more seat

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Republican legislative leaders completed their remapping of the state’s U.S. House districts on Wednesday, intent on picking up one more seat to help President Trump’s efforts to retain GOP control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

The new boundaries approved by the state House could thwart the reelection of Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, who currently represents more than 20 northeastern counties. The state Senate already approved the plan in a party-line vote on Tuesday.

Republicans hold majorities in both General Assembly chambers, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein is unable under state law to use his veto stamp on redistricting maps. So the GOP’s proposal can now be implemented unless likely litigation by Democrats or voting rights advocates stops it. Candidate filing for 2026 is scheduled to begin Dec. 1.

Republican lawmakers made the intent of their proposed changes crystal clear — it’s an attempt to satisfy Trump’s call for GOP-led states to secure more seats for the party nationwide, so that Congress can continue advancing his agenda. Democrats have responded with rival moves in blue states. A president’s party historically loses seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently need just three more seats to flip House control.

“The new congressional map improves Republican political strength in eastern North Carolina and will bring in an additional Republican seat to North Carolina’s congressional delegation,” GOP Rep. Brenden Jones said during a debate that Republicans cut off after an hour.

Democratic state Rep. Gloristine Brown, an African American who represents an eastern North Carolina county, made an impassioned floor speech in opposition, saying “You are silencing Black voices and are going against the will of your constituents.”

“North Carolina is a testing ground for the new era of Jim Crow laws,” Brown said.

Republican-led Texas and Missouri already have revised their U.S. House districts to try to help Republicans win additional seats. Democratic-led California reciprocated by asking the state’s voters to approve a map revised to elect more Democrats, and Jones accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of ramping up the redistricting fight.

“We will not let outsiders tell us how to govern, and we will never apologize for doing exactly what the people of this state has elected us to do,” Jones said.

North Carolina’s replacement map would exchange several counties in Davis’ current 1st District with another coastal district. Statewide election data suggests this would favor Republicans winning 11 of 14 House seats, up from the 10 they now hold, in a state where Trump got 51% of the popular vote in 2024.

Davis is one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives. Map critics suggested this latest GOP map could be challenged as an illegal racial gerrymander in a district that has included several majority Black counties, electing African Americans to the U.S. House continuously since 1992.

Davis is already vulnerable — he won his second term by less than 2 percentage points, and the 1st District was one of 13 nationwide where both Trump and a Democratic House member was elected last year, according to the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Davis on Tuesday called the proposed map “beyond the pale.”

Hundreds of Democratic and liberal activists swarmed the legislative complex this week, blasting GOP legislators for doing Trump’s bidding with what they called a power grab through a speedy and unfair redistricting process.

“If you pass this, your legacy will be shredding the Constitution, destroying democracy,” Karen Ziegler with the grassroots group Democracy Out Loud, told senators this week. She accused the state GOP of “letting Donald Trump decide who represents the people of North Carolina.”

Democrats said this map is a racial gerrymander that will dismantle decades of voting rights progress in North Carolina’s “Black Belt” region. Republicans counter that no racial data was used in forming the districts, and the redrawing was based on political parties, not race.

Based on last week’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a Louisiana redistricting case, the Democrats may lose this line of attack. A majority of justices appears willing to neuter a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that has protected political boundaries created to help Black and Latino residents elect favored candidates, who have tended to be Democrats.

State GOP leaders say Trump won North Carolina all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly last year — and thus merits more GOP support in Congress. Senate leader Phil Berger called it appropriate “under the law and in conjunction with basically listening to the will of the people.”

Robertson writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Gubernatorial hopeful Katie Porter said Friday that she mishandled a recent television news interview that called her temperament into question, but explained she felt the reporter’s questioning implied she should cater to President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Porter, an outspoken Democrat and former U.S. House representative from Orange County, said that she was “pushing back on” the reporter’s implication that she needed to be more temperate politically.

“I think Trump is hurting Californians,” said Porter, speaking at the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento. “I am not going to sell out our values as a state for some short-term political gain to try and appease people who are still standing and still supporting what this president is doing as he is trampling on our Constitution.”

Porter came under fire last week for snapping at the CBS reporter and threatening to end the interview. A second video has since emerged of Porter cursing at a young staffer who walked behind her during a video conference in 2021.

Porter, who was speaking as part of the policy center’s California Leaders Speaker Series, said she apologized “in real time” to her staffer.

“It was inappropriate,” she said. “I could have done better in that situation and I know that. I really want my staff to understand that I value them.”

After the videos emerged, several of Porter’s rivals criticized her behavior, including former state Controller Betty Yee, who said she should drop out of the race.

Marisa Lagos, a correspondent with KQED radio who moderated Friday’s discussion, asked if Porter felt any of the blow back was unfair, especially given Trump’s mannerisms.

Trump has a long history of belittling or targeting journalists, continually accusing them of being the “enemy of the people” and, during his 2016 presidential campaign, mocking the appearance of a disabled reporter with a congenital joint condition.

“Let me just say, Donald Trump should not be anyone’s standard for anything,” Porter said. “From how to use self-tanner to how to deal with the press, that is not the benchmark.”

Porter said she would work to demonstrate throughout the rest of her campaign that she has the right judgment to serve as governor.

“I think we all know that those were short videos that were clipped, there is always a larger context, but the reality is every second of every minute I am responsible for thinking about how to lead California and do my best,” she said.

Throughout the discussion Friday Porter also shared her support for Proposition 50, a ballot measure that would change congressional district boundaries and likely shift five more seats to Democrats in the U.S House of Representatives. The measure, which will be on the Nov. 4 statewide ballot, was drafted to counteract a redistricting plan in Texas intended to give Republicans more seats.

Lagos asked Porter how she would respond to residents who fear they’re being disenfranchised, especially those from rural areas.

Porter said she grew up in a rural area and wanted rural Californians to feel heard. But she said California was approaching redistricting in a different way than Texas by giving residents the opportunity to vote on it.

“It’s a question being put to each Californian about what they want to do in this political moment,” she said. “Circumstances were one way, and we had one policy, but the world has changed — in light of that, what do you as a Californian want to do about that?”

During a question-and-answer round at Friday’s event, a student referenced legislation on antisemitism and asked for Porter’s thoughts on whether criticizing Israel counted as antisemitism.

Porter said it was a complex issue but that criticizing Israel was not automatically antisemitic.

“There are plenty of people in Israel who criticize Israeli policy,” she said. “There are plenty of people around the world who don’t like Donald Trump and criticize (the United States) all the time. There is a right to criticize policy.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri Republicans handed President Trump a political victory Friday, giving final legislative approval to a redistricting plan that could help Republicans win an additional U.S. House seat in next year’s elections.

The Senate vote sends the redistricting plan to Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe for his expected signature to make it law. But opponents immediately announced a referendum petition that, if successful, could force a statewide vote on the new map.

“This fight is not over. Missouri voters — not politicians — will have the final say,” said Elsa Rainey, a spokesperson for People Not Politicians, which is leading the referendum effort.

U.S. House districts were redrawn across the country after the 2020 census to account for population changes. But Missouri is the third state to take up mid-decade redistricting this year in an emerging national battle for partisan advantage ahead of the midterm elections.

Republican lawmakers in Texas passed a new U.S. House map last month aimed at helping their party win five additional seats. Democratic lawmakers in California countered with their own redistricting plan aimed at winning five more seats, but it still needs voter approval. Other states could follow with their own redistricting.

Each seat could be critical, because Democrats need to gain just three seats to win control of the House, which would allow them to obstruct Trump’s agenda and launch investigations into him. Trump is trying to stave off a historic trend in which the president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections.

Republicans currently hold six of Missouri’s eight U.S. House seats. The revised map passed the Republican-led state House earlier this week as the focal point of a special session called by Kehoe that also includes a proposal making it harder for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments to win voter approval.

The Republican-led Senate passed both measures Friday after changing the chamber’s rules, then shutting off Democratic opponents.

Kehoe promoted the reshaped districts as a way to amplify “Missouri’s conservative, common-sense values” in Washington.

Trump had pressed Missouri officials to act, asserting on his social media site earlier this week that the Senate “must pass this Map now, AS IS, to deliver a gigantic Victory for Republicans.”

Missouri’s revised map targets a seat held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver by shaving off portions of his Kansas City district and stretching the rest of it into Republican-heavy rural areas. The plan reduces the number of Black and minority residents in Cleaver’s district, partly by creating a dividing line along a street that has served as a historical segregation line between Black and white residents.

Cleaver, who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor, has served in Congress for over 20 years. He won reelection with over 60% of the vote in both 2024 and 2022 under districts adopted by the Republican-led state Legislature after the 2020 census.

Cleaver has said he plans to challenge the new map in court and seek reelection in 2026, regardless of the shape of his district.

Cleaver’s revised Kansas City district would stretch from near the city’s St. James United Methodist Church — which Cleaver once led — 180 miles southeast to include another United Methodist church in rural Vienna. In the neighborhood around Cleaver’s hometown church, where his son is now pastor, about 60% of the residents are Black or a mix of Black and another race, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. By contrast, the area around Vienna has just 11 Black residents out of nearly 2,500 people.

Democratic state Sen. Barbara Washington of Kansas City, who described Cleaver as her longtime pastor, said the new map “erases the voice of my community.”

“Carving up Kansas City and silencing our constituents is terrible,” Washington said.

Kansas City resident Roger C. Williams Jr., a 79-year-old former middle-school principal, said the effort to reshape congressional districts reminds him of the discrimination he witnessed against Black residents while growing up in Arkansas.

“What Republicans are doing now in the state of Missouri is they’re taking me back to a time when I, or people that looked like me, would not have an opportunity, because they wouldn’t have a voice,” he said.

Republican lawmakers said little during Senate debate. But sponsoring state Rep. Dirk Deaton, a Republican, has said the new congressional map splits fewer overall counties and municipalities into multiple districts than the current one.

“It is a better map for the state of Missouri,” Deaton told a Senate committee Thursday. “By really every metric I look at, I feel that way.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Mo., and John Hanna in Topeka, Kan., contributed to this report.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. —  Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe is calling Missouri lawmakers into a special session to redraw the state’s U.S. House districts as part of a growing national battle between Republicans and Democrats seeking an edge in next year’s congressional elections.

Kehoe’s announcement Friday comes just hours after Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a new congressional voting map designed to help Republicans gain five more seats in the 2026 midterm elections. It marked a win for President Trump, who has been urging Republican-led states to reshape district lines to give the party a better shot at retaining control of the House.

Missouri would become the third state to pursue an unusual mid-decade redistricting for partisan advantage. Republican-led Texas took up the task first but was quickly countered by Democratic-led California.

Kehoe scheduled Missouri’s special session to begin Sept. 3.

Missouri is represented in the U.S. House by six Republicans and two Democrats — Reps. Wesley Bell in St. Louis and Emanuel Cleaver in Kansas City. Republicans hope to gain one more seat by reshaping Cleaver’s district to stretch further from Kansas City into suburban or rural areas that lean more Republican.

Some Republicans had pushed for a map that could give them a 7-1 edge when redrawing districts after the 2020 census. But the GOP legislative majority ultimately opted against it. Some feared the more aggressive plan could be susceptible to a legal challenge and could backfire in a poor election year for Republicans by creating more competitive districts that could allow Democrats to win three seats.

Republicans won a 220-215 House majority over Democrats in 2024, an outcome that aligned almost perfectly with the share of the vote won by the two parties in districts across the U.S., according to a recent Associated Press analysis. Although the overall outcome was close to neutral, the AP’s analysis shows that Democrats and Republicans each benefited from advantages in particular states stemming from the way districts were drawn.

Democrats would need to net three seats in next year’s election to take control of the chamber. The incumbent president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterm elections, as was the case for Trump in 2018, when Democrats won control of the House and subsequently launched investigations of Trump.

Seeking to avoid a similar situation in his second term, Trump has urged Republican-led states to fortify their congressional seats.

In Texas, Republicans already hold 25 of the 38 congressional seats.

“Texas is now more red in the United States Congress,” Abbott said in a video he posted on X of him signing the legislation.

In response to the Texas efforts, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a November statewide election on a revised U.S. House map that gives Democrats there a chance of winning five additional seats. Democrats already hold 43 of California’s 52 congressional seats.

Newsom, who has emerged as a leading adversary of Trump on redistricting and other issues, tauntingly labeled Abbott on X as the president’s “#1 lapdog” following the signing.

Voting rights groups filed a lawsuit this week ahead of Abbott’s signing the bill, saying the new map weakens the electoral influence of Black voters. Texas Democrats have also vowed to challenge the new map in court.

The redistricting battle could spread to other states. Republicans could seek to squeeze more seats out of Ohio, where the state constitution requires districts to be redrawn before the 2026 elections.

Republican officials in Florida, Indiana and elsewhere also are considering revising their U.S. House districts, as are Democratic officials in Illinois, Maryland and New York.

In Utah, a judge recently ordered the Republican-led Legislature to draw new congressional districts after finding that lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering. Republicans have won all four of Utah’s congressional seats under the map approved by lawmakers in 2021.

Lieb and DeMillo write for the Associated Press. DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Ark. AP journalist Jim Vertuno contributed from Austin, Texas.

Gov. Gavin Newsom made a ballsy threat this week to Texas legislators who are trying to gerrymander voting maps in favor of Republicans.

“Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California, and they will pay that price,” Newsom said. “They’ve triggered this response. And we’re not going to roll over, and we’re going to fight fire with fire.”

The “we” in that sentence is you, California voters, who may soon be asked to fix the Texas menace via the ballot box. If Newsom has his way, voters in November would face some version of an if/then question: “If Texas cheats on their voting maps, then (and only then) should California cheat on ours?”

In these days of creeping authoritarianism, it’s a fair query, but also one rife with personal interests and risks large enough to remake American democracy, or even inadvertently crush it.

But such is the state of our union that even those determined to preserve it are ready to throw out its basic tenets — myself included, sort of — and cause a national kerfuffle by considering remaking voting maps to supposedly benefit, if not a party, democracy as a whole.

“This is something that we have just never seen before, right?” Mindy Romero told me Tuesday. She’s an assistant professor and the founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Romero is against gerrymandering, but also agrees that we are in “unprecedented times,” a phrase that doesn’t seem to do justice to the daily trampling of democratic safeguards by our president.

Most of you are aware by now that the Texas Legislature, allegedly after pressure from President Trump, is contemplating redrawing its voting maps in the hopes of scooping up more seats for Republicans in Congress during the 2026 midterms — the very election that Democrats are praying will deliver them control of at least one chamber.

With the possibility that this Texas two-step could hand Trump an even more solidly compliant Congress, Newsom has come up with a plan to gerrymander our own maps. But to make it (hopefully) legal, he needs voters to go along with it because this ain’t Texas, and we don’t ignore rules. We bend them.

Whoever thought redistricting could be this exciting? But stay calm, redistricting nerds: It remains boring to the majority of voters, which is both the problem and the brilliance of the plan — you have to engage voters, but also not so much that they think too deeply.

The difference between Texas and California is our ballot initiative process, which would ultimately make voters responsible for any gerrymandering here. In Texas, it’s backroom stuff.

But will voters go for it? For many, it will come down to simple choices that miss the complexity of what is being asked: California vs. Texas, Newsom vs. Trump, democracy vs. authoritarianism.

Romero warns that once you smash a norm, even for a virtuous reason, it’s hard to get it back. She worries that despite Newsom’s claim that the rigged maps would disappear in 2030, the gerrymandering might remain.

California has one of the best systems in the country right now for nonpartisan redistricting, with an independent commission that draws lines without regard to party.

It was put in place because decades of gerrymandering left voters disenchanted.

In the 1980s, political icon Phillip Burton allegedly wrangled an infamous gerrymander that still shows just how bad things could be. He did it in part to protect the seat of his brother, John Burton ( a colorful fellow who served in both the state Legislature and Congress before becoming chair of the California Democratic Party) creating a district that wound around the Bay Area in a nonsensical fashion to scrape up the necessary votes.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Phillip Burton described that questionable territory to the Washington Post at the time. “It curls in and out like a snake.”

That was just the way business was done before our redistricting commission was put in place in 2008, with a hefty push by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who remains a vocal critic of gerrymandering and who has vowed to fight Newsom’s plan.

But that nonpartisan system was hard won, and in reality, neither party really loved the idea.

“We’ve gone through this and in cooler times,” Romero pointed out. “The Democrats and the Republicans in California did not want independent redistricting. Let’s make that clear. But a lot of people came together and worked towards this.”

So while any upcoming ballot measure will likely focus on the righteousness of fighting fire with fire, it’s also true that the Democratic party and some Democratic politicians would hope to reap personal gain from such a vote.

As much as this might be about saving democracy, politics is always about personal and party gain. Some California state legislators would surely desire to win a newly drawn seat in Congress. And, of course, there are Newsom’s political ambitions.

“It’s really difficult to disentangle people that may be sincerely scared for our democracy” from those “that may be jumping on this, seeing it as a political opportunity. And I think we have to be really honest about that,” Romero said.

That’s the choice that voters will ultimately be asked to make.

But we also can’t ignore the precarious nature of the times, and the reality that our checks and balances are disintegrating. Do we save election integrity and maybe risk democracy, or try to save democracy and risk election integrity?

Two paths lead into the dark. Do voters follow Newsom or Trump?