California Punches Back In Trump’s Redistricting War

California voters fired the first return shot from Democrats in a mid-decade congressional redistricting push by President Donald Trump, passing a ballot initiative on Tuesday that will enable the state legislature to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 elections.

After Texas Republicans followed Trump’s orders to eliminate five Democratic-held seats in the state, California will now be able to do the same after Proposition 50 passed. The initiative enables the state legislature, controlled by large Democratic majorities, to temporarily set aside the state’s nonpartisan redistricting process until 2030 and redraw districts on a partisan basis. The maps Democrats are considering would flip between four and five GOP-held seats into their column.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has presidential aspirations, led the charge to put Proposition 50 in front of voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. He billed it as a direct response to Texas’ mid-decade redistricting, naming the initiative the Election Rigging Response Act, and, critically, a way for Californians to weigh their disapproval of the second Trump administration.

“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said upon introducing the legislation that put the initiative on the ballot. “In just six months, Trump’s unchecked power has cost Americans billions and taken an ax to the greatest democracy we’ve ever known. This moment calls for urgency and action — that is what we are putting before voters this November, a chance to fight back against his anti-American ways.”

Big-name Democrats from former President Barack Obama to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped promote the campaign by arguing that Democrats needed to respond to Trump’s redistricting provocations or else his autocratic grip on Washington would tighten.

“Republicans want to steal enough seats to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years,” Obama said in an advertisement for the Yes campaign. “Prop. 50 could stop Republicans in their tracks.”

Proposition 50’s passage was not an assured outcome. Newsom and state Democrats needed to overcome California’s long-held support for good government reforms by convincing voters to set aside the constitutional amendment to create the nonpartisan redistricting commission in 2008 pushed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican at the time, and backed by voters with wide majorities.

Newsom raised over $100 million for the Yes campaign, swamping the No side, which received backing from Schwarzenegger and GOP donor Charles Munger. Other fundraising efforts by Republicans, like that of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, fizzled. Trump and national Republicans largely stayed out of the race.

The campaign offered a channel for the rage felt by California Democrats and independents at the apparent lawlessness of the Trump administration. With immigration enforcement and the National Guard swarming Los Angeles, deportation raids targeting rural agricultural communities, critical funds to the state frozen or cut and more threats of troop deployments to the Bay Area, the campaign offered a tangible way to fight back.

It also nullifies Trump’s biggest coup in his bid to save his increasingly unpopular presidency from the threat of future oversight.

Since regaining the White House, Trump has faced no pushback or oversight from the House, and little from the Senate, with supine Republicans in control. This has enabled his sweeping effort to consolidate autocratic control over the federal government and the country.

But Republicans have an incredibly slim five-seat majority in the House that they are likely to lose in the 2026 midterm elections — considering Trump’s extremely negative approval numbers and the public’s sour economic sentiments. One way Republicans could make Democrats’ effort to reclaim the House more difficult was to tilt the board, redrawing congressional district lines to flip Democratic seats to the Republican column. That’s why Trump launched the current mid-decade redistricting war.

On July 7, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, arguing, falsely, that Texas’ map was an illegal racial gerrymander for drawing too many seats for Black and Latino Texans to vote for candidates of their choosing. Abbott called a special session that was immediately derailed when Texas Democratic legislators fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum. Newsom launched his response campaign while the Texas Democrats were out of state. They returned afterwards, pointing to California’s response as a victory, and Republicans enacted a new map that eliminated three seats currently held by Democrats and increased the GOP lean of two others currently represented by Democratic congressmen.

Texas offered the biggest net gain for Trump in a redistricting fight. California was the only Democratic-leaning state that could respond in kind.

While California will now balance out Texas’ redistricting, other GOP states have already redrawn districts to eliminate Democratic seats or are thinking about doing so. Missouri and North Carolina each already voted to turn one Democratic seat into a GOP seat. Members of Ohio’s independent redistricting commission reached a compromise on a new map on Oct. 31 that would make two Democratic-held seats lean slightly further to the right. Other similar efforts are under consideration in Florida, Indiana and Nebraska.

Democrats have had little success outside of California in getting states they control to redraw their maps. The biggest reason is that these states largely use nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw congressional maps and the process to get around them can be even more cumbersome than in California.

With Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race on Tuesday, Democrats in the state are poised to be the next to respond. Democrats in the state legislature already voted to put an initiative before voters next year to set aside the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission. The legislature will need to vote one more time to do so. Then voters would need to approve an initiative next spring, and the legislature will need to quickly draw a new map.

New York Democrats are similarly considering putting an initiative before voters to set aside their nonpartisan districting process, but the rules for doing so in the state make it so no initiative can be put forward before 2027.

Illinois and Maryland are the only Democratic-run states without nonpartisan commissions. Their maps are, however, already heavily gerrymandered to favor Democrats. It is possible for Maryland to eliminate the state’s only GOP seat and Illinois to eliminate one or two GOP seats, but powerful Democrats in each state are currently resistant to doing so.

National Democrats hope that Proposition 50’s victory will have a “chilling effect” on GOP redistricting efforts ahead of 2026, Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin previously told HuffPost.

But if it does not, they can point to the success of Proposition 50 as evidence for other Democratic state leaders that the party can indeed fight fire with fire and win.