Gavin Newsom’s Retaliatory Redistricting Plan Is Good, Actually
California Governor Gavin Newsom is doing something extraordinary for a Democratic politician: He is proposing structural changes to address the threat of Trumpism. In interviews and public statements in recent weeks, he has threatened to gerrymander a number of GOP seats out of their control in the 2026 midterms if Texas goes through with a plan to wipe out four or five Democratic-leaning seats in that state.
In comments to reporters, Newsom explained that while he previously supported independent redistricting, “they’re playing by a different set of rules,” referring to Republican leaders in other states. “We can sit on the sidelines and talk about the way the world should be, or we could recognize the existential nature that is this moment,” he argued.
Some Democrats have embraced the threats to wipe out Republican seats in the Golden State if Texas tries to gerrymander a GOP majority in the House. “Gov[ernor] Gavin Newsom is right,” California Representative Ted Lieu said on Twitter on Wednesday. “If I were a Republican Member of Congress in California, especially one in a swing district, I would pray that Texas doesn’t engage in more gerrymandering.”
Others are less enthusiastic about the idea. “Gerrymandering is bad actually,” Alex Lee, a Democratic state lawmaker in California, wrote on Bluesky on Wednesday. “And anyone, even governors, who are proposing this are playing a dangerous game that’ll further undermine democracy and further the race to the bottom of fascism.”
Newsom has gone to great lengths to center himself in the Democratic Party’s post-2024 response to Trump—a feat made easier by the GOP’s antipathy towards both him and California in general. The president has publicly toyed with the idea of arresting him on dubious grounds; Speaker Mike Johnson even suggested earlier this spring that Newsom should be “tarred and feathered.” Some of Newsom’s efforts to chart a new course for Democrats have also received justified criticism along the way.
On this particular issue, however, the governor is unequivocally correct. Democrats should abandon their efforts to limit gerrymandering in states where they are likely to hold power for the foreseeable future. Wherever feasible, they should also roll back reforms that limit their ability to gerrymander in the first place. While it may be true that those who have backed the elimination of gerrymandering on a state-by-state basis did so with good intentions, it has had calamitous results for American democracy.
An analysis by the Brennan Center of Justice last December found that partisan gerrymandering was responsible for the narrow GOP majority in the House after last year’s election. Republican state legislators across the country drew maps that intentionally made things more difficult for Democrats: Competitive seats where Democrats were favored were broken up or watered down, while Republican-leaning districts were shored up with friendly voters to make them less competitive.
Newsom’s comments came as President Donald Trump is reportedly pressuring Republican leaders in Texas to redraw their congressional maps, hoping to further increase the number of likely House seats for the GOP. The Lone Star State’s delegation grew to 38 seats after the 2020 Census thanks to a decade of strong population growth. Twenty-five of those seats are currently held by Republicans; twelve seats are controlled by Democrats. (The 18th congressional district is currently vacant after the death of Representative Sylvester Turner on March 5.)
In a letter sent on July 7, the Justice Department formally notified Texas that it believed that four of the state’s districts—the 9th, 18th, 29th, and 33rd—amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The letter claimed that the districts were no longer constitutionally defensible after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the “coalition districts,” which are minority-minority districts created by counting white crossover voters, are not covered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Although the state’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 Petteway decision, that interest no longer exists,” Harmett Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, told state leaders. “Post-Petteway, the congressional districts at issue are nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutional racially biased gerrymandering past, which must be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas.”
The letter continues a trend of Republicans treating Voting Rights Act remedies for racial gerrymandering as equivalent to (or even worse than) actual racial gerrymandering. As I noted earlier this week, the Supreme Court is planning to re-hear a major case on Louisiana’s congressional districts this fall after punting it at the end of the court’s most recent term. The next round of oral arguments will likely center on the constitutionality of racial gerrymandering claims under the VRA and what courts can do to remedy them.
Even though the letter appears to be front-running an expected Supreme Court ruling, it is also somewhat pretextual. The New York Times reported last month that Trump personally pressured Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation to support another round of partisan redistricting, with the apparent goal of making it easier for the GOP to hold onto the House of Representatives in next fall’s midterms.
If Americans lived in a world where the courts could police partisan-gerrymandering claims, Newsom’s threats would be far less justifiable. Throughout the 2010s, federal courts threw out maps drafted by Republican legislatures in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin after concluding that their excessive partisan tilts violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority eliminated that option in a 2019 ruling that barred federal courts from hearing partisan-gerrymandering claims at all.
Congress could also end partisan gerrymandering in all fifty states by repealing the Uniform Congressional District Act, a 1967 law that mandates single-member districts. (They are not actually required by the Constitution, as many assume.) Lawmakers could instead enact a new law that adopts some form of proportional representation for House seats instead. I have long argued that this would be the ideal end state for the gerrymandering wars. Americans could finally end the two hundred and fifty year old mistake of letting politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around.
Those reforms are not imminent, however. Democrats obviously lack control of Congress or the White House right now to advance such legislation. Republicans also have no interest in supporting such a measure. Why would they? They can gerrymander to their hearts’ content in most of the states where they hold power, while their opponents have unilaterally disarmed their retaliatory measures in the ones where they don’t.
California is one of those states. In 2010, at the behest of a Republican donor, voters approved state constitutional amendments that made an independent commission responsible for redrawing the state’s congressional districts after each census. (A similar measure already gave it control over state legislative districts in 2008.) That would appear to take the power out of the hands of the state legislature, where it normally resides by default.
Newsom’s office could pursue two options to try to overcome that obstacle. One would be for the state legislature to pass new maps notwithstanding the amendment’s existence. Newsom could then try to convince the California Supreme Court that the amendment’s text only gave the commission control over the redistricting that is required after each census, and that it doesn’t prohibit mid-decade redistricting by the legislature outright. That could be a hard sell, but it is not as absurd an argument as “the president can commit crimes” or “birthright citizenship is optional.”
A second option—and perhaps the stronger one—would be for the state legislature to call a snap referendum on repealing the 2010 amendment within the next few months. California voters may be reluctant to repeal a good-governance reform that is designed to eliminate gerrymandering, and one could hardly blame them for some skepticism. Newsom would have to forcefully argue that it is necessary to combat a greater evil: Republicans using gerrymandering in other states to make it harder for the American people to check Trump’s power in the 2026 midterms.
After all, if Democrats had managed to eke out four more seats in last year’s election, Republicans would not have been able to pass an omnibus bill earlier this month that slashed Medicaid and other social programs to give tax breaks to billionaires and fund the mass-deportation squad that harassed Los Angeles this summer. Ending gerrymandering should still be a top Democratic priority, but the last decade has shown that the solution will only come through comprehensive reform at the national level. State-by-state efforts to strengthen American democracy have, paradoxically, only made it easier for anti-democratic forces to prosper.