By Richard Hernandez and Mark Gutglueck
It does not appear that Governor Gavin Newsom nor his Democratic loyalists in the California Legislature will target either of the Republican members of Congress for removal with the virtually unheard of plan to redistrict the Golden State’s political map to reduce the number of the Republican delegation to Congress from its current nine to four.
The genesis for the California redistricting effort, which was whispered about very early this month but which was taken up with a renewed sense of urgency this week is a plan by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature and that state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in response to a request by President Donald Trump to redraw the Lone Star State’s political map mid-decade to ensure that Texas has five more congressional district seats that favor the Republicans than it now does, thus greatly increasing the chances that there will be five fewer Democrats and five more Republicans from Texas in the House of Representatives after the mid-term 2026 election.
Doing something like that in Texas is relatively easy, as the formulation of voting districts and their timing is left up to the legislature there. Historically, in the United States, at least since the mid-19th Century, presidents in power have a tendency to start their terms with a majority in one or both houses of Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate – and to see that advantage diminish in the mid-term election two years later. There are multiple examples of U.S. presidents who had comfortable or even commanding majorities in both houses during their initial tenure in office but saw their party lose its majority in one or both of the county’s legislative bodies, creating administrative challenges as they were unable to obtain passage of bills they considered key to their agendas. In January, at his second inaugural following four years out of office, Donald Trump took office with narrow a narrow 220-to-215 Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a 53-Republican to 45-Democrat/2-Independent breakdown in the Senate. The Trump Administration-backed redistricting ploy in Texas appears aimed at preserving the Republican legislative advantage in the face of what is expected to be a minor migration of support away from the Republicans in the November 2026 election.
Yesterday, in the Little Tokyo District of Los Angeles, at the Japanese American National Museum, Governor Newsom, a Democrat, announced and unveiled some remarkably intricate details with regard to a redistricting plan for California which he believes will counterbalance the removal of Democratic officeholders/addition of Republican officeholders from and to the Texas Congressional Delegation by the removal of Republican officeholders/addition of Democratic officeholders from and to the California Congressional Delegation.
Newsom, who will be termed out of office as governor in 2026 and has unmistakable intentions to capture the Democratic nomination for president in 2028 and thereby become the 48th President of the United States in the November 7, 2028 election, sought to use the controversy over the Republicans’ manipulation of the redistricting process in Texas to demonstrate that he is no less strong-willed than either Donald Trump or Governor Abbott in standing up for his party by using the reach, power and privilege of rank he possesses as governor to engage in barefaced gerrymandering that is no less bold than that of his Texas counterpart, and shamelessly counter a radical political manipulation with political maneuvering that is every bit as extreme.
President Trump has no respect for the conventions of governance, Newsom said. The nation’s chief executive “doesn’t just play by a different set of rules, he doesn’t believe in the rules,” Newsom charged during his Little Tokyo speech. “As a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we have got to meet fire with fire, and we’ve got to be held to a higher level accountability.”
That higher level of accountability, Newsom said, consists of loading the political dice with the same degree of skill as what the Republicans do.
With philosophical debates about what is right and wrong and whether gerrymandering the state’s electoral districts to favor his party in the rearview mirror, Governor Newsom informed the crowd present and the rest of the world that California will sponsor a ballot initiative asking the state’s voters to authorize a redrafting of the states congressional districts in time to complete the redistricting for the midterm 2026 elections. Built into Newsom’s speech was the assumption that the redistricting plan that was to be offered would be approved overwhelmingly by the state’s voters, who accepted, as he did, that it was foursquare necessary to counter the gerrymandering President Trump and the Republicans are now engaged in down in Texas and which may soon involve redistrictings elsewhere.
Newsom’s announcement of the ballot initiative glossed over – or actually ignored – that what he was embarking on was far more complicated and involved than what was to take place in Texas and would prove many times more expensive.
Unlike Texas, California cannot just leave it to the legislature to snap its collective fingers and redraw the state’s political maps. In 2010, a coterie of political do-gooders, many of which were outright aligned with the Democratic Party – Common cause, the League of Women Voters, the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, San Diego Tax Fighters, the American Association of Retired People, the National Federation of Independent Businesses – bankrolled by Charles Munger Jr. qualified Proposition 20 for that year’s ballot and succeeded in getting it passed. Proposition transferred congressional redistricting authority from the California State Legislature and the governor to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. One of the provisions of the change is that for the governor or legislature to reassume redistricting authority, any redistricting must be approved by the state’s voters.
It is estimated that holding a special election to pass the redistricting plan Newsom is drawing up will cost in the neighborhood of $200 million to conduct.
The Sentinel has learned that Governor Newsom and his advisors have set their sights on five specific Republican congressman, based primarily upon practical considerations relating to the boundaries of their current districts and proximity to neighboring districts with sufficient concentrations of Democrat voters who, if incorporated into the targeted officeholders’ districts, would create demographics favorable to the Democrats, virtually ensuring a challenging Democratic candidate’s victory in November 2026.
Of note is that while three of those targeted Congressman can be cataloged as Trump supporters or die-hard Trump supporters, two of those targets have evinced political orientations along certain lines that are not embraced by the current administration.
Those California Congressmen who Newsom is intent on ousting next year are Representative Doug LaMalfa in California’s 1st Congressional District, Representative Kevin Kiley in the 3rd Congressional District Representative David Valadao in the 22nd Congressional District, Representative Ken Calvert in the 41st Congressional District and Representative Darrell Issa in the 48th Congressional District.
Kiley has authored a bill that would prohibit all states from engaging in mid-decade congressional redistricting.
His legislation, if passed, he said would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”
But now, with the Democratic Party looking to counter what Donald Trump is attempting to do in Texas with Abbot’s assistance by engaging in gerrymandering of their own, he has not gotten anyone, Republican or Democrat, to co-sponsor the bill. Newsom does not want to cooperate with Kiley by getting a Democrat or two to sign onto his approach, and is instead looking to take him out of office.
Newsom’s animus toward Valadao is even more baffling.
Valadao is one of only a handful of anti-Trump Republicans in Congress. With several of the anti-Trump Republicans who were in place during the last Congress – such as Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinsinger of Illinois, who were defeated and chose not to seek reelection, respectively – Valadao is one of just two current Republican Congressmen to have voted for Trump’s impeachment following the January 6, 2021 Capitol siege. Newsom and his fellow and sister Democrats in the state legislature are determined to blast Valadao out of office.
It is not as if the Congressional map in California has not already been gerrymandered.
Of California’s total 23,206,519 registered voters, 10,396,792 or 44.8 percent are Democrats, while 5,896,203 or 25.41 percent are Republicans. Those who have no party affiliation number 5,336,441 or 23 percent, a number not terribly far off from that of the Republicans. The remaining 1,577,083 voters or 6.8 percent are members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom or other more obscure parties. Despite comprising more than one-quarter of the state’s voters, the Republicans hold nine of the total 52 House seats in California’s congressional delegation, while the Democrats claim 43. In this way, California’s electoral map has already been set so that the Republicans are represented at a rate in the House of Representatives – 17.31 percent – well below the 25.41 percent of the voters they constitute.
The new map Governor Newsom is promoting would supersede the one the state’s supposedly independent redistricting commission established, an arrangement that was “intended” to keep either the Democrats of the Republicans from having an edge in how those overseeing the government was composed.
Republicans across California are decrying what Newsom is doing – pushing the state Legislature to approve a precedent-setting November special election to ensure that the Democratic-to-Republican ratio in California’s Congressional delegation is even more lopsided than it already is – as absurdly unfair.
Congressman Doug LaMalfa intoned that this is “an absolutely ridiculous gerrymander.”
Republicans noted that if Newsom succeeds, Republicans will see their presence in the California Congressional Delegation drop to 7.7 percent, virtually wiping the Republican presence in the halls of governance to a pittance. The governor was conducting, the California Republican Party stated, “a masterclass in corruption.”
Independent and nonpartisan groups decried what Newsom is doing as “election rigging.”
Kiley on X made note of what he characterized as Newsom’s “obsessed fixation” on national politics, where the Democrats are losing, rather than tending to the problems in California, over which he has constitutional authority and control of the legislature in which his party holds supermajorities. Newsom’s obsession extends to damaging any Republican within sight, out of the mistaken belief that this will empower him in his Quixotic presidential quest. “Newsom is so desperate to get rid of me,” Kiley said. “He has gerrymandered my district in the shape of an elephant. The ‘trunk’ captures as many Democrat voters as possible. Like all his attempts, this will fail.”
In San Bernardino County, two of the state’s nine Republican members of Congress represent the citizenry in Washington, D.C., 23rd Congressional District Congressman Jay Obernolte and 40th Congressional District Congresswoman Young Kim. The Democrats are making no effort to gerrymander their districts because, in all likelihood, tweaking the boundaries of their district’s to load more Democrats into them would result in offloading Republicans into the districts of Democratic Congress members, who then might succumb to the challenges of their Republican rivals in November 2026.
It appears that Governor Newsom is making a huge gamble on the California redistricting bid, believing pressing his advantage in already heavily Democratic California against Donald Trump will garner for him so much support among members of his own party that it will render him the inevitable Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2028.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether he is correct. At the same time, if California’s voters, Democratic and Republican alike, come together to reject the concept of rescuing American Democracy from Donald Trump and the scourge of Republicanism by a heroic strategy of doctoring the state’s electoral system so in 13 out of every 14 of California’s 52 Congressional districts it is impossible for a Republican to win, Newsom’s presidential hopes may prove to be Dead On Arrival.
Reported from Los Angeles by Richard Hernandez and from Sacramento by Mark Gutglueck.