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.
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.