SACRAMENTO, Calif (AP) — 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.
“This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing,” Newsom said at a press conference, pledging a campaign for the measure that would reach out to Democrats, Republicans and independent voters. “This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
Republicans, who have filed a lawsuit and called for a federal investigation into the plan, promised to fight the measure at the ballot box as well.
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.
"You move forward fighting fire with fire and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
Texas’ redrawn maps still need a final vote in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which advanced the plan out of a committee Thursday but did not bring the measure to the floor. The Senate was scheduled to meet again Friday.
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.
My one hope is that this eye-for-an-eye redistricting will eventually lead to a constitutional amendment to have all congressional districts drawn via some nonpartisan algorithm rather than by state politicians. Probably over optimistic of me, though.
My only qualm with that is that if you select an algorithm, it needs to be selected, which means that the people in control of that selection can decide what's non-partisan in the selection criteria.
I'm more in favor of defining properties that districts must have and then selecting a districting commission by lottery. Make it so you can't be fired for being on the commission, and pay people 20% over their wage for the time they're on the commission.
If an algorithm has an outcome that seems flagrantly incorrect, you can't subpoena it and ask about its reasoning. The courts are already geared towards handling complaints regarding how a commission handled its responsibilities.
Anyone with a sibling that has had to divide something equally to share it knows how to solve this. One group chooses the algorithm and the second group chooses which side they get to on.
The first group, who have the power to introduce bias disadvantaging one side cannot benefit from it, and worse, they'd hand the power to the second group. It forces the first group to choose a method with built in equality because the second group could force the first group to take the disadvantaged side.
this seems to assume a baked-in 2 party system I would prefer not to continue to plan around
In practice this would require the second group to basically have a switch that switches all voters' preferences. So I don't think that's gonna work here.
Unfortunately I don't think that's how algorithm development works, not if you want to make a fair one.
Not a US american so sorry if this is a stupid question, but why aren't these congressional districts the same as administrative districts?
How would you define an administrative district? It's likely similar I'd imagine, but not sure where your frame of reference comes from.
Well I don't need to, they are predefined administrative units. Take the federal state of Northrhine-Westphalia in Germany as an example:
In the US, after a census every 10 years, each state is allocated a number of House congressional districts based on population. The House has 435 members (not including non-voting members from territories like Puerto Rico). The number for any given state fluctuates each census, so predefined districts won't work.
One way to combat gerrymandering without a constitutional amendment is to increase the size of the House. It's set by statute and hasn't been changed since 1911.
Another is to use Iowa's redistricting method, which has appropriately boring maps: https://waynecountyelections.iowa.gov/global/maps/iowa_congressional_districts_82470.pdf
Ideally it makes sense to divide districts based on population. But the elections system in the US has so many flaws, it feels like optimizing at the wrong position.
I mean if you subsume the votes under the "state level" in a first step, wouldn't it be logical to go the next step subsume under county level (or whatever your administrative units are being called)?
Division based on population can never be stable because people are moving, so I feel this is the wrong metric in the first place.
Again I am not living in the US, so if I made some wrong assumptions please correct me. I don't know much about your election system.
The Iowa method is basically collecting the counties together into roughly equal population. But states get a lot of leeway in the exact methods.
(Aside: it's weird that the US uses that term in most states, because none of it was ever ruled by Counts. Although Louisiana does call them a "Parish" instead, which is a weirdly religious term for effectively the same thing.)
Increasing the size of the House would also increase the number of electoral college votes and would make it far less likely that there's a split between the electoral college and popular vote. So doing that and replacing first-past-the-post voting covers pretty much everything structurally wrong with the US election system.
It's equally likely that it will end with the US being carved into semi-official fiefdoms divided by faction as with the Guelphs and Ghibellines in medieval Italy.
Replace Guelphs and Ghibellines techbro A and techbro B, and yeah, sounds about right.