Newsom Flirts with a CA Gerrymandering Plan

As I noted yesterday, Trump is putting pressure on Texas Republicans to engage in a mid-cycle redistricting round so as to try and gerrymander more Republican seats out of the state. As noted in the post, California’s governor has threatened retaliation. Politico reports: ‘Crazy hill to die on’: Newsom jolts California with bid to throw out House maps.

It’s a proposal capturing the imagination of a Democratic Party spoiling for another fight with Republicans and desperate to regain a foothold in Washington. This week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries privately huddled with members of the California delegation to discuss redistricting at the bloc’s weekly lunch. And in California, text threads are ablaze with discussions of what a redraw would look like, who would benefit, and how it would affect active efforts to recruit candidates and raise money.

But it’s also a longshot. And to many Democrats in Newsom’s home state, it’s a new obsession bordering on bizarre — or even anti-democratic.

“Trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish,” said Assemblymember Alex Lee, the head of the state Legislature’s Pprogressive Ccaucus. “By legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose.”

Or as one Democratic political consultant granted anonymity to speak freely put it, “The idea of taking away the power from the citizens and giving it back to the politicians — the optics of that is horrendous and indefensible.”

It is worth noting that California has an independent commission to draw its districts, and so any attempt to use the legislature to do as Newsom is discussing would require taking that power away. All of this is theoretically possible, but doing so would mean overturning a statewide referendum and risk alienating voters in his own party.

California’s current House delegation consists of 52 seats, 43 Democrats and nine Republicans. To use, as I did for Texas, the crude metric of the 2024 presidential vote to determine the partisan division in the state, California went ~59% for Harris and ~38% for Trump (leaving 3% for others). Using that, the Democrats should probably have 31 seats, and the Republicans have 20 with 1 third-party seat. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say the delegation should be closer to 32 Ds and 20 Rs if the House elections more accurately reflected the state’s actual partisan preferences.

What we see, like in Texas, is that the map is already biased towards the majority party pretty heavily. Yet again, we see maps being more important than voters. This is a pathology that runs throughout American politics and is not limited to helping only one party. There is a reason that most House races are not competitive. And there is a reason why I balk a bit when people argue that elections are as big a corrective in any given moment as our shared mythology thinks they are.* Especially not a corrective that is directly tied to a democratic feedback loop.

Also, like in Texas, exactly how many seats can be squeezed out of California is an open question.

So, I understand Newsom’s impulse: fight fire with fire.** But I also see a deeper problem here. If the way to supposedly save democracy is to make democracy even less democratic, then it does raise the question of what we are actually doing.

A lot of this feels a bit like people taking Red States and Blue States too literally. But as this post and the previous one notes, there are a lot of citizens in both parties in these states. I would prefer we find a way to make all those votes count, but our leaders seem to prefer making the votes of their opponents count less and less. Again, I understand the power politics of it all as well as the risk of unilateral disarmament, but let’s at least be honest about what is going on with proposals like this one.

I would note that this problem predates Trump, but that his brazenness about it makes it worse, and one of the ways it is made worse is by encouraging opponents, like Newsom, to adopt similar strategies of power. I likewise fear that the next Democratic president is going to try to govern via Executive Order the way Trump has, to the same degradation of democratic governance.***

I suppose, on the flip side, one could argue that House elections are already mostly predetermined, and so gerrymandering the map even further is just acknowledging that the system really isn’t the competitive, representative democracy our national mythos claims that it is, and so why not just play power politics and forget the democracy of it all.

For the record, I prefer to fight for greater democratization, not less. But I also fear we are on the pathway to less democracy, less real competition, and more raw power plays. Granted, if this is just a threat of tit-for-tat to get Texas to stand down, all well and good, I suppose; but if so, Newsom isn’t playing an especially strong hand.

*After all, if most House races are not competitive, the presidency can be won with a minority of the popular vote, and the Senate is tilted towards empowering the voters in low-population states, the notion that any given election is an actual representation of the public is simply not true.

**Not to mention, of course, he seems to be positioning himself for a run at the Democratic nomination for president in 2026, and so a lot of this may well just be posturing as a fighter.

***And yes, Trump did not invent EOs, but he has used them in new ways in terms of scope and in terms of number.