California Democrats Roll Out Map Designed to Flip Five GOP House Seats
“Opposition is already forming, including from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the politically moderate former GOP governor who championed the voter-approved commission and has vowed to ‘terminate’ gerrymandering.”
California Democrats submitted their proposed congressional map to the state legislature on Friday, unveiling a plan designed to reshape the balance of power in Washington. The redrawn districts are projected to give Democrats five additional seats in Congress — offsetting the gains Texas Republicans are pursuing through their own redistricting efforts.
California currently has 52 congressional districts, with Democrats representing 43 and Republicans holding just 9.
The new map will go before voters in November. If approved, Republicans would be left with control of just four districts in the state — less than 8 percent of the state’s congressional delegation. California may be a deep-blue state, but Trump still won the support of nearly 40% of its voters in 2024.
In a statement accompanying the draft map, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Executive Director Julie Merz wrote:
We strongly believe that this map serves the best interest of California voters, while also attempting to push back against the corrupt scheme occurring in Texas and other Republican-majority states where Republicans – doing the bidding of their DC party bosses – are considering adopting a clearly racially gerrymandered, partisan map at the expense of their voters.
…
Democrats cannot sit idly by while Texas Republicans and their DC party bosses attempt to steal congressional seats and rig the election in their favor, well before any votes have been cast. Unlike what Texas Republicans are attempting to do in letting politicians choose their own voters, we believe that voters should be able to decide who represents them.
KCRA-TV reported that the redraw targets the following five Republican-held districts: District 1 (Rep. Doug LaMalfa), District 3 (Rep. Kevin Kiley), District 22 (Rep. David Valadao), District 41 (Rep. Ken Calvert), and District 48 (Rep. Darrell Issa).
The new map faces several significant headwinds. First, California voters took redistricting authority out of politicians’ hands with Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 in 2010, creating the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC). The reforms stripped the legislature of its power to draw districts and handed it to the commission instead.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that California will hold a Nov. 4 special election, asking voters to temporarily return redistricting authority to the legislature for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles, after which control would revert to the ICRC. The proposed constitutional amendment is titled the Election Rigging Response Act.
The amendment contains a “trigger clause” that would void the measure if Texas were to withdraw its redistricting plans.
California, you have the power on November 4 to stand up to Trump and his lapdogs. pic.twitter.com/OTubnROghG
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) August 14, 2025
But a POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll of California voters released on Thursday found that “strong majorities in both parties prefer an independent panel draw the House district lines.” Respondents favored keeping the ICRC in charge of congressional redistricting by a “nearly two-to-one margin.” Only 36% of those surveyed support returning redistricting authority to state lawmakers.
Pollster Jack Citrin was not surprised by those results. He pointed out, “California has voted twice for this independent review commission not all that long ago. And there’s a lot of mistrust and cynicism about politicians and the Legislature. That’s reflected here as well.”
Second, the “California Supreme Court has interpreted the state Constitution to prohibit redrawing congressional districts between the decennial census, a process known as mid-decade redistricting.”
[Note: Under the Texas Constitution, mid-decade redistricting is allowed.]
The state legislature faces an August 22 deadline to approve the measure, but with Democrats holding supermajorities in both chambers, passage is expected.
National Republican Campaign Committee Chair Richard Hudson responded to the new map in a statement.
Gavin Newsom failed to solve the homelessness, crime, drug, and cost epidemics plaguing the Golden State. Now he is shredding California’s Constitution and disenfranchising voters to prop up his Presidential ambitions. The NRCC is prepared to fight this illegal power grab in the courts and at the ballot box to stop Newsom in his tracks.
According to Politico, “opposition is already forming, including from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the politically moderate former GOP governor who championed the voter-approved commission and has vowed to ‘terminate’ gerrymandering.”
Former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is spearheading a Republican campaign to oppose the redraw as well.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
I don’t see how these survive a court challenge. The governor of the state was dumb enough to go public and call this a retaliatory gerrymandering in no uncertain terms.
On what grounds could it be challenged? Yes, of course it’s a retaliatory gerrymander. What’s wrong with that? If the voters approve a constitutional amendment to allow it, then it will of course be allowed and state courts will have no grounds to overturn it. And if they don’t, then it won’t happen and it will never get to court.
There’s nothing in federal law that bans gerrymandering! Which is why Texas can do what it’s doing without any problem whatsoever, now that they’ve got their quorum.
There will be suits to challenge this maneuver; however, I expect it to survive, go to the voters, and, unfortunately, pass.
On what grounds could those suits be brought? You can’t claim it’s illegal to try to amend the constitution!
There is this the “California Supreme Court has interpreted the state Constitution to prohibit redrawing congressional districts between the decennial census, a process known as mid-decade redistricting.” Pretty sure they would have a good case to say you have to wait 5 yrs to do this which would defeat the whole purpose.
Um, you don’t seem to understand what a constitutional amendment is. Yes, the constitution currently says what it says. He knows that. That’s why he wants to amend it. If he succeeds, what can they say?
Is there any procedural difference in California between amending their constitution and passing legislation? This reads like the Democrats are trying to amend it with their “We will temporarily suspend the independent redistricting board for the next three elections and also we’re using this new gerrymandered map for the next election” plan. Amendment. Legislation. Thing.
Surely there is more involved than just a single public referendum.
On the grounds that this is a punitive gerrymandering designed to disenfranchise California voters for the actions of voters in another state.
There he is!!! Outhouse will never be lost because he can always be found on the wrong/evil side of every issue… EVERY …Single…Time
In which Democrats prove – again – that their only interest is in their own power. They couldn’t care less about America, or Americans.
Free advice- If you’re reasonably presentable don’t stand at a podium with a collection of misfits behind you.
That’s about all they have.
Newsome is such an asshole.
Yes. But, give him this. He’s so GOOD at it.
His buttplug has three holes and says BRUNSWICK.
Newsom is not “good at it.”
He’s unchallenged. Thirty years and SoiBoyGirl media never questioned him.
His four Xtwitter accounts are handled by Soy party trolls.
Most days he goofed on drugs – we’re talking Louis Vuitton designer-level psychotropics.
Is newscum doing prescription drugs to “stabilize” his personality? Wouldn’t be surprising, he did cocaine detox while back after he boffed his campaign manager’s wife.
He has major reading disability and barely survived undergrad. He doesn’t like to read things. His office staff must read documents for him and break them down into bullet point slides and explain the meaning to him. Then he sticks his finger in the air, to see which way the wind is blowing, and makes gut decision. Gov jerry brown had little respect for him, and didn’t value his input and left newscum out of meetings.
There he is!!! Outhouse will never be lost because he can always be found on the wrong/evil side of every issue… EVERY …Single…Time
He’s had a lot of practice…
Cool go for it. I suspect it will be rejected by voters. However the hypocrisy will have been fully on display. If CA and SR d/prog nationally are behind an effort that effectively tells 40% of the electorate ‘tough cookies’ it doesn’t matter were gonna have redistricting that reduces you to 8% of CD ….then absolutely no whining when Red States do the same. If the new ratio for % of CD to Statewide voting for minority political party CD is now arrived at by new CA Formula of ÷ by 5 (40% ÷5 =8% of CD) then there’s gonna be a whole lot of CD potentially pulled away from d/prog. No whining.
They will use other disqualifiers like “raaaaaaaaaacism” to stop it in red states.
Sorry, no whining allowed, not in any flavor.
They can try, but the courts are going to be very skeptical of that, especially if SCOTUS throws out the requirement for “majority-minority” seats.
It’s already happened in Alabama where they were flat out told by courts that they HAVE to have majority-minority seats on their map no matter what the lines look like.
Is this actively going to be challenged? I may have missed that.
Yes, that’s what’s coming before SCOTUS now. Federal law now says gerrymandering on racial grounds is forbidden except when it’s mandatory. And it’s almost impossible to predict in advance whether a given racial gerrymander is forbidden or mandatory. It’s ridiculous. In Alabama’s case SCOTUS upheld the current law, but there are more cases coming, and sooner or later it’s likely to be overturned.
Louisiana is going through this too; the central district court ordered it to racially gerrymander a district, so it obeyed the order, and now the western district (I think) has told it that it wasn’t allowed to do that. That’s likely to end up at SCOTUS too, unless SCOTUS overturns the whole thing first.
But other than that, there are NO federal bars whatsoever to gerrymandering. Only state bars. So Texas can do whatever it wants so long as it isn’t on racial grounds, and if California amends its constitution then it will be able to as well..
You don’t need it.
The hypocrisy is ALREADY on display, Mission accomplished.
The new ‘CA Math Formula for totes fair Reapportionment’ didn’t exist until now. Use it in every Red State to generate the same % of seats…golly gee since many Red States don’t even have 12 CD total to divvy up then in those States the minority d/prog just won’t have any CD. (8% for each CD would require a minimum of 12 CD to get even one CD) Sucks to be them. Massachusetts has done just that for 3 decades drawing their CD to lock out the minority party entirely from even one GoP majority CD. No whining today since they didn’t effectively criticize/cajole Massachusetts from doing it for 30 years. Nope no whining allowed.
That’s Democracy for you, 51% figures out how to get the %49
“California Democrats submitted their proposed congressional map to the state legislature on Friday”
It’s all kabuki.
They ain’t the “independent commission.”
They’re the REASON California has one.
Apparently, much like racism is overcome by more racism, threats to democracy are overcome by more threats to democracy.
Newsom: California don’t like the GOP election rigging by gerrymandering.
Also Newsom: So California will election rig by gerrymandering HARDER.
Absolute power mad buffoons.
The “Election Rigging Response Act”?
You mean the ERR Act?
To ERR is Newsom.
He meant ERA — Election Rigging Act.
He’s not shredding it, he’s proposing to amend it. Either the voters will approve the amendment or they won’t. Either way no shredding will be involved. And everyone gets to vote; so long as gerrymandering is allowed no one has a right to be drawn into a seat where their preferred party can win; CA Republicans will be no more “disenfranchised” than TX Democrats will be.
I expect this will fail and that’ll be the last we hear of it. But just in case he does manage to persuade the voters to approve it, Texas should preempt it. While Abbot has the legislature there, and voting for his current map, he should also prepare a second map that takes ten Dem seats instead of only five, and have the legislature pass a law that says if California redistricts before 2032, this map will automatically come into effect in Texas.
There’s a tiny ray of hope (or maybe just wishful thinking on my part) that the publicity generated with all the hoopla will draw greater public interest and awareness re how CD are apportioned among the States, the degree of gerrymandering that exists in some States v others/their own State and spur public pressure on Congress to make some reforms to the process to limit chicanery and perhaps replace any Federal Funding based more/less on total population with one based on # of US Citizens and lawful permanent residents which would obviously remove one perverse incentive for a State to want open borders/sanctuary.
Altering the VRA to specifically prohibit CD drawn based on racial/ethnicity considerations aka ‘majority minority’, to embrace/allow State Senate Seats on a County basis (need CT help on this as well) and to add a requirement to existing criteria for redistricting to have a roughly equal # of US Citizens per district say +/- 10%. within a particular State post Apportionment. That last one alone would overwhelm much of the current shenanigans in many areas.
If you mean allowing seats with widely different populations this would be unconstitutional. Counties are not the constituent components that form a state. They are creations of the state, subdivisions into which the state chooses to divide itself, and the state can create, abolish, and alter them at its whim. So it makes no sense to allow a state to deliberately divide itself into unequal subdivisions and then give the people of those subdivisions equal representation.
This is nothing like the US senate, because states are not subdivisions of the USA; the USA is a federation of states. The states are the base unit, not the union. And the unequal representation in the senate is the basis of the agreement that is the only thing legitimizing the USA’s existence.
No kidding, yet that’s how it worked from founding till what 1964? Meh no worries, we can fix that at the Article V convention among a host of other things.
Wasn’t the basis for the ruling in ’64 supposedly no longer allowing these County based seats due to arguments about ‘dilution’ of political power of the voters in larger population Counties v lower population Counties? Logically, it follows there should be an existing presumption that all districts within a particular State should have similar# of Citizens within them to pass muster to avoid ‘dilution’. Only Citizens can have the political power of their vote diluted and in some places they certainly do have dilution. I believe that Shelia Jackson Lee’s CD has less than 100K US Citizens while adjacent CDs have 2.5 to 3X that #. Seems pretty diluted in comparison.
From the founding until the 14th amendment states did all sorts of undemocratic things. Look at Rhode Island, until Dorr’s rebellion. That’s when SCOTUS ruled the Republican Guarantee clause is not justiciable, and it was up to the political branches to worry about whether RI’s form of government could be said to still be republican.
And from the 14th amendment until the Civil Rights era, again states got away with a lot of things that were clearly unconstitutional, because to a lot of people black people’s rights just didn’t matter.
Your argument about political dilution of voters’ strength is fair; and a case could be brought, relying on Reynolds v Simms, that the courts should require districts to have an equal number of voters rather than an equal number of people. You could use an estimate of eligible voters, but why not instead use actual number of registered voters, or even an estimate of actual voters, based on past turnout?
What I don’t think you can do is what you want, which is to use the number of citizens, whether they can vote or not. Either you use all people, as is done now, or you use some measure of voters.
I’d use Citizenship as the basis b/c it is a far more stable grouping than voter registration. Conceivably the day after the final lines are drawn and approved the previously unregistered could register which up ends the basis on which districts were drawn if they use registration.
Citizenship by contrast doesn’t change nearly much. Why couldn’t it be used? Either the issue of non dilution arises from ‘one man one vote’ or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then much of the argument used to invalidate County based State.Senate seats collapses. If it does then Citizens, who are the only universe lawful Federal votes can be drawn from, is a much better ‘proxy’ than registered voters b/c it builds in the potential for registration to change and it will change far more quickly/easily than Citizenship. Plus it keeps a good check on local/State chicanery b/c it relies on strict qualifications.
Finally it pushes the acknowledgement that Citizens are eligible voters and non Citizens aren’t. (Exceptions of age, mental infirmity or felony conviction aside). It causes average folks to become !ore aware of their local population demographics…’hey, we got how many Citizens v non Citizens here’. Which the mid decade Trump Census count will assist in revealing and publicising though almost certainly can’t be used for apportionment despite all the hoopla. Could potentially be used for future Federal funding to shift away from total population as basis for some funding to a formula based on Citizen population.
Good idea!
I look for an offset; Indiana and Tennessee can redistrict.
CA already gerrymandered to max by dems. 82% districts blue. One party rule. Newscum trying for 100%.
Drives Newsom bats because Massachusetts managed it and he didn’t. They already have slapfights over who has the “strongest gun laws in the nation.”
It’s not yet gerrymandered to the max, because it’s done by a commission that has to at least pretend to be independent. That’s why Newsom wants to amend the constitution to allow a one-off stronger gerrymander.
Past courts have already approved gerrymandering to assure black representation in congress, why not Democrats? Large numbers of Republicans are not represented in Congress, The BLM movement showed the capability of an unhappy populace.
“[T]he California Supreme Court has interpreted the state Constitution to prohibit redrawing congressional districts between the decennial census, a process known as mid-decade redistricting.”
Then, absent a repeal of the state’s constitutional mid-decade redistricting ban, how can Cali legally get around it any other way?
California is already maximally gerrymandered.
In addition it’s primaries have been reconstructed to eliminate Republican candidates.
California is, by law, the least democratic of all states.
The unironically named bill – his response IS election rigging.
Even NY got called on their radical disenfranchisement of voters and had to punt.
That should read FLIP FIVE MORE GOP HOUSE SEATS….considering Democrats have already gerrymandered CA to destroy as much of their opposition as possible. The spectacle of the Kings of gerrymandering crying that TX is rubbing their faces in Democrat tactics is hilarious.
Wow. It has the 1st District stretching from Oregon to just south of San Francisco. That’s even farther than the post-2000 apportionment that put my town of Turlock, in the center of California’s San Joaquin Valley, in a congressional district that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Nevada.
California under its Constitution has a group separate from the CA Legislature and Governor that sets the districts every 10 years and will do it again at 2030. This group setup is very liberal so that the districts are heavy Democrat. So breaking the CA Constitution because of TX is BS. In 24 the CA election went unlike most states as some districts kept going for weeks until the Democrat person won, which does not make a lot of sense with an Electronic Voting Machine.
CA has the most amended state constitution of the 50 states. All newscum needs is 50% plus 1 with special election? Its probably going to pass because TDS is strong there.
With Hispanics flipping towards Trump and with half of California being Hispanic, the whole state will be close to turning red. If Trump makes a big push in the midterms and holds a bunch of California rallies, that could make the difference.
A lot of districts that Democrats think are safe could turn out to be unsafe, and this redistricting effort, if it “succeeds,” will make ALL Democrat districts less safe. They will be spreading their majority thinner to try to get more districts.
There’s a good chance the whole thing will blow up in their face. Take California back from the commies!