{"id":40315,"date":"2025-11-06T05:19:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T05:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/40315\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T05:19:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T05:19:22","slug":"california-strikes-back-in-the-redistricting-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/40315\/","title":{"rendered":"California Strikes Back in the Redistricting War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The skew in Texas mirrored national trends: in the wake of Republicans\u2019 2010 gains, Democrats could conceivably have won the national popular vote by five percentage points or more and not won a majority of House seats. But that advantage eroded, such that, by last year, \u201cthe party that won the most votes for the House was quite likely to win the most seats,\u201d as Nate Cohn, the data maven at the Times, recently explained<\/a> to my colleague Isaac Chotiner. There are a variety of reasons for this reversal. Several states created California-style independent processes that took map-drawing out of politicians\u2019 hands, and some state courts overturned partisan maps. In others, Democrats aggressively countered Republican gerrymanders with their own.<\/p>\n

Changing voting patterns also played a role, as did (at least at the margins) what political scientists call \u201cdummymandering,\u201d a term\u2014named for the Massachusetts governor Elbridge Dummy (just kidding)\u2014that describes when gerrymanderers inadvertently spread their party\u2019s votes too thin, or fail to correctly predict voter behavior. Especially since Trump first won, in 2016, \u201cour politics have been very volatile,\u201d Michael Li, an attorney focussed on redistricting and voting rights at the Brennan Center, told me. When politicians gerrymander, \u201cyou\u2019re placing a big bet that you know what the politics of the future look like, and if you\u2019re wrong, it can really backfire.\u201d By way of example, Li pointed me, again, to Texas, where state legislative maps drawn to maximize G.O.P. gains after 2010 proved less advantageous by 2018, when suburbs of Dallas, for instance, swung to the left, and demographic shifts made heavily white districts more diverse.<\/p>\n

Last year, politics shifted again: Trump performed surprisingly well with Latino voters in Texas, according to exit polls, winning fifty-five per cent to Kamala Harris\u2019s forty-four. Since then, his approval among Latinos nationally has receded, and, after Texas passed its new maps this year, some Democrats expressed optimism that Republicans in the state might prove to be dummies\u2014that the projection of five new seats was based on a risky bet that Latino voters would stick with the Party at Trump-2024 levels. Mitchell, who drew California\u2019s retaliatory maps, told me that his Texas counterparts may have made existing G.O.P. seats less safe. (Mitchell claims that his maps in California will offer Democrats pickup opportunities and shore up vulnerable incumbents.) According to the Texas Tribune<\/a>, Republicans in Texas were reluctant to redraw the maps before Trump demanded that they do so.<\/p>\n

The independent data journalist G. Elliott Morris, however, told me that the Texas redistricting does not look like a dummymander, and other observers agree<\/a>. (A lawsuit challenging the new maps<\/a> alleges that they were drawn to distribute Latino voters who have lower rates of turnout in a manner that amounts to disenfranchisement.) Morris told me that, nationally, the worst-case net outcome of the current redistricting war for Democrats would lead to \u201cpotentially a pretty big drop\u201d in representation. But predicting the precise number of seats they might lose is tricky, given that redistricting efforts remain in flux in several states\u2014in addition to the purely partisan tit-for-tat, Utah and Ohio have been in the throes of mid-decade redistricting for mandated legal reasons\u2014and, dummymanders or not, voter behavior can indeed buck expectations, especially in this era. (At least one Republican operative has expressed concern<\/a> that moderate voters could punish the Party for initiating the mid-decade redistricting, which smacks of foul play.) Cohn told Chotiner that Democrats may have to win the over-all House vote by two or three points to gain the most seats in 2026\u2014not a fair requirement, but hardly an insurmountable one given Trump\u2019s unpopularity. If they fail, they won\u2019t be able to blame redistricting alone.<\/p>\n

Well, they might be able to. Recently, the Supreme Court heard a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which currently prohibits racial discrimination in mapmaking and has been, as the law professor Atiba Ellis told NPR<\/a>, \u201cthe most important check\u201d on partisan gerrymanders in many G.O.P.-led states in the South. The weakening of Section 2 could swing as many as nineteen House seats in Republicans\u2019 favor; even a lesser effect, per Cohn<\/a>, would put Democrats severely on the back foot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The skew in Texas mirrored national trends: in the wake of Republicans\u2019 2010 gains, Democrats could conceivably have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,11272,20537,564,1649],"class_list":{"0":"post-40315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-house-of-representatives","12":"tag-states","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-u-s-congress"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}