Redistricting Duel Between California and Texas Ramps Up

The redistricting duel between California and Texas is unofficially on. 

Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law on Thursday a ballot measure to amend the California Constitution and allow a redrawn congressional district map to temporarily tilt five additional districts toward Democrats in 2026. The maneuver came in response to Governor Greg Abbott agreeing to redistrict the congressional delegation from Texas at President Trump’s request for five more Republican seats, a goal that is coming within reach.

Both strategies intend to add the same number of seats in the U.S. Congress for their respective parties by gerrymandering district borders to include or exclude voters by party. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that redistricting for partisan reasons was legal, leaving intact the Voting Rights Act rule that redistricting to split a minority vote was not. Though Texas Governor Abbott has promised to sign the legislation, he had yet to announce that he has.

“It’s not complicated,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, who served in the California Legislature as a senator and assemblymember for 14 years. “Trump’s trying to cheat in order to undermine the will of the people,” she argued. “The number one issue is that the President of the United States would try to rig a midterm election knowing that he’s so unpopular that he’s going to lose and democracy will win.”

In fact, the name of California’s ballot measure is “The Election Rigging Response Act,” or Proposition 50, a number that represents the 50 United States. In California, the redistricting will go to the voters to decide on November 4, in a nod to electoral procedure and constitutional norms. In Texas, redistricting only needs the governor’s signature. Democrats in the Texas Senate attempted to argue the bill to a standstill on Friday afternoon, but it passed that night. Abbott is expected to sign the bill into law rather than take up Newsom’s offer to abandon California’s redistricting if Texas does the same.

Redrawing the political map to determine congressional seats normally takes place every 10 years after the Census. In a number of states, including California, bipartisan independent redistricting committees attempt to take the red-blue gerrymandering out of the equation. On the local level, the County of Santa Barbara employed an independent committee to redraw the supervisors’ boundaries in 2021.

Megan Turley, who sat on that commission, said, “The goal of redistricting is to ensure that each voter has equal power to weigh in on issues that affect them at the ballot box. What is going on in Texas is antithetical to this goal, and puts other states and jurisdictions into an ethical bind — do they sit back and allow unethical redistricting to dilute the voting power of certain voters over others, or respond swiftly with imperfect countermeasures that will at least keep the playing field where it currently is?”

Her colleague Will McClintock found California’s move uncomfortable, but he thought the remapping in Texas was both unprecedented and profoundly undemocratic. “In that sense, Governor Newsom’s move feels less like an abandonment of principle and more like an emergency defensive tactic — a way to ensure California doesn’t cede representation in Congress simply because one side is willing to break norms.”

While Texas and California’s game of tit-for-tat might result in a draw, the potential of other red and blue states to act are being considered. Maryland, Illinois, and New York have Democrat governors and distant possibilities of gaining a collective five Democrat seats in the House of Representatives — but Maryland’s governor and Illinois’s legislature are uninterested, according to political watchers in the media, while it was unlikely New York could change its maps before 2026, which is when the midterms take place in November.

Among Republican-led states, Ohio’s map is to be redrawn by 2026, because the map drawn in 2020 had no support from the minority party, which is a state constitution requirement. That map resulted in 10 Republican seats and five Democrat seats, but new redistricting could affect two or three Democrat seats. Combined, Indiana and Missouri could have two or three seats in play, but Missouri’s Governor Mike Kehoe is said to have a lack of interest, and Indiana may be constrained by its constitution or legislature.

California’s ballot measure calls for the new map to affect the midterm election in 2026, often seen as the Democrats’ only chance to win back Congress, which has a narrow seven-seat Republican majority. For the next set of elections in 2028, the map would revert to the one that exists today.

Calling Newsom’s redistricting a “blatant power grab,” California GOP Chair Corrin Rankin said the ballot measure was “the very kind of backroom process Californians voted to abolish when they created the independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. Voters established the Commission to guarantee fairness and transparency, and Democrats just shredded it to protect their own power.

“This scheme will waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a rushed special election at a time when Californians are struggling with the cost of living, crime, and homelessness. It’s an abuse of taxpayer money and a direct attack on democracy in our state,” Rankin said, threatening a lawsuit to “fight this corruption.”

To that end, Republicans are getting a financial hand from Charles Munger Jr., according to Politico. The son of Charles Munger — of Dormzilla and Berkshire Hathaway fame, who died in 2023 — Munger Jr. supported independent redistricting in California, giving $12 million to the 2010 ballot measure establishing the commission. Other of his donations have gone to crisis pregnancy centers and Christian groups opposing LGBTQ+ rights. His spokesperson, Amy Thoma Tan, told Politico that Munger wished to “defend the rights of the voters of California to choose their politicians, not the other way around.” He’s given $10 million against Prop 50 so far, though Politico reports fully $20 million in coffers on both sides of California’s mapmaking attempt.

California will leave the final determination up to the voters, but so will Texas, said Hannah-Beth Jackson. “The new alliance in Texas assumes that the people who voted the way they did in 2024 will vote that way again in 2026. And that’s not necessarily the way that will happen,” Jackson observed.

“People are very unhappy with the state of the economy. And people are very, very unhappy with the way ICE is trampling the rights of citizens and noncitizens. These raids are targeting brown people, and a lot of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 were Latino voters in Texas. It’s not necessarily a given that these voters will ignore what Trump has been doing or the racism of his efforts.”