. The district would transform from a swinging GOP-leaning seat into one where Democrats would hold a 14-point advantage.

Parts of the new 41st would be carved out of the current 38th District, represented by Democrat Linda Sánchez. That change shifts some of Sánchez’s Democratic base into the new 41st district, making it more favorable to Democrats while leaving the 38th slightly less blue.

At the same time, the Hispanic share of the population would rise, further bolstering the Democrat‘s strength in the proposed district. The new 41st seat would become a majority-minority district. The redistricting proposal includes 16 majority-minority districts; the same number as the current map except for swapping the 41st District for the 42nd.

A section of the current 41st district would be added to Rep. Young Kim’s 40th District. The reshaped 40th District would move 9.7 points to the right — the biggest rightward shift among Republican-held districts.

48th District: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall)

The 48th District, a Republican stronghold represented by Darrell Issa, carried a 15-point GOP margin of victory under the current map. But the proposed lines would shift voters into San Diego County, giving Democrats a new edge. The district’s demographics would also change, with a larger share of Hispanic voters. As a result, what had been a safe Republican seat would become a swing district, where Democrats would hold a narrow 3-point advantage. The proposed 48th District includes Palm Springs, a liberal patch that was previously in the 41st District.

Deepening blue

Beyond flipping Republican-leaning swing districts, another aim of the redistricting plan is to shore up vulnerable Democratic seats. Democrats have long fought to hold onto these coastal Orange County seats, eking out narrow wins. Rep. Derek Tran of Cypress unseated a Republican incumbent by just about 650 votes, while Rep. Dave Min of Costa Mesa survived last November with a margin of less than 3 percentage points. Asians are the largest minority currently in Districts 45 and 47.

Under the current map, Harris carried the 45th District by only 1.5 points and the 47th by 4 points. But in Newsom’s proposed map, those advantages widen to 4 and 10 points, respectively, transforming fragile footholds into far safer Democratic turf.

The new changes dilute the number of GOP voters in both Rep. David Valadao’s District 22 and Rep. Adam Gray’s District 13.

— Additional development by data and graphics assistant editor Sean Greene.

Aug. 23 (UPI) — The Texas State Senate has now passed a bill approving new congressional redistricting maps, aimed at giving Republicans more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” Gov Greg Abbott, R-Texas, said in a statement Saturday morning after Bill HB4 was passed in an overnight session.

Texas state House Republicans passed an identical bill Wednesday, despite continued vocal pushback from Democrats who call the move supported by President Donald Trump a power grab. Several times the House failed to reach a quorum because Democrats fled to other states.

“I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise,” Abbott said in the statement, calling the legislation “a bill that ensures our maps reflect Texans’ voting preferences.”

The new maps are expected to give the state an extra five Republican seats in the U.S. House in time for the 2026 mid-term elections. The Republicans currently hold a 219-212 advantage with vacancies from the deaths of three Democrats and one GOP member who resigned.

Currently, Texas has 38 congressional districts, 25 of which are controlled by Republicans.

Lawmakers have said they will challenge the move in court.

Congressional maps are traditionally redrawn every decade in conjunction with a new U.S. Census, which is next scheduled to take place in 2030.

Democrats have fought to keep Texas from passing the legislation to bring in new maps. A contingent of state lawmakers left Texas in an attempt to block the bills from passing by making the governing bodies unable to reach quorum, drawing the ire of Abbott and Trump.

“This is not democracy, this is disgraceful,” Democratic State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt said on X after the bill was passed during the overnight legislative session.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is leading a push from Democrats to counteract the Texas move.

Newsom has said his state will respond by redrawing its own congressional maps that would create more seats in the House for Democrats.

“Republicans are determined to rig every rule they can, to break laws, in order to seize power. As Democrats, we have a responsibility to fight back and fight back hard, and that’s what I love about what California is doing,” Newsom said on X earlier in the week.

This week, the California state Assembly and Senate introduced three bills that would allow it to consider holding a special election needed to pass a constitutional amendment. That amendment would allow it to replace existing congregational maps through 2030.

Governor Greg Abbott is expected to quickly sign it into law, though Democrats have vowed to challenge it in court.

The Texas Senate has given final approval to a new Republican-leaning congressional voting map, sending it to Governor Greg Abbott for his signature.

The state senate voted along party lines to pass the map 18-11 shortly after midnight on Saturday, following more than eight hours of heated debate.

President Donald Trump has pushed for the map to help the GOP maintain its slim majority in Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. It has five new districts that would favour Republicans.

Abbott, a Republican, is expected to quickly sign it into law, though Democrats have promised to challenge it in court.

The effort by Trump and Texas’s Republican-majority legislature prompted state Democrats to hold a two-week walkout and kicked off a wave of redistricting efforts across the country.

The weeks-long showdown has roiled the Texas Legislature. Much of the drama unfolded in the House, where the map ultimately passed on Wednesday.

The showdown has also inflamed a broader, state-by-state redistricting battle, with governors from both parties pledging to redraw congressional maps.

California Democrats approved legislation on Thursday calling for a special election in November for residents to vote on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year. Governor Gavin Newsom quickly signed it.

California’s map needs voter approval because, unlike in Texas, a nonpartisan commission normally draws the map to avoid the sort of political battle that is playing out.

On Friday, Abbott called California’s redistricting “a joke” and asserted that Texas’s new map is constitutional but California’s would be overturned.

Trump wants more states to revise maps

On a national level, the partisan makeup of existing districts puts Democrats within three seats of a majority. The incumbent president’s party usually loses seats in the midterms.

The Texas redraw is already reshaping the 2026 race, with Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett, the dean of the state’s congressional delegation, announcing on Thursday that he will not seek re-election to his Austin-based seat if the new map takes effect.

Under the proposed map, Doggett’s district would overlap with that of another Democratic incumbent, Republican Greg Casar.

Trump has pushed other Republican-controlled states, including Indiana and Missouri, to also revise their maps to add more winnable GOP seats.

Ohio Republicans were also already scheduled to revise their maps to make them more partisan.

Redistricting typically occurs once a decade, immediately after a census. While some states have their own limitations, there is no national impediment to a state trying to redraw districts in the middle of the decade.

The US Supreme Court has said the Constitution does not outlaw partisan gerrymandering, only using race to redraw district lines.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to redraw California’s congressional maps plays out at the state Capitol and on the national stage, a quieter but no less bloody scramble is simultaneously underway.

Newsom’s plan — a bid to counter President Trump’s drive for more GOP House seats with his own California show of force — still needs to be approved by the state Legislature before voters decide its fate in November.

But behind the scenes, consultants, lawmakers and would-be candidates already are jockeying for position in the newly competitive or vastly redrawn districts that may soon exist across the state.

As rumblings emerged that there probably would be a new southeast Los Angeles County congressional seat — later confirmed by the official maps released last week — political watchers braced for a full-on feeding frenzy. A fresh seat in a safe Democratic district can be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, particularly in a region crowded with ambitious politicians.

But a race that doesn’t even officially exist yet seems to already be practically tied up with a bow.

L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis hasn’t publicly announced her candidacy. But she’s made her intention to run for the redrawn 38th district clear within the close-knit world of California politics. And other would-be candidates appear to be staying out of the veteran politician’s way.

In the brass-knuckles world of southeast L.A. County politics, Solis, 67, has long been a starring player.

She previously served in Congress and the statehouse before becoming one of the five “little queens” holding the reins of the county kingdom.

Her desire for the new seat and her ability to claw back potential competition are widely known, according to conversations with more than a dozen political operatives and current and former lawmakers, most of whom asked for anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive topic. Through a consultant, Solis did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Solis was telling California lawmakers and other civic leaders that she was planning to run and was seeking endorsements, even before the maps were finalized.

At least one California lawmaker noted that Solis referred to the district as “my seat” when asking for backing — a reference to the seat she once held, even though the new district doesn’t yet exist.

Some have bristled at the alacrity with which Solis has appeared to consolidate support. The frustration is sharpened at a time when aging politicians in Washington have become a political flashpoint and Democratic leaders have been criticized for sidelining younger talent.

“It kind of looks like Hilda Solis has completely sewn up that seat in one night of making phone calls. And the excitement of a brand new seat was quickly extinguished,” one Southern California Democratic political consultant said.

Several of the consultant’s clients have already agreed to endorse Solis, they added.

“Unless Cesar Chavez himself is running out there, Hilda Solis will get our support,” a leader of one politically influential union said, name-checking the late labor trailblazer.

Solis was reelected to a third and final term on the powerful county Board of Supervisors in 2022, representing a district that sprawls from downtown and northeast Los Angeles to Pomona. She has been a leader on environmental justice and immigrant issues and made history early in her career as the first Latina in the state Senate.

Congress would be a homecoming of sorts for her — she was elected to the House in 2000 and served several terms before stepping down for a role as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor in 2009.

Under the proposed maps, Democrats could pick up five seats now held by Republicans while bolstering vulnerable Democratic Reps. Adam Gray, Josh Harder, George Whitesides, Derek Tran and Dave Min. To make those changes work, the maps vastly alter other districts around the state while creating an additional district in L.A. County.

A wide swath of what is now the 38th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Whittier), would be divided into two neighboring southeast L.A. County districts.

Because members of Congress do not have to live in the district they represent, and because the proposed 38th and 41st districts both include a large chunk of Sánchez’s current district, it was initially unclear which would lack an incumbent and be seen as the “new” district.

But should the maps pass, Sánchez is likely planning to run in the 41st district, according to a source close to her.

During the state’s last redistricting process — when California lost a congressional seat for the first time due to dwindling population — the Southeast L.A. County seat held by Lucille Roybal-Allard, the first Mexican American woman elected to Congress, was eliminated.

Both of the proposed new districts contain portions of Roybal-Allard’s old district — which had the most Latino voters of any district in the country, according to the 2010 census.

“The L.A. delegation gets one more member of Congress when this is all over, and that member will be elected by the Latino community,” said Paul Mitchell, the political data expert tapped by Newsom to draw the new lines.

The proposed 38th District, where Solis is planning to run, would include a swath of southeast L.A. County, including some or all of cities such as Bell, Montebello and Pico Rivera, as well as El Monte, City of Industry and Hacienda Heights, stretching east to Diamond Bar before dipping south to encompass the Orange County city of Yorba Linda.

The proposed new 41st District, where Sánchez is expected to run for reelection, would include some or all of Downey, Whittier and Lakewood, as well as La Habra and Brea in Orange County. (The “old” 41st District, represented by GOP Rep. Ken Calvert, is located entirely in Riverside County, stretching from Corona to Palm Springs.)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom poses for a photo with Los Angeles area Democratic lawmakers Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, center, and her sister Sen. Susan Rubio, right, after his State of the State address in 2020.

(Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

There initially had been talk that one of the politically ambitious Rubios of Baldwin Park, who became the first sisters to serve together in the state Legislature, might be interested in the 38th.

But Susan Rubio failed to make it past the primary in a House bid last year, and her Senate seat is up for reelection in 2026, making her less likely to forgo a relatively easy path back to Sacramento for a far riskier congressional contest. A spokesperson said Rubio has not expressed interest in the seat.

Blanca Rubio said through a spokesperson Tuesday that she is solely focused on her Assembly district.

Solis’ position as a powerful county supervisor, along with her years of name recognition, would give her a strong advantage in drumming up money and endorsements.

Still, should the new maps pass, it’s unlikely that she would go entirely unchallenged. Even as some appear ready to anoint her, others are ready for a generational change.

Former state Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo of Boyle Heights cited Democratic leaders such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Greg Casar of Texas, all of whom are under 40.

“The area includes a lot of smaller cities with a lot of dynamic leaders and is obviously representative of a very diverse community,” Carrillo said of Southeast L.A. County. “The Democratic Party has an opportunity to elect a new generation of leaders that can inspire the voter base and can inspire the future of the Democratic Party.”

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

Vote was held after Democrats returned from two-week walkout to block passage.

Texas legislators have passed a new state congressional map drawn at the behest of United States President Donald Trump to flip five Democratic-held US House seats in next year’s midterm elections, after dozens of Democratic lawmakers ended a two-week walkout that had temporarily blocked passage.

On Wednesday evening, legislators in the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives gave initial approval to the map, though Democratic lawmakers noted during the session that the map was not made available during public hearings.

Texas Democrats on Wednesday raised multiple objections to and questions about the measure.

Representative John Bucy, a Democrat, said from the House floor before passage of the bill that the new maps were clearly intended to dilute the voting power of Black, Latino and Asian voters, and that his Republican colleagues’ bending to the will of Trump was deeply worrying.

“This is not democracy, this is authoritarianism in real time,” Bucy said. “This is Donald Trump’s map. It clearly and deliberately manufactures five more Republican seats in Congress because Trump himself knows the voters are rejecting his agenda.”

Republicans argued the map was created to improve political performance and would increase majority-Hispanic districts.

The approval by the Texas House of Representatives came at the urging of President Trump, who pushed for the extraordinary mid-decade revision of congressional maps to give his party a better chance at holding on to the US House of Representatives in next year’s election. The maps need to be approved by the state Senate and signed by Governor Greg Abbott before they become official.

Texas state legislative Democrats delayed the vote by two weeks by fleeing the state earlier this month in protest, and were assigned round-the-clock police monitoring upon their return to ensure they attended Wednesday’s session.

The walkout ended when Democrats voluntarily returned on Monday, saying they had accomplished their goals of blocking a vote during a first special legislative session and persuading Democrats in other states to take retaliatory steps.

The approval of the Texas maps is likely to prompt California’s Democratic-controlled state Legislature to approve its own new House map aimed at creating five Democratic-leaning districts. Unlike in Texas, the California map would require approval by voters in November before it becomes official.

The California Legislature is scheduled to vote Thursday morning on three measures – to establish new congressional districts, authorise the redrawn map to replace the existing one and declare a November special election to seek voters’ approval.

Democrats have also pledged to sue to challenge the new Texas map and complained that Republicans made the political power move before passing legislation responding to deadly floods that swept the state last month.

Other Republican states – including Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Missouri – are moving forward with or considering their own redistricting efforts, as are Democratic states such as Maryland and Illinois.

Nationally, Republicans captured the 435-seat US House in 2024 by only three seats. The party of the president historically loses House seats in the first midterm election, and Trump’s approval ratings have sagged since he took office in January.

Former President Obama endorsed California Democrats’ plans to redraw congressional districts if Texas or another Republican-led state does so to increase the GOP’s chances of maintaining control of Congress after next year’s midterm election.

Obama said that while he opposes partisan gerrymandering, Republicans in Texas acting at President Trump’s behest have forced Democrats’ hand.

If Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy,” he said at a fundraiser Tuesday in Martha’s Vineyard that was first reported by the Associated Press on Wednesday.

“I wanted just a fair fight between Republicans and Democrats based on who’s got better ideas, and take it to the voters and see what happens,” Obama said, “… but we cannot unilaterally allow one of the two major parties to rig the game. And California is one of the states that has the capacity to offset a large state like Texas.”

Redistricting typically only occurs once a decade, after the census, to account for population shifts. In 2010, Californians voted to create an independent redistricting commission to end partisan gerrymandering. California’s 52 congressional districts were last redrawn in 2021.

Earlier this summer, Trump urged Texas leaders to redraw its congressional boundaries to increase the number of Republicans in Congress. Led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California Democrats responded and proposed redrawing the state’s district lines and putting the matter before voters in a special election in November.

The issue came to a head this week, with Texas lawmakers expected to vote on their new districts on Wednesday, and California legislators expected to vote on Thursday to call the special election.

Obama called Newsom’s approach “responsible,” because the matter will ultimately be decided by voters, and if approved, would only go into effect if Texas or another state embarks on a mid-decade redistricting, and line-drawing would revert to the independent commission after the 2030 census.

“I think that approach is a smart, measured approach, designed to address a very particular problem in a very particular moment in time,” Obama said.

SACRAMENTO — California Democrats on Monday kicked off the process to redraw the state’s congressional districts, an extraordinary action they said was necessary to neutralize efforts by President Trump and Texas Republicans to increase the number of GOP lawmakers in Congress.

If approved by state lawmakers this week, Californians will vote on the ballot measure, labeled Proposition 50, in a special election in November.

At a news conference unveiling the legislation, Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) said they agreed with Gov. Gavin Newsom that California must respond to Trump’s efforts to “rig” the 2026 midterms by working to reduced by half the number of Republicans in the state’s 52-member congressional delegation.

They said doing so is essential to stymieing the president’s far-right agenda.

“I want to make one thing very clear, I’m not happy to be here. We didn’t choose this fight. We don’t want this fight,” said Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park). “But with our democracy on the line, we cannot run away from this fight, and when the dust settles on election day, we will win.”

Republicans accused Democrats of trying to subvert the will of the voters, who passed independent redistricting 15 years ago, for their own partisan goals.

“The citizens seized back control of the power from the politicians in 2010,” said Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), flanked by GOP legislators and signs in the Capitol rotunda that said, “Rigged map” and “Defend fair elections.”

“Let me be very clear,” DeMaio said. “Gavin Newsom and other politicians have been lying in wait, with emphasis on lying … to seize back control.”

After Trump urged Texas to redraw its congressional districts to add five new GOP members to Congress, Newsom and California Democrats began calling to temporarily reconfigure the current congressional district boundaries, which were drawn by the voter-approved independent redistricting commission in 2021.

Other states are also now considering redrawing their congressional districts, escalating the political battle over control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressional districts are typically reconfigured once every decade after the U.S. census.

Newsom, other Democratic lawmakers and labor leaders launched a campaign supporting the redrawing of California’s congressional districts on Thursday, and proposed maps were sent to state legislative leaders on Friday.

The measures that lawmakers will take up this week would:

• Give Californians the power to amend the state Constitution and approve new maps, drawn by Democrats, that would be in place for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 congressional elections, if any GOP-led states approve their own maps.
• Provide funding for the November special election.
• Return the state to a voter-approved independent redistricting commission to redraw congressional districts after the 2030 census.

Whereas Texas and several other GOP-led states are considering an unusual mid-decade redistricting to keep the Republican Party’s hold on Congress, Ohio is an anomaly. If its congressional districts are not approved on a bipartisan basis, they are valid for only two general elections and can then be redrawn.

McGuire said California would go forward if Ohio does.

“The state of Ohio has made it clear that they are wanting to be able to proceed. They’re one of the few states in the United States of America that actually allow for … mid-decade redistricting,” he said. “We firmly believe that they should cool it, pull back, because if they do, so will California.”

Republicans responded by calling for a federal investigation into the California Democratic redistricting plan, and vowed to file multiple lawsuits in state and federal court, including two this week.

“We’re going to litigate this every step of the way, but we believe that this will also be rejected at the ballot box, in the court of public opinion,” DeMaio said.

He also called for a 10-year ban on holding elected office for state legislators who vote in support of calling the special election, although he did not say how he would try to do that.

McGuire dismissed the criticism and threats of legal action, saying the Republicans were more concerned about political self-preservation than the will of California voters or the rule of law.

“California Republicans are now clutching their pearls because of self-interest. Not one California Republican spoke up in the Legislature, in the House, when Texas made the decision to be able to eliminate five historically Black and brown congressional districts. Not one,” he said. “What I would say: Spend more time on the problem. The problem is Donald Trump.”

The redistricting plan taking shape in Sacramento and likely headed toward voters in November could shift the Golden State’s political landscape for at least six years and determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.

Maps made public Friday afternoon show how California Democrats hope to reconfigure the state’s 52 congressional districts. The plan targets five of California’s nine Republican members of Congress, and is designed to counteract the redistricting efforts in Texas that would favor Republicans.

The state Legislature is expected to place the new map and a constitutional amendment to override the state’s independent redistricting process on a Nov. 4 special election ballot.

Enter your address below or select somewhere on the current map to see how the districts could change.

Sean Greene and Hailey Wang contributed to this report.

A decade and a half after California voters stripped lawmakers of the ability to draw the boundaries of congressional districts, Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democrats are pushing to take that partisan power back.

The redistricting plan taking shape in Sacramento and headed toward voters in November could shift the Golden State’s political landscape for at least six years, if not longer, and sway which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections — which will be pivotal to the fate of President Trump’s political agenda.

What Golden State voters choose to do will reverberate nationwide, killing some political careers and launching others, provoking other states to reconfigure their own congressional districts and boosting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s profile as a top Trump nemesis and leader of the nation’s Democratic resistance.

The new maps, drawn by Democratic strategists and lawmakers behind closed doors, were expected to be submitted to legislative leaders by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and widely leaked on Friday. They are expected to appear on a Nov. 4 special election ballot, along with a constitutional amendment that would override the state’s voter-approved, independent redistricting commission.

The changes would ripple across hundreds of miles of California, from the forests near the Oregon state line through the deserts of Death Valley and Palm Springs to the U.S.-Mexico border, expanding Democrats’ grip on California and further isolating Republicans.

The proposed map would concentrate Republican voters in a handful of deep-red districts and eliminate an Inland Empire congressional seat represented by the longest-serving member of California’s GOP delegation. For Democrats, the plans would boost the fortunes of up-and-coming politicians and shore up vulnerable incumbents in Congress, including two new lawmakers who won election by fewer than 1,000 votes last fall.

“This is the final declaration of political war between California and the Trump administration,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

How will the ballot measure work?

For the state to reverse the independent redistricting process that the electorate approved in 2010, a majority of California voters would have to approve the measure, which backers are calling the “Election Rigging Response Act.”

The state Legislature, where Democrats hold a supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, will consider the ballot language next week when lawmakers return from summer recess. Both chambers would need to pass the ballot language by a two-thirds majority and get the bill to Newsom’s desk by Aug. 22, leaving just enough time for voter guides to be mailed and ballots to be printed.

The ballot language has not been released. But the decision about approving the new map would ultimately be up to the state’s electorate, which backed independent redistricting in 2010 by more than 61%. Registered Democrats outnumber Republican voters by almost a two-to-one margin in California, providing a decided advantage for supporters of the measure.

Newsom has said that the measure would include a “trigger,” meaning the state’s maps would only take effect if a Republican state — including Texas, Florida and Indiana — approve new mid-decade maps.

“There’s still an exit ramp,” Newsom said. “We’re hopeful they don’t move forward.”

Explaining the esoteric concept of redistricting and getting voters to participate in an off-year election will require that Newsom and his allies, including organized labor, launch what is expected to be an expensive campaign very quickly.

“It’s summer in California,” Kousser said. “People are not focused on this.”

California has no limit on campaign contributions for ballot measures, and a measure that pits Democrats against Trump, and Republicans against Newsom, could become a high-stakes, high-cost national brawl.

“It’s tens of millions of dollars, and it’s going to be determined on the basis of what an opposition looks like as well,” Newsom said Thursday. The fundraising effort, he said, is “not insignificant… considering the 90-day sprint.”

The ballot measure’s campaign website mentions three major funding sources thus far: Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign, the main political action committee for House Democrats in Washington, and Manhattan Beach businessman Bill Bloomfield, a longtime donor to California Democrats.

Those who oppose the mid-decade redistricting are also expected to be well-funded, and will argue that this effort betrays the will of the voters who approved independent congressional redistricting in 2010.

What’s at stake?

Control of the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance.

The party that holds the White House tends to lose House seats during the midterm election. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House, and Democrats taking control of chamber in 2026 would stymie Trump’s controversial, right-wing agenda in his final two years in office.

Redistricting typically only happens once a decade, after the U.S. Census. But Trump has been prodding Republican states, starting with Texas, to redraw their lines in the middle of the decade to boost the GOP’s chances in the midterms.

At Trump’s encouragement, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to redraw the Texas congressional map to favor five more Republicans. In response, Newsom and other California Democrats have called for their own maps that would favor five more Democrats.

Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum and stop the vote. They faced daily fines, death threats and calls to be removed from office. They agreed to return to Austin after the special session ended on Friday, with one condition being that California Democrats moved forward with their redistricting plan.

The situation has the potential to spiral into an all-out redistricting arms race, with Trump leaning on Indiana, Florida, Ohio and Missouri to redraw their maps, while Newsom is asking the same of blue states including New York and Illinois.

California Republicans in the crosshairs

The California gerrymandering plan targets five of California’s nine Republican members of Congress: Reps. Kevin Kiley and Doug LaMalfa in Northern California, Rep. David Valadao in the Central Valley, and Reps. Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa in Southern California.

The map consolidates Republican voters into a smaller number of ruby-red districts known as “vote sinks.” Some conservative and rural areas would be shifted into districts where Republican voters would be diluted by high voter registration advantage for Democrats.

The biggest change would be for Calvert, who would see his Inland Empire district eliminated.

Calvert has been in Congress since 1992 and represents a sprawling Riverside County district that includes Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Palm Springs and his home base of Corona. Calvert, who oversees defense spending on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, comfortably won reelection last year despite a well-funded national campaign by Democrats.

Under the proposed map, the Inland Empire district would be carved up and redistributed, parceled out to a district represented by Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills). Liberal Palm Springs would be shifted into the district represented by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), which would help tilt the district from Republican to a narrowly divided swing seat.

Members of Congress are not required to live in their districts, but there would not be an obvious seat for Calvert to run for, unless he ran against Kim or Issa.

Leaked screenshots of the map began to circulate Friday afternoon, prompting fierce and immediate pushback from California Republicans.

The lines are “third-world dictator stuff,” Orange County GOP chair Will O’Neill said on X, and the “slicing and dicing of Orange County cities is obscene.”

In Northern California, the boundaries of Kiley’s district would shrink and dogleg into the Sacramento suburbs to add registered Democrats. Kiley said in a post on the social media site X that he expected his district to stay the same because voters would “defeat Newsom’s sham initiative and vindicate the will of California voters.”

LaMalfa’s district would shift south, away from the rural and conservative areas along the Oregon border, and pick up more liberal areas in parts of Sonoma County,

In Central California, boundaries would shift to shore up Reps. Josh Harder (D-Tracy) and Adam Gray (D-Merced). Gray won election last year by 187 votes, the narrowest margin in the country.

Valadao, a perennial target for Democrats, would see the northern boundary of his district stretch into the bluer suburbs of Fresno. Democrats have tried for years to unseat Valadao, who represents a district that has a strong Democratic voter registration advantage on paper, but where turnout among blue voters is lackluster.

Feeding frenzy for open seats

The maps include a new congressional seat in Los Angeles County that would stretch through the southeast cities of Downey, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier and Lakewood. An open seat in Congress is a rare opportunity for politicians, especially in deep-blue Los Angeles County, where incumbent lawmakers can keep their jobs for decades.

Portions of that district were once represented by retired U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, the first Mexican American woman elected to Congress. That seat was eliminated in the 2021 redistricting cycle, when California lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis has told members of the California Congressional delegation that she is thinking about running for the new seat.

Another possible contender, former Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon of Lakewood, launched a campaign for state superintendent of schools in late July and may be out of the mix.

Other lawmakers who represent the area or areas nearby include State Sen. Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park), state Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera) and state Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier).

In Northern California, the southern tip of LaMalfa’s district would stretch south into the Sonoma County cities of Santa Rosa and Healdsberg, home to Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire. McGuire will be termed out of the state Senate next year, and the new seat might present a prime opportunity for him to go to Washington.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Republican leaders said Tuesday that they were prepared to end their stalemated special session and immediately begin another standoff with Democrats in the GOP’s efforts to redraw congressional maps as directed by President Trump.

It’s the latest indication that Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections will become an extended standoff that promises to reach multiple statehouses controlled by both major parties.

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows confirmed the plans during a brief session Tuesday morning that marked another failure to meet the required attendance standards to conduct official business because dozens of Democrats have left the state to stymie the GOP’s partisan gerrymandering attempts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Burrows said from the House floor that lawmakers will not attempt to reconvene again until Friday. If Democrats are still absent — and they have given no indication that they plan to return — the speaker said Republicans will end the current session and Gov. Greg Abbott will immediately call another.

The governor, a Trump ally, confirmed his intentions in a statement.

“The Special Session #2 agenda will have the exact same agenda, with the potential to add more items critical to Texans,” Abbott wrote. “There will be no reprieve for the derelict Democrats who fled the state and abandoned their duty to the people who elected them. I will continue to call special session after special session until we get this Texas first agenda passed.”

Abbott called the current session with an extensive agenda that included disaster relief for floods that killed more than 130 people. Democrats balked when Abbott added Trump’s redistricting idea to the agenda. Burrows on Tuesday did not mention redistricting but chided Democrats for not showing up for debate on the flood response package.

The redistricting legislation would reshape the state’s congressional districts in a design aimed at sending five more Republicans to Washington.

The scheme is part of Trump’s push to shore up Republicans’ narrow House majority and avoid a repeat of his first presidency, when the 2018 midterms restored Democrats to a House majority that blocked his agenda and twice impeached him. Current maps nationally put Democrats within three seats of retaking the House majority — with only several dozen competitive districts across 435 total seats.

Texas Republicans have issued civil warrants for the absent Democrats. Because they are out of state, those lawmakers are beyond the reach of Texas authorities.

Burrows said Tuesday that absent Democrats would have to pay for all state government costs for law enforcement officials attempting to track them down. Burrows has said state troopers and others have run up “six figures in overtime costs” trying to corral Democratic legislators.

Barrow and Lathan write for the Associated Press. Barrow reported from Atlanta.

WASHINGTON — The Constitution makes it clear: “The People” get to pick those who’ll represent their interests in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But just how closely do those choices reflect the overall political leanings of the people? The question is at the heart of a power play in Texas, where Republicans are trying to reshape the state’s congressional boundaries to help them maintain control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

In many cases, a state’s congressional delegation doesn’t align very closely with what would seem to be the will of the voters, although that’s not always because of partisan gerrymandering.

Every state decides how to draw its own congressional boundaries. Some, like California, rely on independent redistricting commissions, while most leave it to the state Legislature and the governor to hammer out a plan. It’s states where one party controls all the levers of government where redistricting dramas like the one in Texas often play out as the majority tries to maximize its power.

Regardless of the process, the resulting maps often produce congressional delegations much more lopsided in favor of one party than the state’s partisan demographics might suggest.

A state’s presidential vote result isn’t a precise tool for measuring what its congressional delegation ought to look like, but it can provide a compelling point of comparison. Politicians frequently cite it when decrying partisan redistricting practices they think are unfair.

President Trump, who’s pushing Texas and other GOP-controlled states to redraw their maps, has said Republicans are “entitled to five more seats” in Texas based in part on the size of his win there in November. Trump won 56% of the Texas vote, but Republicans already hold 65% of the state’s congressional delegation — which would rise to 79% if the GOP’s new maps are adopted and past voting patterns hold in the next election.

During an event with Texas Democratic lawmakers in Boston, Missouri state Rep. Ashley Aune cited her state’s presidential vote results in warning of possible Republican-driven redistricting efforts there.

“Fifty-eight percent of Missouri voted for Trump, but they want to send an 87% representation to Congress,” said Aune, a Democrat.

It’s actually fairly common for a state’s congressional delegation not to align with statewide presidential vote results.

In 41 of the 44 states with more than one congressional district, the party of the winning presidential candidate had a larger share of the state’s congressional seats than its share of the presidential vote, an Associated Press analysis found. In most cases, it was a much larger share, a gap of at least 10 percentage points.

Here’s a comparison of the congressional delegations and presidential vote results in a sampling of states, including some of those considering a redraw of their congressional boundaries after Texas called its special session.

California and Illinois

In remarks to CNBC, Trump pointed to California and Illinois as justifications for redrawing the Texas map in Republicans’ favor.

“You notice they go to Illinois for safety, but that’s all gerrymandered,” he said in reference to the Texas Democrats who relocated to the Chicago area to block, at least temporarily, the Republican redistricting efforts.

“California’s gerrymandered. We should have many more seats in Congress in California,” he said.

He’s right about Illinois: Democrats have gerrymandered the lines so they hold 14 of the 17 House seats. Not so in California.

Democrats there do have an outsized majority, holding 43 of the state’s 52 House seats, about 83%. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, received about 59% of the November vote. But that’s not because of Democratic gerrymandering. A ballot initiative took the process away from state lawmakers and gave it to an independent citizens commission.

California’s lopsided map is due in part to the way like-minded people cluster: California Democrats tend to live in and near major cities that get more congressional districts because of their population.

Florida

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis scored a legal victory in July when the state Supreme Court upheld his congressional redistricting plan redrawing a district with a large Black population. That plan resulted in Republicans holding about 71% of the state’s 28 U.S. House seats. Trump carried the state in November with 56% of the vote.

DeSantis later indicated there may be more “defects” in the map that need to be addressed before the next census.

Republicans held an 18-7 advantage over Democrats in Florida’s House delegation after the 2000 census. Democrats slowly narrowed the gap, reaching 13 seats to Republicans’ 14 after the 2018 election. But Republicans reestablished their advantage after the redistricting that followed the 2020 census, when they reached the 20-8 split they hold today.

New York

Democrats have long enjoyed an advantage at the New York ballot box in presidential and congressional elections. Harris received nearly 56% of the vote in 2024, while Democrats hold 73% of the state’s 26 House seats.

With Democratic advantages in both chambers of the state Legislature, New York might have been a ripe target for Democrats looking to offset Republican redistricting gains in Texas and elsewhere. But they would need to amend the state Constitution to conduct a new round of redistricting before the next census. That constraint means the earliest Democrats could enact a new map would be for 2028.

North Carolina

North Carolina, among the most closely divided states, has been embroiled in its own redistricting drama.

State Republicans implemented new House boundaries in 2023 that turned a 7-7 congressional delegation into one in which Republicans took a 10-4 advantage with the 2024 elections. Several districts are now the subject of a federal lawsuit, with Democrats alleging Republicans illegally diluted Black voting power.

North Carolina has been among the most competitive states in the last several presidential elections. While Trump carried the state in November with about 51% of the vote, it has elected Democrats as governor and attorney general and to other statewide offices.

In the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama narrowly edged Republican John McCain with 49.7% of the vote. The congressional delegation at the time mirrored that with an almost even split, with Democrats holding seven seats and Republicans six after the 2010 midterms.

But after rounds of Republican-controlled redistricting after the 2010 census, Republicans held a 10-3 or 9-4 advantage in the congressional delegation for the rest of that decade.

After the 2020 census, a Democratic-majority North Carolina Supreme Court threw out a Republican-drawn plan and permitted elections under a map adopted by trial judges that produced the 7-7 split. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the boundaries to be used in the 2022 elections.

After flipping to a Republican majority in 2023, the state Supreme Court ruled partisan gerrymandering wasn’t outlawed by the state Constitution, allowing GOP lawmakers to redraw a congressional map in use today that led to their party’s 10-4 majority.

Minnesota

Minnesota is the state where the congressional breakdown most closely matches the 2024 presidential result. Harris received 51% of that vote, compared with Trump’s 47%. Democrats and Republicans split the state’s eight House seats with court-imposed maps.

Nevada

Nevada, where a Democratic Legislature drew the lines, is the only state where the party of the winning presidential candidate is outnumbered by the other party in the state’s congressional delegation. Trump received 51% of the vote in Nevada, but Democrats hold three of the state’s four House districts.

Yoon writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writer Leah Willingham in Boston contributed to this report.

California Democrats and Texas Republicans are in an old-fashioned standoff, threatening to redraw their congressional maps in an attempt to sway the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections.

Caught in the middle are a handful of California Republicans, from relative newcomers to seasoned veterans, who represent pockets of the state from the U.S.-Mexico border to the remote forests in the northeast corner.

The Texas GOP is pushing, at the behest of President Trump, to net five additional seats for congressional Republicans, who hold the U.S. House of Representatives by a razor-thin margin. In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California will push back with a map that would increase the number of Democrats the state sends to Washington.

“The idea that the president of the United States says he’s entitled to five seats should sicken everybody,” Newsom said at a news conference Thursday. “There’s nothing normal about that and anyone who says it’s not surprising is normalizing it. That’s shocking.”

The California gerrymandering plan taking shape behind closed doors would increase the Democratic Party’s dominance in the Golden State, adding as many as five congressional districts favorable to Democrats, according to a draft map reviewed by The Times. If the Democrats succeed, those changes could leave Republicans with four of the state’s 52 House seats — down from the current roster of nine.

California’s districts are typically drawn once per decade by an independent commission. Newsom is pushing to put a new map tailored to favor Democrats in front of voters Nov. 4, which would require the Legislature to approve the plan shortly after members return to Sacramento from their summer recess.

Newsom has said California’s redistricting plan will have a “trigger,” meaning a redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas moved forward with its own.

“We want to do it in the most transparent way,” Newsom said. “That’s a process that will unfold over the course of the next few weeks. But we want to see the maps on the ballot. I want folks to know what they’re voting on. That’s what separates what we’re doing from what others are doing.”

The proposed boundaries of the new congressional districts continue to shift, but the goal for California Democrats remains the same: Funnel the state’s Republican voters into fewer seats, boost vulnerable Democrats and turn some GOP-dominant districts into narrowly divided toss-ups.

Here are the Republicans who could face major changes.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin)

Kiley represents a sprawling district that runs along the Nevada border from Northern California to Death Valley, cutting through Mammoth and Lake Tahoe and the cities of Roseville, Rocklin and Folsom.

Republicans have a 6-percentage-point voter registration advantage in Kiley’s district. The district’s footprint could shrink and shift closer to Sacramento, adding more registered Democrats and trimming off some conservative and rural areas.

Kiley introduced a bill this week to nullify any newly drawn congressional boundaries adopted by states before the next U.S. census, in 2030, which would apply to both Texas and California. He said the bill would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”

Newsom, Kiley said, is “trying to subvert the will of voters and do lasting damage to democracy in California.”

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale)

LaMalfa represents a safe Republican district that stretches through a vast territory of Northern California that borders Oregon and Nevada. The district includes Chico, Redding and Yuba City.

LaMalfa said in an interview that he had seen one map that shifted his district south to include parts of Sonoma County wine country and shifted some conservative rural areas in the north in another lawmaker’s district. Those changes, he said, would put towns near the Oregon border and Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, in the same district.

“The Democrats are really way over the line on this,” LaMalfa said. “I hope the weight of how bad this looks collapses on them before we even have to go through these gyrations, and millions and millions of dollars.”

He said he was certain that Republicans would litigate the new map if Democrats push ahead. He said other groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, have also voiced concerns.

“I’m not even stressed,” said La Malfa, a fourth-generation rice farmer. “If they throw me in some wine country district or some coastal district, and that throws me out, then I can go over here and finish cutting apart this tree that fell on my fence last night.”

Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford)

The proposed plans could add more registered Democrats to Valadao’s predominately Latino district in the Central Valley.

Democrats have tried for years to unseat Valadao, who represents a district that has a strong Democratic voter registration advantage on paper, but where turnout among blue voters is lackluster.

Even before the redistrict dustup, Valadao was once again a top target for Democrats. Valadao represents the California district with the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients, many of whom may lose coverage because of legislation approved by the Republican-led Congress and signed by Trump. Valadao previously lost his congressional seat in 2018 after voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

A representative for Valadao didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills)

The plan being considered could force two Republican members of the House into the same district: Kim and Calvert.

Calvert was first elected to Congress in 1992 and is the longest-serving member of California’s Republican delegation. He represents a Riverside County district that includes Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Palm Springs and his home base of Corona. The district, which leans Republican, has been a prime, but unsuccessful, target for Democrats in the last two elections.

Kim, who was first elected to Congress in 2020, represents a Republican district, mostly in Orange County, that includes Mission Viejo, Orange, Lake Forest, Anaheim and Tustin.

Calvert said he strongly opposes “the scheme being orchestrated behind closed doors by Sacramento politicians” to replace maps drawn by the redistricting commission “with a process that would allow legislators to draw district maps that are gerrymandered to benefit themselves and their political allies.”

Deviating from the independent redistricting process “disenfranchises voters and degrades trust in our political system,” Kim said in a statement. She said Newsom should, “for once, focus on addressing the pressing issues making life harder for Californians under his watch instead of trying to position himself for a presidential run.”

Newsom this week said he was pleased to see Republican members coming out in support of independent redistricting.

“That’s an encouraging sign,” Newsom said. “So already, perhaps, people are waking up to the reality of California entering into this conversation. We’re not a small state. Again, we punch above our weight. It will have profound national implications if we move forward.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall)

Under the tentative plans, Issa, who has served in Congress for more than two decades, would see his safely Republican district become purple. That could include absorbing Palm Springs, a liberal area that is currently in Calvert’s district and has become a hub of fundraising and political activity for Democrats.

A spokesman for Issa declined to comment but referred to a statement from the state’s nine-member Republican delegation, which said that Trump won 38% of the presidential vote in California last year, but Republicans hold fewer than 1 in 5 of the state’s 52 House seats.

Newsom, the delegation said, is trying to wrest power from the independent redistricting commission and “place it back into the hands of Sacramento politicians to further his left-wing political agenda.”

“A partisan political gerrymander is not what the voters of California want,” the statement said.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

One of California’s most influential labor organizations endorsed redrawing the state’s congressional maps to counter President Trump’s effort to push Republican states, notably Texas, to increase his party’s numbers in Congress in next year’s midterm election.

The California Federation of Labor Unions voted unanimously Tuesday to support putting a measure on the ballot in November. The proposal, backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and many of the state’s Democratic leaders, would ask voters to temporarily change congressional district boundaries that were drawn by an independent redistricting commission four years ago, with some conditions.

Republicans could potentially lose up to a half dozen seats in California’s 52-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. After it returns for its summer recess on Aug. 18, the California Legislature is expected to vote to place the measure on the statewide ballot in a special election.

“President Trump has said that Republicans are ‘entitled’ to five more congressional votes in Texas. Well, they aren’t entitled to steal the 2026 election. California’s unions refuse to stand by as democracy is tested,” Lorena Gonzalez, president of the federation, said in a statement. “California Labor is unified in our resolve to fight back against President Trump’s anti-worker agenda.”

Redistricting — the esoteric redrawing of the nation’s 435 congressional districts — typically occurs once every decade after the U.S. census tallies the population across the nation. Population shifts can result in changes in a state’s allocation of congressional seats, such as when California lost a seat after the 2020 census the first time in the state’s history.

The political redistricting process had long been crafted by elected officials to give their political parties an edge or to protect incumbents — sometimes in brazen, bizarrely shaped districts. Californians voted in 2010 to create an independent commission to draw congressional maps based on communities of interest, logical geography and ensuring representation of minority communities.

The ballot measure being pushed by Newsom and others would allow state lawmakers to help determine district boundaries for the next three election cycles if Texas approves a pending measure to reconfigure districts to increase Republican-held congressional seats in that state. Line-drawing would return to the independent commission after the 2030 census.

The California Federation of Labor is committed to spending several million dollars supporting a mid-decade redistricting ballot measure, on top of what it already planned to spend on competitive congressional races next year, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the strategy.

A spokesperson for several organizations devoted to fighting any effort to change the state’s redistricting process said that Charles Munger Jr., the son of a billionaire, and who bankrolled the ballot measure to create the independent commission, is committed to making sure it is not weakened.

“While Charles Munger has been out of politics since 2016, he has said he will vigorously defend the reforms he helped pass, including nonpartisan redistricting,” said Amy Thoma, spokesperson for the Voters First Coalition. “His previous success in passing ballot measures in California means he knows exactly what is needed to be successful. We will have the resources necessary to make our coalition heard.”

Texas Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s urging, are preparing to redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could flip up to five seats to the GOP in 2026. Trump hopes to boost Republicans’ chances of maintaining a narrow House majority amid the headwinds of the midterm election.

The manoeuvre in Texas would be legal and not unprecedented for the state, which also undertook a Republican-driven redistricting in 2003. But Democrats have called the move a partisan power grab and an affront to the traditional practice of drawing new congressional districts every 10 years, after a new Census.

But the debate over Texas’s electoral map has also prompted broader questions over the fairness of the way in which voting districts are outlined. And the one state bigger than Texas – California – has caught the attention of Vice President JD Vance.

“The gerrymander in California is outrageous,” Vance posted July 30 on X. “Of their 52 congressional districts, 9 of them are Republican. That means 17 percent of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40 percent of the vote in that state. How can this possibly be allowed?”

So, does California have an unfair map, as Vance said?

By the numbers, California is not a dramatic outlier when it comes to the difference between its congressional and presidential vote. However, because this difference is multiplied by a large number of districts – since California is the United States’ most populous state – it produces a bounty of House seats beyond what the state’s presidential vote alone would predict.

Vance’s description of California’s map as a “gerrymander” is also doubtful – it was drawn by a bipartisan commission, not Democratic legislators. Gerrymandering is done by politicians and political parties.

Vance’s office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

What the numbers show

Our first step was to measure the difference between each state’s House-seat breakdown by party and its presidential-vote breakdown by party, which is what Vance cited. (Our analysis builds off of a 2023 Sabato’s Crystal Ball story written by this author. Sabato’s Crystal Ball is a publication of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.) We removed from consideration any state with one, two or three House members in its delegation, because these small states have wide differentials that skew the comparison.

For red states won by Trump, we took the percentage of Republican seats in the House delegation and subtracted the percentage of the vote Trump won in that state. Conversely, for blue states won by Kamala Harris, we took the percentage of Democratic seats in the House delegation and subtracted the percentage of the vote Harris won in the state.

Our analysis found that California did elect more Democrats to the House than its presidential vote share would have predicted, but the state was not an outlier. With 83% of its House seats held by Democrats and 58% of its 2024 presidential votes going to Democrats, California ranked 13th nationally among 35 states that have at least four seats in their delegation.

California has the nation’s 13th widest difference between House and presidential results

The top 13 differentials were split roughly evenly between blue and red states.

In six states that have at least four House seats – red Iowa, Utah, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and blue Connecticut and Massachusetts – a single party controls every House seat, even though the winning presidential candidate won between 56% and 66% of the vote in those states.

Another six states had a differential equal to or wider than California’s: Red South Carolina and Tennessee, and blue Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, plus purple Wisconsin.

California does stand out by another measure, because of its size.

If you multiply the House-to-presidential differential by the number of House seats in the delegation, you get a figure for “excess House seats”, the term used in the 2023 Sabato’s Crystal Ball article – essentially, a majority party’s bonus in House seats beyond what presidential performance would predict.

Because California has a large population represented by many House districts, even its modest differential produces a lot of extra Democratic House seats – 12, to be exact. That’s the largest of any state; the closest competitors are blue Illinois and New York, and red Florida, each of which has more than four excess seats for the majority party.

Texas’s current congressional map has 3.7 excess seats for the Republicans. That would increase to an 8.7-seat GOP bonus if the GOP can flip the five seats they’re hoping for in 2026.

Is California a “gerrymander”?

Vance described California’s map as a gerrymander, but political experts doubted that this term applies. A gerrymander typically refers to a map drawn by partisan lawmakers, and California’s is drawn by a commission approved by voters specifically to remove the partisanship from congressional map drawing.

“California’s congressional map is no gerrymander,” said Nathaniel Rakich, a contributing analyst to Inside Elections, a political analytics publication. “It was drawn by an independent commission consisting of five Republicans, five Democrats, and four independents that is generally upheld as one of the fairest map-drawing entities in any state.”

Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said commissions tend to produce a more competitive House battleground than a fully partisan system. Of the 19 House seats his outlet currently rates as toss-ups going into 2026, only two come from states where one party had a free hand to gerrymander the current district lines.

“I think it’s fair to say that commission and court-drawn maps can inject some competitiveness into the process,” Kondik said.

Because the seats were drawn by a commission, California has a lot of competitive seats. This helps California Republicans despite the state’s Democratic tilt.

According to the 2024 pre-election ratings by Sabato’s Crystal Ball, California had three Democratic-held seats in the “lean Democratic” category, and two more that were rated “likely Democratic”.

So, going into the election, five of California’s 40 Democratic-held seats are at least somewhat vulnerable to a Republican takeover. Texas Democrats aren’t so lucky, under its existing map: They are able to realistically target only one “likely Republican” seat out of 25 held by the GOP.

Sometimes, geography is the enemy of a “fair” map

Despite map makers’ efforts, it is sometimes impossible to produce a map that jibes perfectly with a state’s overall partisan balance. The cold facts of geography can prevent this.

One oft-cited example is Massachusetts, which hasn’t elected a Republican to the US House since 1994. There are few Republican hotbeds in Massachusetts, and experts say they can’t be easily connected into coherent congressional districts.

“Especially in deep-red or deep-blue states, parties tend to get a higher share of seats than they do of votes,” Rakich said. “Imagine a state where Republicans get two-thirds of the vote in every district; obviously, they would get 100 percent of their seats.”

Rakich said Democrats are geographically distributed more favourably in California. But in other states, Republicans benefit from better geographic distribution.

“I haven’t heard Vance complain about the fact that Democrats only get 25 percent of Wisconsin’s congressional seats despite regularly getting 50 percent of the vote there,” Rakich added.

NEW YORK — On a sweltering summer day, children leap between rocks along the Bronx River while cyclists pedal on newly paved paths. Kayaks rest on what was once an industrial dumping ground, now transformed into a bustling promenade along the city’s only freshwater river.

The Bronx River Greenway, a series of stitched-together waterfront parks built atop once largely abandoned and polluted wasteland, is a hard-fought victory for the country’s poorest congressional district — one that locals call a “beacon of environmental justice” built by federal dollars and water-pollution settlements from the borough’s wealthier neighbors.

Now, like thousands of nonprofits around the country, this organization’s future is in jeopardy. The Trump administration’s sweeping federal grant cuts have left nonprofits nationwide and the communities they serve in precarious straits. But few places face as stark a reckoning as the Bronx, where federal funding has proved indispensable for revitalizing green spaces, protecting survivors of domestic violence, and preventing youth violence.

Over 84% of the 342 nonprofits based in the Bronx rely on federal grants now at risk, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. It’s a significant increase from the 70% of groups vulnerable to government defunding statewide.

In all but two of the country’s 437 congressional districts, the typical nonprofit could not cover its expenses without government grants. Nonprofits have increasingly served as contractors for government services — like operating homeless shelters — since the 1960s.

In the Bronx, if such grants were to disappear entirely, the borough’s nonprofits could face a collective deficit of nearly 30% — cuts that have begun to force layoffs and austerity on dozens of groups connecting Bronxites to low-cost health care, food assistance, and preschool slots.

“When America sneezes, the Bronx gets the flu,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Democrat who represents the district. “I think we in the Bronx feel we have been and will continue to be the hardest hit by the impact of a Trump presidency.”

From revival to reversal

Nestled in a corner of parkland atop the site of an abandoned amusement park, the headquarters of the Bronx River Alliance is among the borough’s greenest buildings, boasting nature classrooms, samples of the river’s flora and fauna, and a storage space teeming with kayaks and canoes.

In March, the group received formal notice that it would lose $1.5 million in federal grants promised under the Inflation Reduction Act last year for improving water quality and climate-resilience projects. After years of rising momentum, cubicles now sit empty. Leaders held off on hiring in anticipation of cuts, and now they don’t know if they’ll be able to fill those roles.

“I’ve met some of the folks who were pulling cars out of the river in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Daniel Ranells, the group’s deputy director of programs. Back then, the area was a “dumping ground” so inundated with industrial waste, tires, abandoned cars, ovens, and microwaves that “folks didn’t really understand there was a river there.”

That has shifted dramatically in recent years thanks in part to decades of federal investment. Just south of its headquarters, the organization restored salt marshes along the riverbanks of a shuttered concrete plant.

In 2007, the first beaver appeared on the Bronx River in over 200 years — named “José the Beaver” in honor of former Congressman José E. Serrano, who helped direct millions in federal funds to groups dedicated to the river’s restoration.

“The Bronx River is a shining light of environmental justice,” Ranells said, and millions in federal funding over the years has helped “make it a destination” after years of neglect.

Progress frozen

Now staffers at the Bronx River Alliance describe a sense of “whiplash” in seeing hard-fought funds dry up and grant language scrubbed of any allusions to racial or environmental justice.

The Bronx River Alliance has joined other nonprofits in suing the Trump administration to unfreeze funds, but the uncertainty has already disrupted years of planning, a reality that has rippled across the neighborhood, leaving few organizations untouched.

Up the street from the Alliance, the office of the Osborne Association, a group that has worked to prevent youth violence for nearly a century, has grown quieter. In April, an email from the Bureau of Justice Assistance stated the remaining $666,000 of a $2 million grant “no longer effectuates department priorities.”

The cut thrust the nonprofit into “triage mode,” said Osborne president Jonathan Monsalve, who was forced to lay off three staffers and reduce the number of participants in a diversion program offering young adults facing gun charges an alternative to jail time.

“It’s a lifeline for young people, and it’s no longer there for 25 more of them,” Monsalve said. “Without another alternative, it’s 25 young people that will see prison or jail time, and that’s incredibly frustrating.”

Why the Bronx bears the brunt

The Department of Justice has canceled over $810 million in similar grants to nonprofits working in violence prevention. The Environmental Protection Agency attempted to cancel $2 billion in grants for environmental justice work.

Nonprofit leaders say the cuts hit hardest in the places that can afford them the least. In the Bronx, almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty, the vast majority of whom are Black or Latino, and nearly one in six schoolchildren experience homelessness every year.

“We’ve had decades of disinvestment in these communities, and we had been starting to see some meaningful investment and community-based solutions that were actually working,” said Monsalve. “And then all of a sudden that support just gets yanked away.”

The federal government, he said, is essentially telling these communities: “You aren’t a priority anymore. You don’t fit the plan.”

For decades, a million-dollar federal grant allowed the victim-service organization Safe Horizon to operate a program that stationed domestic violence advocates in the borough’s criminal court.

When the grant came up for renewal this year, it came with new restrictions that CEO Liz Roberts described as “so extreme, so broad, so radical” that the organization chose to walk away rather than accept conditions which would have prohibited supporting transgender survivors or treating domestic violence as a systemic issue.

It was an agonizing decision given the volume of domestic violence in the Bronx, Roberts said.

It means that hundreds of survivors “may not have the opportunity to talk to an advocate about their options, about their rights, or about their safety,” she said.

Filling the void

Roberts said she’s bracing for more cuts — federal funds make up about 24% of the group’s budget — that could force the closure of shelters or reductions to a citywide hotline.

As nonprofits nationwide grapple with similar losses, Roberts said private philanthropy and local governments will need to “make some smart and thoughtful and principled decisions about where they can help to fill those gaps.”

In places like the Bronx, finding alternative funding is especially challenging. “The not-for-profit sector is often fragile, and nowhere more so than the Bronx,” Torres said of the district he represents, where organizations tend to be more dependent on government funding than wealthier enclaves.

“Organizations spent hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to apply for a contract and hired staff and made all these plans only to see the written contract disappear,” Torres said. “It’s deeply destabilizing.”

Sara Herschander is a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This article was provided to the Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content.

The potential redrawing of California’s congressional district lines could upend the balance of power in Washington, D.C., in next year’s midterm congressional election. The unusual and unexpected redistricting may take place in coming months because of sparring among President Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Redrawing these maps — known as redistricting — is an esoteric practice that many voters tune out, but one that has an outsized impact on political power and policy in the United States.

Here is a breakdown about why a process that typically occurs once every decade is currently receiving so much attention — and the potential ramifications.

What is redistricting?

There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, each of whom is supposed to represent roughly the same number of constituents. Every decade, after the U.S. Census counts the population across the nation, the allocation of congressional representatives for each state can change. For example, after the 2020 census, California’s share of congressional districts was reduced by one for the first time in state history.

After the decennial census, states redraw district lines for congressional and legislative districts based on population shifts, protections for minority voters required by the federal Voting Rights Act and other factors. For much of the nation’s history, such maps were created by state legislators and moneyed interests in smoke-filled backrooms.

Many districts were grossly gerrymandered — contorted — to benefit political parties and incumbents, such as California’s infamous “Ribbon of Shame,” a congressional district that stretched in a reed-thin line 200 miles along the California coast from Oxnard to the Monterey County line.

But in recent decades, political-reform organizations and some elected officials, notably former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, called for independent drawing of district lines. In 2010, the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure requiring California congressional maps to be drawn by a bipartisan commission, which it did in 2011 and 2021.

Why are we talking about this?

President Trump recently urged Texas lawmakers to redraw its congressional districts to increase the number of GOP members of the House in next year’s midterm election. Congress is closely divided, and the party that does not control the White House traditionally loses seats in the body two years after the presidential election.

Trump has been able to enact his agenda — from deporting undocumented immigrants to extending tax breaks that largely benefit the wealthy to closing some Planned Parenthood clinics — because the GOP controls the White House, the Senate and the House. But if Democrats flip Congress, Trump’s agenda will likely be stymied and he faces the prospect of being a lame duck during his last two years in office.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, shown with Democratic lawmakers from Texas, speaks during a news conference in Sacramento on Friday.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

What is Texas doing?

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called his state’s Legislature into special session last week to discuss the disastrous floods that killed more than 130 people as well as redistricting before the 2026 election.

Trump and his administration urged Abbott to redraw his state’s congressional lines with the hope of picking up five seats.

Abbott has said that his decision to include redistricting in the special session was prompted by a court decision last year that said the state no longer has to draw “coalition districts” that are made up of multiple minority communities. New district lines would give Texans greater opportunity to vote for politicians who best represent them, the governor said in interviews.

Democrats in the Lone Star state’s Legislature met with Newsom in Sacramento on Friday to discuss the ramifications of mid-decade redistricting and accused Trump of trying to rig next year’s midterm election to hold onto power.

Republicans “play by a different set of rules and we could sit back and act as if we have some moral authority and watch this 249-, 250-year-old experiment be washed away,” Newsom said of the nation’s history. “We are not going to allow that to happen.”

Democratic lawmakers in Texas have previously fled the state to not allow the Legislature to have a quorum, such as in 2021 during a battle over voting rights. But with the deadly flooding, this is an unlikely prospect this year.

Why is California in the mix?

The Golden State’s congressional districts are drawn by an independent commission focused on logical geography, shared interests, representation for minority communities and other facets.

If the state reverts to partisan map drawing, redistricting experts on both sides of the aisle agree that several GOP incumbents in the 52-member delegation would be vulnerable, either because of more Democratic voters being placed in their districts, or being forced into face-offs with fellow Republican members of Congress. There are currently nine Republican members of the delegation, a number that could shrink to three or four, according to political statisticians.

Strange bedfellows

These dizzying developments have created agreement among rivals while dividing former allies.

Sara Sadhwani, a member of the 2021 redistricting commission and longtime supporter of independent map drawing, said she supports Democratic efforts to change California’s congressional districts before the midterm election.

“I stand by the work of the commission of course. We drew fair and competitive maps that fully abided by federal laws around the Voting Rights Act to ensure communities of color have an equal opportunity at the ballot box,” said Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “That being said, especially when it comes to Congress, most certainly California playing fair puts Democrats at a disadvantage nationally.”

She said the best policy would be for all 50 states to embrace independent redistricting. But in the meantime, she supports Democratic efforts in California to temporarily redraw the districts given the stakes.

“I think it’s patriotic to fight against what appears to be our democracy falling into what appears to be authoritarian rule,” Sadhwani said.

Charles Munger Jr., the son of a late billionaire who was Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, spent more than $12 million to support the ballot measure that created the independent redistricting commission and is invested in making sure that it is not weakened.

“He’s very much committed to making sure the commission is preserved,” said someone close to Munger who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Munger believes “this is ultimately political quicksand and a redistricting war at the end of day is a loss to American voters.”

Munger, who was the state GOP’s biggest donor at one point, is actively involved in the California fight and is researching other efforts to fight gerrymandering nationwide, this person said.

The state Democratic and Republican parties, which rarely agree on anything, agreed in 2010 when they opposed the ballot measure. Now, Democrats, who would likely gain seats if the districts are redrawn by state lawmakers, support a mid-decade redistricting, while the state GOP, which would likely lose seats, says the state should continue having lines drawn by the independent commission once every decade.

“It’s a shame that Governor Newsom and the radical Left in Sacramento are willing to spend $200 million on a statewide special election, while running a deficit of $20 billion, in order to silence the opposition in our state,” the GOP congressional delegation said in a statement on Friday. “As a Delegation we will fight any attempt to disenfranchise California voters by whatever means necessary to ensure the will of the people continues to be reflected in redistricting and in our elections.”

What happens next?

If Democrats in California move forward with their proposal, which is dependent on what Texas lawmakers do during their special legislative session that began last week, they have two options:

• State lawmakers could vote to put the measure before voters in a special election that would likely be held in November — a costly prospect. The last statewide special election — the unsuccessful effort to recall Newsom in 2021 — cost more than $200 million, according to the secretary of state’s office.
• The Legislature could also vote to redraw the maps, but this option would likely be more vulnerable to legal challenge.

Either scenario is expected to be voted on as an urgency item, which requires a 2/3 vote but would insulate the action from being the subject of a referendum later put in front of voters that would delay enactment.

The Legislature is out of session until mid-August.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento contributed to this report.

California Democrats led by Gov. Gavin Newsom may upend the state’s mandate for independently drawn political districts as part of a brewing, national political brawl over the balance of power in Congress and the fate of the aggressive, right-wing agenda of President Trump and the GOP.

The effort being considered by state Democratic leaders is specifically intended to reduce the number of Republicans in California’s congressional delegation, retaliation for the ongoing actions by GOP leaders in Texas to unseat Democratic representatives in its state, reportedly at Trump’s behest.

“I think this whole thing is a horrible idea all the way around … and I don’t think people fully understand the ramifications of what they’re talking about,” said Republican redistricting expert Matt Rexroad. “Once we get to the point where we’re just doing random redistricting after every election … redistricting won’t be used as a tool to reflect voter interests. It will be used to just bludgeon minority political interests, whether it be Republican or Democrat, after every election.”

Newsom already has been in talks with Democratic legislative leaders and others about reconfiguring California’s congressional district boundaries before the 2026 election.

Doing so probably would require a statewide ballot measure to scrap or temporarily pause the voter-approved, independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission charged with drawing the boundaries of congressional districts based on logical geography, shared interests, representation for minority communities and other facets. In 2010, Californians voted to create the commission to take partisan politics out of the redistricting process for Congress, two years after they did so for the state Legislature.

Newsom said California may have to take the emergency action if Texas and other GOP-controlled states this year decide to redraw their congressional districts to ensure that Republicans keep control of Congress in the upcoming election. Redrawing of congressional districts typically occurs after the decennial census to reflect population shifts across the nation.

“So they want to change the game,” he said last week. “We can act holier-than-thou. We can sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be, or we can recognize the existential nature that is this moment.”

Newsom on Friday plans to meet with six Democratic Texas state lawmakers visiting the state and members of California’s congressional delegation “to push back on Trump and Texas Republicans’ redistricting power grab,” according to the governor’s office.

Redistricting experts in both parties agree that reverting to partisan redrawing of congressional lines in California would make several GOP incumbents vulnerable. The state’s congressional districts could be reconfigured to increase the share of Democratic voters in districts currently represented by Republicans, or in a way that forces Republican officeholders to face off against one another.

Rexroad sees a scenario in which Republicans are so packed into districts that the party would have only three safe seats. Only nine of the state’s 52 congressional districts are currently represented by the GOP.

Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell said five of nine GOP-held districts could be flipped. He said Democrats are in a good position to gain seats because of California’s history of nonpartisan redistricting. In Texas, by comparison, districts already are gerrymandered to favor Republicans.

In California, “Democrats haven’t had partisan line-drawing since the ‘90s,” he said. “So there’s all this partisan gain left on the table for decades. If you ever do crack open the map, there’s just many available to bolster” the party’s existing grip on the delegation.

Rexroad warns that there would be unintended consequences, including weakening safe Republican districts in Texas and leading to a broken system in which lines are redrawn after every election to benefit whichever party controls the White House or various legislative bodies.

Before the creation of the independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, California was similar to most other states. Political districts were created by state lawmakers of both parties who often prioritized incumbent protection and gerrymandered oddly shaped districts, such as the infamous “ribbon of shame,” where a 200-mile coastal sliver of a congressional district between Oxnard and the Monterey County line disappeared during high tide.

Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said such districts are why he started the National Democratic Redistricting Committee with former President Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in 2017.

“Because of our work, we now have the fairest national congressional map the country has seen in a generation, one that allows both parties to compete for the majority in the House,” Holder said Wednesday at a “Stop the Texas Takeover” virtual event hosted by the redistricting committee.

That could fall by the wayside, however, if some states crack open their redistricting process for partisan gain and states controlled by the opposing party retaliate by doing to the same.

California Democrats are considering trying to revisit the independent line-drawing after President Trump and his administration urged Texans to redraw their districts in a way that probably would improve the GOP’s ability to hold control of Congress in next year’s midterm election.

The House is narrowly divided, and the party that wins the White House often loses seats in the body two years later. The loss of a handful of GOP seats would stymie Trump’s plans, potentially making him a lame duck for two years.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called for a special session of the state Legislature that includes redistricting and began Monday.

On Tuesday, Abbott said the decision was prompted by a court decision last year that said the state no longer has to draw “coalition districts,” which are made up of multiple minority communities.

“New maps will work toward insuring that we will maximize the ability of Texas to be able to vote for the candidate of their choice,” he said in an interview with Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth.

“This is shameless, shameless, the mid-decade redistricting that they’re doing at the orders of Donald Trump,” Pelosi said Wednesday at the “Stop the Texas Takeover” event. “And this is what we’re doing in California. We’re saying to the Texans, ‘You shouldn’t be going down this path. We go down this path, we’ll go down together.’”

If California Democrats pursue partisan redistricting in time for next year’s midterm election, the Legislature, in which Democrats hold a supermajority, could place the matter on the ballot during a special election that probably would take place in November. State lawmakers also could opt to make the change through legislation, though that probably would be vulnerable to a legal challenge.

Nonpartisan congressional redistricting was one of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s priorities when it was approved by voters in 2010. Schwarzenegger hasn’t weighed in on the state potentially rescinding the reform. But the director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, which includes such political reforms among its top priorities, warned that weakening California’s system would be out of sync with the state’s values.

“We’re in a scary position with all this talk of this gerrymandering arms race between Texas and California,” said Conyers Davis, global director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. “It’s really a race to the bottom for voters in both states and the entire country as a whole. We should be celebrating California’s citizen redistricting commission and looking to expand that model into other states, not looking for political ways to dismember it and erode its powers.”

The state Republican Party, which opposed the creation of the redistricting commission, now supports the body in the face of a proposal that would cost it seats.

“To sort of start to mess with it right at this point in time, it just kind of undermines the whole independent redistricting commission that everybody has come to rely on,” said Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party. “And I don’t know what it will look like constitutionally.”

Asked about Texas, she demurred, saying she was focused on California.

State Democrats, who also opposed the creation of the commission, cheered the potential response to Texas.

“Trump and Republicans — from D.C. to Texas — are attempting to rewrite the rules of our democracy,” said Rusty Hicks, chairman of the California Democratic Party. “With so much at stake, California may be left with little choice but to fight fire with fire to protect and preserve our democracy.”

Times staff writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento contributed to this report.

Florida’s Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the state’s congressional redistricting map, rejecting a challenge over the elimination of a majority-Black district in north Florida that was pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The court, dominated by DeSantis appointees, ruled that restoration of the district that previously united Black communities from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee, or across 200 miles, would amount to impermissible racial gerrymandering. That, the majority ruled, violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.

“The record leaves no doubt that such a district would be race-predominant. The record also gives us no reasonable basis to think that further litigation would uncover a potentially viable remedy,” said Chief Justice Carlos Muniz in the court’s majority opinion.

The decision means Florida’s current congressional districts that give Republicans a 20-8 advantage over Democrats will remain in place for the 2026 midterm elections and beyond. The former north Florida district was most recently represented by a Black Democrat, former Rep. Al Lawson. The new districts divide that area among three Republicans.

A panel of three federal judges previously upheld the current congressional districts.

“This was always the constitutionally correct map — and now both the federal courts and the FL Supreme Court have upheld it,” DeSantis said on X.

One of the plaintiffs, the National Redistricting Foundation, called the new ruling “alarming” because it “diminishes the voting power of Black Floridians” by upholding the GOP-drawn map.

“The court is abandoning the most basic role of the judiciary: to provide justice for the people,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the foundation.

Earlier redistricting efforts by the state Legislature included versions of the north Florida district that preserved Black voting power. But after a veto by DeSantis, the governor pushed through the current map that eliminated it.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court said one problem for the plaintiffs was they did not propose a viable alternative map but only pointed out potential problems with the current one.

“It is not enough in the redistricting context for challengers to identify a flaw in an enacted districting plan and demand that the court send the Legislature back to the drawing board,” the decision said.

Justice Jorge Labarga was the lone dissenter, contending the lawsuit should be sent back to a lower court for further proceedings to allow the challengers a chance to produce different districts.

“By foreclosing further litigation, the majority’s decision now allows to remain in place a congressional redistricting plan that is unconstitutional under the Florida Constitution,” Labarga wrote.

Anderson writes for the Associated Press.

Imagine a Washington in which President Trump was held to account. A Washington in which Congress doesn’t roll over like a dog begging for a treat. A Washington that functions the way it’s supposed to, with that whole checks-and-balances thing working.

Enticing, no?

Democrats need to win just three seats in 2026 to seize control of the House and impose some measure of accountability on our rogue-elephant president. That’s something Trump is keenly aware of, which is why he’s pushing Texas to take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional boundaries ahead of the midterm election.

Republicans, who’ve exercised iron-clad control over Texas for decades, hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats. A special session scheduled next week in Austin is aimed at boosting that number by as many as five seats, increasing the GOP’s odds of hanging onto the House.

Enter, stage left, California’s White House-lusting governor.

As part of a recent Southern campaign swing, Gavin Newsom sat down with a progressive Tennessee podcaster to discuss the Republican power grab. (The picnic bench, rolled up shirt sleeves, beer and f-bomb showed the governor was being authentic, in case there was any doubt.)

“They’re not f— around now. They’re playing by a totally different set of rules,” Newsom said of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow Republicans. Years ago, he noted, California created an independent commission to draw its political lines, which states normally do once a decade after new census figures come out.

But with a super-majority in Sacramento, Newsom said, Democrats could “gerrymander like no other state.”

“We’ve been playing fair,” he continued, but Abbott’s actions “made me question that entire program.” Later, elaborating on social media, the governor accused Republicans of cheating their way to extra House seats and warned, “California is watching — and you can bet we won’t stand idly by.”

There’s a Texas expression for that: All hat and no cattle.

The fact is, voters took the power of political line-drawing away from the governor and his fellow lawmakers, for good reason, and it’s not like Newsom can unilaterally take that power back — no matter how well his chesty swagger might play with Trump-loathing Democrats.

“We have a commission,” said Justin Levitt, an expert on redistricting law at Loyola Law School. “Not only that, a Constitution and the commission’s in the Constitution. And not only that, we have a Constitution that says you only get to redistrict once every 10 years, unless there’s a legal problem with the existing maps.”

In other words, it’s not up to Newsom to huff and puff and blow existing House districts down.

California voters approved Proposition 20, which turned congressional line-drawing over to a nonpartisan, 14-member commission, in November 2010. The point was to introduce competition by taking redistricting away from self-dealing lawmakers. It passed by an overwhelming margin, 61% to 39%, and has worked just as intended.

After decades of prebaked congressional contests, when the success of one party or the other was virtually guaranteed, California has become a hotbed of competition; in recent years, the state — an afterthought in November balloting for president — has been key to control of the House. In 2026, as many as a dozen seats, out of 52, could be at least somewhat competitive.

“I think it’s worked out great,” said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant politics professor at Pomona College and a member of the redistricting commission. (Others doing the map-making included a seminary professor, a structural engineer and an investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.)

There are two ways, Levitt said, that Newsom and fellow Democrats could undo the commission’s handiwork.

They could break the law and pass legislation drawing new lines, face an inevitable lawsuit and prevail with a sympathetic ruling from the California Supreme Court. Or they could ask voters to approve different lines through a new constitutional amendment, in a hurried-up special election ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Both scenarios seem as plausible as Newsom delivering universal healthcare and fulfilling his pledge to build 3.5 million new homes a year, to name two other extravagant promises.

To be clear, none of the above condones the plot that Trump and Abbott are attempting to hatch. Their actions are politically ruthless and more than a little cynical. (A letter from Trump’s hand-in-glove Justice Department has provided a legal fig leaf for the special session. Texas was recently — expediently — notified that four of its majority-minority congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered along racial lines, thus justifying the drawing of a new map.)

That’s no excuse, however, for Newsom to end-run California voters, or call a special election that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars at a time the state is gushing red ink.

Politics rooted in vengeance is both dangerous and wrong, whether it’s Trump or Newsom looking to settle scores.

There’s also the matter of delivering vacant threats. Some Democrats may thrill each time Newsom delivers one of his pugnacious pronouncements. That seems to be a big part of his presidential campaign strategy. But those same voters may tire of the lack of follow through, as Californians have.

Newsom has a well-deserved reputation for over-promising and under-delivering.

That’s not likely to serve him well on the national stage.

July 9 (UPI) — Legendary cyclist Greg Lemond on Wednesday became the first cyclist and 10th athlete to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal during a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.

Lemond, 64, joins the likes of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Billie Jean King and Jack Nicklaus in being so honored by Congress.

Lemond was the first American to win the Tour de France with a victory in 1986 and won two others in 1989 and 1990.

He also is the only American to officially win the prestigious, multiday cycling event following disqualifications of Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis over doping allegations, USA Today reported.

A strong and faithful support system

“Throughout his life, Greg has put his talent and success to good use, speaking up for children and our military veterans, for fairness in the sport and for the next generation of cyclists, ” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during Wednesday’s award event.

“As Greg will tell you, no race gets easier, and no great victory is won all alone,” Johnson continued. “Behind every champion stands a strong and faithful support system.”

Johnson cited Lemond’s wife, Kathy, and his extended family as the cyclist’s support system and acknowledged their attendance at the Gold Medal ceremony.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., called Lemond an “American and worldwide cycling legend” who initially was a skier but began cycling as a way to stay in shape during the off season at age 13.

“Once he got on two wheels, he had a new passion,” Thompson said of Lemond.

“After just one year of training, Greg placed second in his first club ride,” Thompson said, “He rode in a tank top, jogging shorts and tennis shoes.”

Lemond “didn’t have the right gear or the right bike, but it didn’t matter,” Thompson added. “His rocket-ship rise to success had begun.”

Honoring people, places and moments

Lemond and his family joined Johnson and other lawmakers on the stage for the medal presentation.

“The honor is more than I ever expected, and I accept it with deep gratitude and a profound sense of humility,” Lemond said of the Congressional Gold Medal.

“Today isn’t just about reflecting on my own journey,” Lemond told the audience. “It’s also about honoring the people, places and moments that shaped it.”

He thanked his parents and family for their support and all of the teammates who helped make him a champion.

“Cycling was an unusual sport for a 14-year-old kid in 1976,” Lemond said. “I didn’t even know the sport existed until one day a bicycle race passed my home.”

Lemond said he became “passionately obsessed with racing” after winning his first cycling event and “believed that, as an America, if I worked hard enough, anything was possible.”

His dream was to become the world’s best cyclist, so he moved to Europe at age 19 to make it happen.

Just a blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid

“I brought an American attitude to the sport of cycling,” Lemond said. “I was open to new ideas and bringing innovation and technology to a very traditional sport. That was a huge competitive advantage.”

He said Europeans taught him a lot and embraced him as “le American.”

“I was just a blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid from America, and for some reason, that resonated with people,” Lemond said. “I think Europeans saw in me what the U.S. has meant to Europe at critical times — as an ally, a liberator and a friend.”

He recalled a recent encounter in a village of about 80 people in the French Alps, where he said an old man approached him and announced he was the one who invented the carbon fiber disc wheels that Lemond was the first to use and that helped him to win the 1986 Tour de France.

Lemond told the man he wished he still had those wheels. The man told him they were in his mother’s garage and asked if he would like to have them.

“They were the first carbon fiber wheels to win the Tour de France,” Lemond said.

A legacy of sacrifice and courage

Lemond, his wife, Kathy, and the man walked to the 104-year-old woman’s home, where the old woman hugged him, invited them into her home.

She had an old U.S. flag and lots of American-related memorabilia in her home and told Lemond and Kathy that she witnessed the Nazis occupy France in 1940.

Her brothers fled into the mountains to join the resistance, and she rode her bicycle through the countryside to deliver food and information, Lemond told the audience.

“Sadly, one of her brothers was killed in the fighting, and then the Americans came,” he said.

The woman told him Americans saved her father, her family and her country.

“She cried as she told us, and so did we,” Lemond said. “That moment has stayed with me.

“It reminded me that being an American, especially abroad, carries a legacy of sacrifice, of courage and showing up when it matters most,” he said. “So I am honored beyond words to receive this Congressional Gold Medal.”

Lemond said the honor isn’t his alone and belongs to every teammate, supporter, family member and to “all the extraordinary Americans whose courage and sacrifice made my life possible.”

Greatest U.S. cyclist who raced clean

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest award that a civilian can receive from Congress, which Congress initially awarded to Lemond in 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic delayed Lemond’s receipt of the Gold Medal until Wednesday.

Lemond was born in northern California and grew up in Reno, Nev., where he was graduated from Wooster High School in 1979 and soon after pursued his cycling dreams in Europe.

He is considered the greatest U.S. cyclist who did not resort to performance-enhancing drugs to become a champion.

Lemond’s final two wins came he was nearly killed when accidentally shot during a turkey hunt on his family’s ranch in northern California in 1987.

His 8-second margin of victory during the 1989 race is the closest in the history of the Tour de France, which covers more than 2,000 miles in the French Alps over 21 stages each summer.

It is one of the world’s most popular sporting events and its oldest and most prestigious cycling race.