Category Archives: redistricting

“Indiana lawmaker who opposed Trump’s redistricting push is victim of a swatting”

authoritarian threats in US, redistricting

AP News reports that one of the two Indiana lawmakers, who resisted the White House’s redistricting push to have Republicans redraw the state’s congressional boundaries, was the victim of a swatting call Sunday that brought sheriff’s deputies to his home.

“Earlier Sunday, Trump criticized Goode and Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray for opposing a redistricting plan for Indiana. Republicans already hold a 7-2 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

‘Because of these two politically correct type “gentlemen,’” and a few others, they could be depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, a VERY BIG DEAL!’ Trump wrote on his social media platform.”

The White House is concerned that Democrats only need to secure three seats to retake the House. They have instituted mid-decade redistricting processes in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio to entrench their power. California and Virginia are poised to engage in countermeasures. None of this is auspicious for the state of democracy.

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“Trial over referendum on Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map delayed again”

redistricting, referendum

The Missouri Independent reports:

A new political action committee funded by the national Republican Party won a delay Thursday in a trial over the effort to force a statewide vote on Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional district map.

…

The case postponed on Thursday is one of six — five in state courts, one in federal court — focused on the September special session. One case, challenging the authority for the special session, has been decided at the trial court level and is under appeal.

Another, questioning whether lawmakers had the power to revise districts without new census data, was heard on Wednesday. A hearing in the federal case, which attempts to win a decision that congressional redistricting maps are protected from citizen referendum petitions by the federal Constitution, is scheduled for Nov. 25 in St. Louis.

In the case postponed Thursday, People Not Politicians is arguing that the right to seek a referendum on any law is triggered when lawmakers take a final vote on a bill. The committee is suing Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who rejected petition forms because Gov. Mike Kehoe had not signed the redistricting legislation.

Kehoe called lawmakers into special session in September at the insistence of President Donald Trump in a bid to give Republicans seven instead of six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats.

Under the bill scheduled to take effect Dec. 12, Missourians would vote next year in revised districts. The new Missouri map targets the Kansas City-based 5th District, held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, to flip to the Republican Party.

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“Kansas Redistricting Was on the Fast Track. Then Some Republicans Said No.”

redistricting

NYT:

The top Republicans in Kansas were ready to join President Trump’s redistricting push and redraw the state’s political map to deliver another seat in Congress to Republicans. Democrats feared that a special session to pass new district lines was inevitable.

Then something surprising happened. Some Republicans refused.

The pushback on the Plains leaves in place, at least for now, the one Democratic-leaning congressional district in Kansas. It comes as a small but rising number of lawmakers across the country, Republicans and Democrats, have balked at joining the drive to carve up congressional districts to boost their side’s odds in the midterm elections.

The national flurry of remapping, set off this summer when Texas Republicans drew a new one at the president’s behest, happened quickly in several states. But growing resistance from state lawmakers, for reasons both practical and philosophical, has put a chill on the effort.

When the Republican governor of Indiana called a special session for redistricting last month, the Senate Republicans said the votes were not there. Maryland Democratic leaders are divided. And in Kansas, where top Republicans had hoped to meet about a new map last Friday, House leaders failed to get enough support.

The debate over remapping in Kansas is not over, and new boundaries could still pass when lawmakers return for their regular session in January. Some Republican legislators were stripped of committee leadership roles on Friday, a punishment for bucking the party line on redistricting. And several lawmakers said they had considered the possibility of more political repercussions if the president were to become more involved.

But the depth and breadth of Republican skepticism, both conservative and moderate, from both rural areas and cities, suggests that redistricting faces an uphill climb in Kansas even if political pressure continues to increase….

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“Judge’s ruling likely to give Democrats a congressional seat in Utah”

redistricting

WaPo:

A Utah judge late Monday rejected a congressional map that state Republican lawmakers had passed last month and ordered the adoption of a new map before next year’s midterm elections that is likely to give Democrats a U.S. House seat.

The ruling is a win for Democrats, who have not won a House seat in the conservative state since 2021, and a blow for Republicans in the broader national redistricting battle between the parties ahead of next year’s midterms. Lawmakers in Republican and Democratic-led states have looked in recent months for opportunities to gain seats as Republicans try to defend a very narrow U.S. House majority….

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“Why Democrats Could Win the Redistricting War”

redistricting

Nate Cohn for NYT’s The Tilt: Republicans have had an advantage in this year’s redistricting wars because they control the redistricting process in states with more Democratic-held congressional seats.

But this advantage is starting to look shaky — shaky enough that it’s possible to imagine how Democrats could fight the redistricting wars to a draw ahead of the 2026 midterms, and perhaps even win them by the 2028 election.

What’s changed? Much of the Republican advantage stems from the significant constitutional limitations on gerrymandering in blue states. But now Democrats are demonstrating the ability — and the will — to amend blue state constitutions to allow for partisan gerrymandering. If they do so in enough states, they could redraw enough Republican-held districts to turn the redistricting war in their favor. This outcome may still be unlikely, but this week’s elections have made it easier to imagine.

On Tuesday, California voted to amend its state constitution to enact a new Democratic gerrymandered map, potentially costing Republicans up to five districts. The ballot measure was expected to pass; what was more surprising was the margin. While many votes remain to be counted, “Yes” leads on redistricting by 28 points, 64 percent to 36 percent. That’s a wider margin than Kamala Harris’s 20 point-win in the state in 2024….

It’s important to emphasize that Democratic lawmakers haven’t indicated their intention to try to amend state constitutions in any state besides California and Virginia. But if even light blue Virginia is willing and able to amend its constitution to allow gerrymandering, it’s no longer safe to assume that other blue states won’t do the same thing. There have been rumblings of similar efforts in states like New York and Colorado. If those or other efforts ultimately materialize and succeed, it’s possible that Republicans, not Democrats, will ultimately lose the most seats from redistricting by the time the 2028 election rolls around.

It’s too early to lay out a specific redistricting scenario. There are many layers of uncertainty, including which red or blue states will redistrict or amend their constitutions, how far their gerrymanders might go, and the fate of the Voting Rights Act. Together, there’s an enormous range of possibilities.

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“Two Republican Incumbents Will Face Off as Red Turf Shrinks in California”

redistricting

NYT:

A day after California voters shrunk the number of safe Republican House seats through a Democratic gerrymander, two endangered incumbents said they would square off against each other in a high-stakes bid for political survival next year.

Representative Ken Calvert, a Riverside County Republican whose 41st Congressional District was carved up and appended to several neighboring districts, said on Wednesday that he would run for the new incarnation of the 40th District, one of the few friendly territories left for Republicans in California.

He made no mention of the fact that the district was already occupied.

Representative Young Kim, an Orange County Republican, is the current 40th District incumbent, and she said on Wednesday that she would not cede her favorable turf without a fight. The Democratic redraw of congressional maps actually made her district safer for Republicans than it was before — which also made it an attractive life raft.

That means two veteran G.O.P. incumbents will vie for one House seat in a clash that underscores how dire the stakes have become for Republicans in California. It also shows how the redistricting war has sent incumbents scrambling in the middle of the decade, in a way that unlucky members usually only do after a new census….

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“Republicans Swiftly File Lawsuit in Bid to Block California’s New House Maps”

redistricting

NYT:

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday accuses California of violating the Constitution “when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.” The lawsuit points to statements made by Democratic state lawmakers and a mapmaking consultant this year in which they referred to having intentionally drawn some districts with Latino majorities.

“These arguments are not frivolous, but they are not going to be easy, and the timing is going to present a major challenge,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The case is likely to hinge on whether race or partisanship was the predominant factor in drawing the new maps. A Supreme Court ruling in 2019 established that federal courts are powerless to hear claims about partisan gerrymandering, essentially allowing lawmakers to carve up districts for political gain. So California could argue that the maps were a raw political play, crafted explicitly to help Democrats even the score against similarly partisan maps in Republican-led states.

Michael Columbo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that the case would show that race was a predominant factor in drawing the new maps, even though Democrats said their main goal was to flip five seats for Democrats.

“There was a lot of rhetoric and maybe even an effect, but within that, we have clear statements that establish that there was racial gerrymandering going on,” Mr. Columbo said at a news conference on Wednesday….

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, said he thought it was unlikely the courts would act on the case early enough to change the course of California’s primary election in June 2026.

“A big procedural problem for this lawsuit is that legislatures and elected officials are allowed to make late changes to district lines, but the Supreme Court has been really stringent in saying that courts can’t do anything close to an election,” he said….

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“Redistricting Battles, Set Off by Trump, Have Few Parallels in U.S. History”

redistricting, Supreme Court

NYT:

But election lawyers and experts say that what is happening now is a crisis with few parallels in American history, especially given the potential weakening of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the coming months.

They fear this one-two punch could weaken democracy.

“The wheels are coming off the car right now,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has studied gerrymandering. “There’s a sense in which the system is rapidly spiraling downward, and there’s no end in sight.”

Congressional redistricting is typically carried out after the national census, which is taken every decade. States can win and lose House seats according to population changes, and state legislatures from both parties have used the once-per-decade opportunity to redraw districts that benefit them politically.

But this year, that norm has been shattered. Election experts worry that if the trend continues, redistricting could become a chaotic and near-constant process, with state lawmakers redrawing districts with the onset of every midterm election…..

Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said that gerrymandering generated more controversy when the country was closely divided politically, with power regularly flip-flopping between parties.

At the same time, both parties in recent years have painted the other as a fundamental threat to the future of the republic.

“When the stakes are viewed as so high and the partisan margins of control are so thin,” Mr. Pildes said, “it creates all of this pressure for those who control the structure of elections to use that power to try to advance the interests of their side.”…

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The Complaint Filed By Republicans Against the Maps Created by California’s Prop 50 Raising Racial Gerrymandering and Intentional Discrimination Claims Faces an Uphill Battle, Especially Given 2026 Timing

redistricting, Voting Rights Act

You can find the complaint here. The main argument in the case is that plaintiffs engaged in a racial gerrymander by making race the predominant factor in drawing district lines without s compelling reason to to so. The primary allegations concern what the mapmaker for the Legislature said about protecting Latino voting power in the new district lines, something that the state would be required to do to to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

If partisanship, preserving communities of interest or other factors predominated when the Legislature drew the lines enacted via Proposition 50, then the case would fail on the first prong. Seems like this was a very partisan process, so there’s a good chance the case would fail on this prong. If we get to the second prong, the state could try to defend by saying the districts were drawn race consciously to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

There is also a brief set of claims in here that the Legislature drew lines to intentionally discriminate against Latinos. That claim is supported by no real evidence and I don’t expect it to go anywhere.

Plaintiffs will likely seek a preliminary injunction and have asked for a three-judge court. They will likely want a preliminary injunction hearing quickly. It may not happen quickly, and as we get closer to the election, the Purcell Principle, which has been applied to similar challenges in Louisiana and Alabama, tells courts not to make changes to districts in the period close to the election. Although applying Purcell typically has benefitted Republicans could benefit Democrats in this instance.

If the district court denies the injunction, plaintiffs could try to get emergency relief from the Supreme Court.

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Joey Fishkin: “California’s Prop 50 passed. Now, here’s how to end partisan redistricting once and for all “

political parties, political polarization, redistricting

Joey Fishkin with an important piece in the SF Chronicle:

The nationalization of politics also provides an opening to solve this problem. Congress has the power to do what it did in 1842: Enact a statute to bring both parties back from the brink. Congress’ authority to set the “Times, Places, and Manner” of choosing representatives is undisputed. Prop 50 itself, perhaps as a sweetener to help the partisan medicine go down, included an anti-gerrymandering cri de coeur: It “establishes state policy supporting use of fair, independent, and nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.” 

We need a new federal statute of mutual disarmament — ideally before we reach the point where there are zero California Republicans and zero Texas Democrats. Prop 50’s call for nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide is a good start. So is the bill by Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin (Placer County), who may lose his seat because of Prop 50, which would ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide. 

However, there are major problems to overcome. First, it will be difficult to prevent states from stacking nonpartisan commissions with partisans. Second, the two parties are unfortunately not similarly situated: Both parties benefit from gerrymandering, but Republicans have more opportunities and benefit more. That is part of why Democrats were able to unite their caucus in 2021 behind their democratic reform package, HR1, which included a requirement that every state use a nonpartisan redistricting commission, whereas Republicans do not seem interested in even Kiley’s modest bill. 

Thus, unfortunately, the most plausible route to solving the gerrymandering problem is to elect a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, and a Democrat in the White House, and then make sure they — at their moment of maximum opportunity to lock in partisan advantage through partisan hardball — instead engage in anti-hardball, building fairer rules for everyone. ….

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Proposition 50: “California voters pass anti-Trump, pro-Democrat ballot measure”

direct democracy, redistricting

LA Times:

California Democrats’ effort to block President Trump’s agenda by increasing their party’s numbers in Congress was overwhelmingly approved by voters on Tuesday.

The Associated Press called the victory moments after the polls closed Tuesday night.

The statewide ballot measure will reconfigure California’s congressional districts to favor more Democratic candidates. The Democratic-led California Legislature placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot, at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s behest, after Trump urged Texas and other GOP-led states to modify their congressional maps to favor their party members, a move designed to keep the U.S. House of Representatives in Republican control during his final two years in office.

Proposition 50 was the sole item on the statewide, special-election ballot Tuesday. Supporters hope the ballot measure has become a referendum about Trump, who remains extremely unpopular in California, while opponents call Prop. 50 an underhanded power grab by Democrats….

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