LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -The California legislature approved on Thursday a redistricting plan aimed at giving Democrats five more seats in the U.S. Congress, countering a partisan advantage President Donald Trump sought from a Republican move to redraw political maps in Texas.
California Democrats pushed their three bills through the state Senate and Assembly in a remarkable flurry of fast-track action, ahead of a Friday deadline to get the changes on the ballot in time for a special election on November 4.
The swift passage was a decisive victory for Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a possible 2028 White House contender whose national political stature has climbed as he led Democrats’ charge against what they decried as an attempted power grab in the Republican-led state of Texas.
“Time to fight fire with fire,” the governor wrote on X shortly after the legislature voted.
Newsom, who enjoys a Democratic super-majority in both houses of the California legislature, later signed the measure to put his redistricting plan up for popular vote.
If successful, it would neutralize the Trump-backed Texas bill designed to flip five Democratic seats to Republican control in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Republicans, including Trump, have openly acknowledged that the Texas effort is about boosting their political clout by helping to preserve the party’s slim U.S. House majority in the November 2026 midterm races.
That election already is shaping up as closely fought.
PRELUDE TO MIDTERM RACES
Democrats have characterized their bid to depart from California’s usual independent, bipartisan redistricting process – adopted by voters in 2008 – as a temporary “emergency” strategy to combat what they see as extreme Republican moves to unfairly rig the system.
“The decks are stacked against us, so what we need to do is fight back,” California Senator Lena Gonzalez, a joint author of the redistricting plan, said as the state Senate opened floor debate on the bill.
Democrats say more than 70% of their newly drawn congressional districts were adopted from maps used by the independent commission in formulating the current boundaries.
Republican Senator Tony Strickland objected, saying, “These maps were drawn behind closed doors.”
Within six hours, however, both houses had approved all three measures, voting along party lines to approve each bill in succession and sending it to the other body for its concurrence.
Unlike the California initiative, the newly drawn district lines in Texas would take effect without voter approval, though Democrats have vowed a court challenge to the Republican plan.
The Texas measure cleared a major hurdle on Wednesday when the state House of Representatives in Austin adopted it on a party-line vote of 88 to 52.
The Texas Senate is expected to pass the measure next. Both versions of the bill may then need to be reconciled before the legislation goes to Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has said he will sign it.
“Big WIN for the Great State of Texas,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
Democrats and civil rights groups say the new Texas map further dilutes the voting power of Hispanic and Black voters, violating federal law that forbids redrawing political lines on the basis of racial or ethnic discrimination.
BREAK WITH TRADITION
In pursuing mid-decade redistricting, both sides are breaking with a long-held political custom of generally altering political maps once every decade, following the U.S. Census to adjust for population changes.
Most Americans believe redrawing congressional lines for the sake of maximizing political gain, known as gerrymandering, is bad for democracy, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Former President Barack Obama weighed in on the issue this week, supporting the Democratic effort as a necessary short-term response to Republican overreach in Texas. But he said he remained uneasy about the long-term consequences.
Consideration of the Texas bill was delayed for two weeks after more than 50 Democratic state House members staged a walkout that denied Republicans the legislative quorum needed.
Their collective absence sparked extraordinary efforts by Abbott and other Republican leaders to pressure the Democrats to relent, including civil arrest warrants, the imposition of fines and threats to withhold their pay.
The Democrats finally returned to Austin on Monday, by which time their legislative boycott had galvanized Democratic leaders in other states, especially California.
Texas Representative Nicole Collier, one of the leaders of the Austin walkout, said the Republican plan she fought against was among the “most segregated maps that have been presented in Texas since the 1960s.”
The Texas-California clash may be just the start of a growing war over congressional district boundaries.
Other Republican-controlled states, such as Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Missouri, are moving forward with, or considering, their own measures, as are Democratic-led states such as Maryland and Illinois.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Stephen Coates)
Comments