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.
Republicans, who have filed a lawsuit and called for a federal investigation into the plan, promised to keep fighting it.
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.
In Texas, the Republican-controlled state Senate was scheduled to vote on a map Thursday night. 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.
Republicans and some Democrats championed the 2008 ballot measure that established California’s nonpartisan redistricting commission, along with the 2010 one that extended its role to drawing congressional maps.
Democrats have sought a national commission that would draw lines for all states but have been unable to pass legislation creating that system.
Trump’s midterm redistricting ploy has shifted Democrats.
That was clear in California, where Newsom was one of the members of his party who backed the initial redistricting commission ballot measures, and where Assemblyman Joshua Lowenthal, whose father, Rep. Alan Lowenthal, was another Democratic champion of a nonpartisan commission, presided over the state Assembly’s passage of the redistricting package.
Newsom on Thursday contended his state was still setting a model.
“We’ll be the first state in U.S. history, in the most democratic way, to submit to the people of our state the ability to determine their own maps,” Newsom said before signing the legislation.