redistricting fight

A handful of seats are all that keep Republicans in control of the House, giving President Trump untrammeled sway over, well, pretty much everything, from the economy to the jokes on late-night TV to the design of the Cracker Barrel logo.

It’s a number that’s both tantalizing and fraught, depending on your political perspective.

For Democrats, that eyelash-thin margin means they’re thisclose to regaining power and a political toehold in next year’s midterm election. All they need is a gain of three House seats. For Trump and fellow Republicans, it means their hegemony over Washington and life as we know it dangles by a perilously thin thread.

That tension explains the redistricting wars now blazing throughout our great land.

It started in Texas, where Trump pressured Republicans to redraw congressional lines in hopes of handing the GOP as many as five additional seats. That led California Democrats to ask voters, in a Nov. 4 special election, to approve an eye-for-an-eye gerrymander that could yield their party five new lawmakers.

Several other states have waded into the fight, assuming control of the House might be decided next year by just a few seats, one way or the other.

Which could happen.

Or not.

Anyone claiming to know for sure is either lying, trying to frighten you into giving money, or both.

“History is on Democrats’ side, but it’s too early to know what the national political environment is going to be like,” said Nathan Gonzales, one of the country’s top political handicappers and publisher of the nonpartisan campaign guide Inside Elections. “We don’t know the overall mood of the electorate, how satisfied voters [will be] with Republicans in power in Washington or how open to change they’ll be a year from now.”

A look back offers some clues, though it should be said no two election cycles are alike and the past is only illuminating insofar as it casts light on certain patterns.

(Take that as a caveat, weasel words or whatever you care to call it.)

In the last half century, there have been 13 midterm elections. The out party — that is, the one that doesn’t hold the presidency — has won 13 or more House seats in eight of those elections. Going back even further, since World War II the out party has gained an average of more than two dozen House seats.

In Trump’s last midterm election, in 2018, Democrats won 40 House seats — including seven in California — to seize control. (That was 17 more than they needed.) A Democratic gain of that magnitude seems unlikely next year, barring a complete and utter GOP collapse. That’s because there are fewer Republicans sitting in districts that Democrats carried in the most recent presidential election, which left them highly vulnerable.

In 2018, 25 Republicans represented districts won by Hillary Clinton. In 2026, there are just three Republicans in districts Kamala Harris carried. (Thirteen Democrats represent districts that Trump won.)

Let’s pause before diving into more numbers.

OK. Ready?

There are 435 House seats on the ballot next year. Most are a lock for one party or the other.

Based on the current congressional map, Inside Elections rates 64 House seats nationwide as being at least somewhat competitive, with a dozen considered toss-ups. The Cook Political Report, another gold-plated handicapper, rates 72 seats competitive or having the potential to be so, with 18 toss-ups.

Both agree that two of those coin-flip races are in California, where Democrats Adam Gray and Derek Tran are fighting to hang onto seats they narrowly won in, respectively, the Central Valley and Orange County. (The Democratic gerrymander seeks to shore up those incumbents.)

You really can’t assess the 2026 odds without knowing how the redistricting fight comes out.

Republicans could pick up as many as 16 seats through partisan map-making, Inside Elections forecasts, a number that would be reduced if California voters approve Proposition 50. Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, puts GOP gains as high as 13, again depending on the November outcome in California.

Obviously, that would boost the GOP’s chances of hanging onto the House, which is precisely why Trump pushed for the extraordinary mid-decade redistricting.

But there are many other factors at play.

One huge element is Trump’s approval rating. Simply put, the less popular a president, the more his party tends to suffer at the polls.

Right now Trump’s approval rating is a dismal 43%, according to the Cook Report’s PollTracker. That could change, but it’s a danger sign for Republicans. Over the past three decades, every time the president’s net job approval was negative a year from the midterm election, his party lost House seats.

Another thing Democats have going for them is the passion of their voters, who’ve been flocking to the polls in off-year and special elections. The Downballot, which tracks races nationwide, finds Democratic candidates have far surpassed Kamala Harris’ 2024 performance, a potential harbinger of strong turnout in 2026.

Those advantages are somewhat offset by a GOP edge in two other measures. Republicans have significantly outraised Democrats and have limited the number of House members retiring. Generally speaking, it’s tougher for a party to defend a seat when it comes open.

In short, for all the partisan passions, the redistricting wars aren’t likely to decide control of the House.

“Opinions of the economy and Trump’s handling of it, the popularity (or lack thereof) of Republicans’ signature legislation” — the tax-cutting, Medicaid-slashing bill passed in July — as well as “partisan enthusiasm to vote are going to be more determinative to the 2026 outcome than redistricting alone,” Amy Walter, the Cook Report’s editor-in-chief, wrote in a recent analysis.

In other words, control of the House will most likely rest in the hands of voters, not scheming politicians.

Which is exactly where it belongs.

It’s been more than 60 years since Utah backed a Democrat for president. The state’s last Democratic U.S. senator left office nearly half a century ago and the last Utah Democrat to serve in the House lost his seat in 2020.

But, improbably enough, Utah has suddenly emerged as a rare Democratic bright spot in the red-vs.-blue redistricting wars.

Late last month, a judge tossed out the state’s slanted congressional lines and ordered Utah’s GOP-run Legislature to draw a new political map, ruling that lawmakers improperly thumbed their noses and overrode voters who created an independent redistricting commission to end gerrymandering.

It’s a welcome pushback against the growing pattern of lawmakers arrogantly ignoring voters and pursuing their preferred agenda. You don’t have to be a partisan to think that elections should matter and when voters express their will it should be honored.

Otherwise, what’s the point of holding elections?

Anyhow, redistricting. Did you ever dream you’d spend this much time thinking about the subject? Typically, it’s an arcane and extremely nerdy process that occurs once a decade, after the census, and mainly draws attention from a small priesthood of line-drawing experts and political obsessives.

Suddenly, everyone is fixated on congressional boundaries, for which we can thank our voraciously self-absorbed president.

Trump started the whole sorry gerrymandering business — voters and democracy be damned — by browbeating Texas into redrawing its congressional map to try to nab Republicans as many as five additional House seats in 2026. The paranoid president is looking to bolster his party ahead of a tough midterm election, when Democrats need to gain just three seats to win a House majority and attain some measure of control over Trump’s rogue regime.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to Texas with a proposed Democratic gerrymander and perhaps you’re thinking, well, what about his attempted power grab? While your friendly columnist has deplored efforts to end-run the state’s voter-established redistricting commission, at least the matter is going on the ballot in a Nov. 4 special election, allowing the people to decide.

Meantime, the political race to the bottom continues.

Lawmakers in Republican-run Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio may tear up their congressional maps in favor of partisan gerrymanders, and Democrats in Illinois and New York are being urged to do the same.

When all is said and done, 10 or so additional seats could be locked up by one party or the other, even before a single ballot is cast; this when the competitive congressional map nationwide has already shrunk to a postage stamp-sized historic low.

If you think that sort of pre-baked election and voter obsolescence is a good thing, you might consider switching your registration to Russia or China.

Utah, at least, offers a small ray of positivity.

In 2018, voters there narrowly approved Proposition 4, taking the map-drawing process away from self-interested lawmakers and creating an independent commission to handle redistricting. In 2021, the Republican-run Legislature chose to ignore voters, gutting the commission and passing a congressional map that allowed the GOP to easily win all four of Utah’s House seats.

The trick was slicing and dicing Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, the state’s most populous and densely packed, and scattering its voters among four predominantly Republican districts.

“There’s always going to be someone who disagrees,” Carson Jorgensen, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party, said airily as lawmakers prepared to give voters their middle finger.

In July 2024, Utah’s five Supreme Court justices — all Republican appointees — found that the Legislature’s repeal and replacement of Proposition 4 was unconstitutional. The ruling kicked the case over to Salt Lake County District Judge Dianna Gibson, who on Aug. 25 rejected the partisan maps drawn by GOP lawmakers.

Cue the predictable outrage.

“Monday’s Court Order in Utah is absolutely Unconstitutional,” Trump bleated on social media. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?”

In Gibson’s case, the answer is her appointment by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican who would be considered a radical leftist in the same way a hot fudge sundae could be described as diet food.

Others offered the usual condemnation of “judicial activism,” which is political-speak for whenever a court decision doesn’t go your way.

“It’s a terrible day … for the rule of law,” lamented Utah’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who is apparently concerned with legal proprieties only insofar as they serve his party’s president and the GOP, having schemed with Trump allies in their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

In a ruling last week rejecting lawmakers’ request to pause her decision, Gibson wrote that “Utah has an opportunity to be different.”

“While other states are currently redrawing their congressional maps to intentionally render some citizen votes meaningless, Utah could redesign its congressional plan with the intention to protect its citizens’ right to vote and to ensure that each citizen’s vote is meaningful.”

That’s true. Utah can not only be different from other states, as Gibson suggested.

It can be better.

Latinos unleashed a political earthquake after voting for Donald Trump, who has long painted the country’s largest minority as an existential threat, in unexpectedly large numbers in the fall.

This swing to MAGA helped Trump win, kicked Democrats into the political wilderness, launched a thousand thought pieces and showed politicians that they ignore Latinos at their own risk.

Now, Latinos once again hold the power to make or break American politics, thanks to redistricting fights shaping up in Texas and California. And once again, both Democratic and Republican leaders think they know what Latinos want.

In the Lone Star State, the GOP-dominated Legislature last week approved the redrawing of congressional districts at the behest of Trump, upending the traditional process, to help Republicans gain up to five seats in the 2026 midterms. Their California counterparts landed on the opposite side of the gerrymandering coin — their maps, which will go before voters in November, target Republican congressional members.

Texas Republicans and California Democrats are both banking on Latinos to be the swing votes that make their gambits successful. That’s understandable but dangerous. If ever a voting bloc fulfills the cliche that to assume something makes an ass out of you and me, it’s Latinos.

Despite President Reagan’s famous statement that Latinos were Republicans who didn’t know it yet, they rejected the GOP in California and beyond for a generation after the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. When Hillary Clinton supporters whispered during the 2008 presidential race that Latinos would never vote for a Black candidate, they gladly joined the coalition that put Barack Obama in the White House. Trump increased his Latino support each time he ran — to the point that in 2024, a bigger proportion of Latinos voted for him than for any previous Republican presidential candidate — even though Democrats insisted that Latinos couldn’t possibly stomach a man that racist.

Many Latinos hate being taken for granted and don’t like the establishment telling them how to think. It’s classic rancho libertarianism, the term I created in the era of Trump to describe the political leanings of the people with whom I grew up: Mexican Americans from rural stock who simultaneously believed in community and individualism and hated the racist rhetoric of Republicans but didn’t care much for the woke words of Democrats, either.

Such political independence exasperates political leaders, yet it’s long been a thing with Latino voters across the U.S. but especially in Texas and California, where Mexican American voters make up an overwhelming majority of each state’s Latino electorate. As Republicans in the former and Democrats in the latter launch their initial redistricting volleys, they seem to be forgetting that, yet again.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), poses for a portrait in the Rayburn House Office Building in 2021.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

The GOP is hoping voters in South Texas, one of the most Latino areas of the U.S., will carry their Trump love to the 2026 congressional races. There, two of the three congressional seats are held by Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, despite a swing from most of the region’s 41 counties supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to just five going for Kamala Harris eight years later.

In their new maps, Texas legislators poured more Republican voters into those South Texas districts. They also configured new districts in the Houston area and central Texas so that Latinos are now the majority, but voters favored Trump last year.

But a lawsuit filed hours after the Texas Senate moved the maps to Gov. Greg Abbott for his approval alleged that all the finagling had created “Potemkin majority-Latino districts.” The intent, according to the lawsuit, was to dilute Latino power by packing some voters into already Democratic-leaning districts while splitting up others among red-leaning districts.

The legislators especially threw San Antonio, a longtime Democratic stronghold that’s a cradle of Latino electoral power, into a political Cuisinart. Three Latino Democrats currently represent the Alamo City and its metro area: Cuellar, Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar. Under the new maps, only Castro is truly safe, while Casar is now in a district represented by Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who has announced he will retire.

“We have three Hispanic-predominated districts in South Texas that we believe we can carve out for Republican leadership,” state GOP Rep. Mitch Little bragged on CNN this month. “It’s good for our party. It’s good for our state. And we need to ensure that Donald Trump’s agenda continues to be enacted.”

The thing is, fewer and fewer Latinos are supporting Trump’s agenda. In Reuters/Ipsos polls, his Latino support dropped from 36% in February to 31% this month. Only 27% of Latinos approved of his performance in a Pew Research Center poll released this month.

If this slide continues through next year and Latinos continue to reject MAGA, Texas Republicans would have done Trump’s gross gerrymandering and sparked a nationwide legislative civil war for nothing.

In California, Latino voters are also crucial to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting push — but Democrats are hoping they’ll be GOP spoilers, despite their recent tack to the right.

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley’s district would swing into Sacramento, picking up many more Latino voters than he now has in the majority white Eastern Sierra.

Proposed districts for Democrats Josh Harder and Adam Gray in Central California and Derek Tran in Orange County, all of whom the party is trying to buttress after they squeaked through in close elections in the fall, also include areas with more Latinos. A new congressional district in southeast L.A. County would probably be filled by a Latino Democrat.

Powerful Latinos in the state have already come out in favor of Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Response Act, and the governor is counting on them to convince Latino voters to approve the maps in November.

But all this shuffling is happening a year after those very voters jolted state Democrats. Although the party still holds a super-majority in Sacramento, Democratic legislators serve alongside the largest number of Latino GOP colleagues ever. The biggest swings to Trump happened in areas with larger Latino populations, according to a Public Policy Institute of California report published last month.

The president’s popularity is especially souring in California due to his deportation deluge — but whether Latinos will support redistricting is another matter.

Although 51% of Latinos support Newsom’s performance, only 43% said they would vote yes on his redistricting push — the lowest percentage of any ethnic group, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. The poll also found that 29% of Latinos are undecided on redistricting — the highest percentage of any group.

Such skepticism is the bitter fruit of a generation of Democratic rule in Sacramento, at a time when blue-collar Latinos are finding it harder to achieve the good life. Politicians blaming it all on Trump eventually created a Chicken Little situation that pushed those Latinos into MAGAlandia — and Newsom, by constantly casting redistricting as a necessary uppercut against Trump, is in danger of making the same mistake.

California Latinos have helped to torpedo liberal shibboleths at the ballot box more often than Democrats will ever admit. A Times exit poll found 45% of them voted to recall Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 while 53% voted yes on the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in 2008 even as a bigger majority voted for Obama. So egghead arguments about how redistricting will save the future of democracy won’t really land with the rancho libertarians I know. They want cheaper prices, and Trump isn’t delivering them — but neither is Newsom.

Latinos, as another cliche goes, aren’t a monolith. They could very well help Republicans win those extra congressional seats in Texas and do the same for Democrats in California.

But any politician betting that Latinos will automatically do what they’re expected to … remind me what happens when you assume something?

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he’s considering calling a special election on Nov. 4 to ask voters to approve new congressional maps in California in an effort to thwart President Trump’s plan to redistrict Republican-controlled states and hold onto power of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

“I think there’s a growing recognition in this country, not just with Democrats, independents, but also Republicans, that de facto the Trump presidency ends in November of next year if the American people are given a fair chance and a voice and a choice. We’ll take back Congress,” Newsom said. “The President of the United States recognizes that, so he wants to rig the game, wants to change the rules midterm.”

The governor has cast his call to gerrymander California as a response to Trump’s request for Texas and other states to reconfigure their maps to pick up seats in 2026.

“We’re going to respond in a transparent way, an honest way, but it’s in response,” Newsom said. “But I’m not going to sit back any longer in a position, a fetal position, in a position of weakness, when in fact California could demonstrably advance strength and that’s what we intend to do.”

Under Newsom’s plan, the California Legislature would need to take a vote to send a ballot measure to voters.

Newsom said voters would be given the maps of new congressional districts. A special election would be held on the first Tuesday in November asking voters to adopt the maps and allow the new districts to remain in effect through 2030 when California would return to the independent redistricting system that’s currently in place.

California’s Independent Redistricting Commission would craft new maps after the next census to be put into effect in 2032.

The governor said he’s in the early planning states of the process and doesn’t have an estimate yet for the price tag of a statewide special election. Newsom called the cost of preserving Democracy “priceless.”

“There are many local elections that first Tuesday already on the ballot, so it requires significant less resources than a special election that didn’t already have regular elections considered,” Newsom said. “So that could be very meaningful in mitigating the cost.”

Newsom promised more information in the weeks ahead.