SACRAMENTO, Calif (AP) — California voters will decide in November whether to approve a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats next year, after Texas Republicans advanced their own redrawn map to pad their House majority by the same number of seats at President Donald Trump’s urging.
California lawmakers voted mostly along party lines Thursday to approve legislation calling for the special election. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has led the campaign in favor of the map, then quickly signed it — the latest step in a tit-for-tat gerrymandering battle.
“This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing,” Newsom said at a press conference, pledging a campaign for the measure that would reach out to Democrats, Republicans and independent voters. “This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
Republicans, who have filed a lawsuit and called for a federal investigation into the plan, promised to fight the measure at the ballot box as well.
California Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican minority leader, said Trump was “wrong” to push for new Republican seats elsewhere, contending the president was just responding to Democratic gerrymandering in other states. But he warned that Newsom’s approach, which the governor has dubbed “fight fire with fire,” was dangerous.
"You move forward fighting fire with fire and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
Texas’ redrawn maps still need a final vote in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which advanced the plan out of a committee Thursday but did not bring the measure to the floor. The Senate was scheduled to meet again Friday.
After that, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature will be all that is needed to make the map official. It’s part of Trump’s effort to stave off an expected loss of the GOP’s majority in the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections.
Are all of these the same population size? That is roughly what our districts are, partitions of our populace into ~equal regions. Our nearest second level partition would be counties, which are drawn based on characteristics that largely remained static since their creation (1600s). Districts are generally redrawn every 10 years, but well… here we are.
In theory, districts are supposed to be race blind, and group together people based on rough location. But they don’t necessarily need to be the least complex shapes (hexagons), because that generally isn’t how humans have settled in areas. Again, in theory it was meant to capture groupings of people who would want or deserve similar representation but aren’t optimally clumped together. Instead, both sides have abused the lack of simple shapes rule to really fuck with representation. In particular, these last 20 years have seen the worst gerrymandering abuses because computing power progress made it feasible to gerrymander with ease. In theory past it has generally been held that redistricting happens every 10 years, so the middle of every third president.