NYT:

One Friday in early August, Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom sat together in the historic governor’s mansion in Sacramento and began dialing some of the nation’s wealthiest Democrats for dollars.

Ms. Pelosi, the 85-year-old former House speaker, and Mr. Newsom, the 57-year-old governor of California, have known each other for decades. She has been his mentor, and their circles are so entwined as scions of San Francisco that their families were even blended by marriage at one point.

But this was something entirely new for them both as they raced to raise cash for a fall ballot campaign on redistricting that could shape the 2026 midterms.

Ms. Pelosi would begin with pleasantries, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss private fund-raising calls made that day. Then she would hand the phone to Mr. Newsom to close the deal. The choreography was partly borne of a mindfulness of tangled federal rules about soliciting outsized checks, and partly out of deference to Mr. Newsom.

Well, at least most of the time.

“That’s certainly not enough,” Ms. Pelosi blurted out to one potential contributor who had floated a sizable, but apparently not sizable enough, donation. Everyone burst out laughing, according to two people with knowledge of the tandem fund-raising. “I think we can do better,” she ribbed at another point.

The moment at the mansion provided a glimpse of Ms. Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in a redistricting push with national consequences. At President Trump’s behest, Republican-led states, starting with Texas, are moving rapidly to rip up their congressional boundaries and boost G.O.P. chances of keeping control of the House next fall. California represents Democrats’ biggest and best hope for a meaningful counteroffensive…..

Hansi Lo Wang for NPR.

Nebraska Examiner:

A handful of Nebraska lawmakers are set to travel to Washington, D.C., this week for a “state leadership conference” at the White House’s invitation. 

But, if what happened with delegations from other states is an indication, another reason for the trip might be for President Donald Trump and his team to lay groundwork for asking another red state to redistrict congressional boundaries to Republican advantage before the 2026 election. 

At least four Nebraska lawmakers confirmed with the Examiner that they are headed to Capitol Hill on Tuesday. The official reason is the leadership conference organized by the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs….

NYT:

The Missouri House of Representatives is poised to vote on Tuesday on new congressional boundaries that would create an additional Republican-leaning district, part of President Trump’s national push to redraw maps to favor his party ahead of the midterm elections.

As lawmakers gathered at the Missouri State Capitol this week, Democrats, who are outnumbered, decried the new boundaries as “brazen,” “shameless,” cheating or “all to protect Trump,” and questioned whether drawing a new map now was even legal. States generally pass new congressional boundaries once a decade, after the results of the census are published.

“If we sanction this midcycle redraw, we will be joining the long and shameful line of the states that have used legal language to silence voters rather than to protect them,” said State Representative Kem Smith, a Democrat from the St. Louis area.

But Republicans used their large majority on Monday to advance the new map, which would split a Kansas City-based district now held by Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has held a congressional seat for two decades. The proposed boundaries would favor Republicans in seven of Missouri’s eight districts, up from the six seats they currently hold. The new boundaries would splice Kansas City’s core into districts with large rural areas….

Politico:

Republicans wield almost no power in California. But as a moribund state party gathered here over the weekend, it confronted an even grimmer reality now suddenly settling in: If the state gerrymanders its congressional map, they’ll practically be an endangered species.

“It’s a guillotine,” said Dale Quasny, a party delegate and real-estate broker from suburban Los Angeles County. “We won’t be able to pick up the pieces and move forward. I mean, we were making a little headway, but this would be a catastrophe.”

ong locked out of power in Sacramento, one thing that Republicans here and nationally have counted on for years from California was influence in U.S. House races — and the ability to help deliver Republican majorities by winning battleground races in the state’s Central Valley and Orange County.

Now they’re on the brink of losing even that — a consequence of the redistricting wars that could cost the GOP as many as five House seats in California.

It is in part the Republican president, Donald Trump, who got them here. The GOP base in the state is as ardently MAGA as anywhere. But it was Trump’s push for a Republican gerrymandering in deep-red Texas that sparked a national battle over redistricting, provoking Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders to respond with a Nov. 4 ballot measure to gerrymander California’s lines.

Even Republicans here, while chiding Newsom, were critical of Trump’s redistricting effort. And as rank-and-file members of the GOP gathered in Orange County for their annual convention, the festivities were overshadowed by angst over the consequences of redistricting in a deep-blue state.

“I’m certainly frustrated that our party’s leadership has not been more proactive in trying to stop a redistricting war,” said Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose seat in the Sacramento suburbs is at risk of being drawn out of existence. “We shouldn’t be having mid-decade redistricting in any state.”

If there is any bright spot for Republicans, it’s that the left has had some difficulty recently with ballot measures. Voters last year rejected statewide proposals to ban forced prison labor, raise the minimum wage and expand rent control. [Non-partisan line-drawing is overwhelmingly popular in California.] And if Republicans can defeat Newsom’s redistricting effort, they would hand him a significant setback on the cusp of a likely 2028 presidential campaign.

Even internal polling from Democrats in the state Legislature suggests the GOP’s messaging on the initiative could be effective with some voters, including that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that it “undermines democracy.”

While polling shared with Democrats in the state Assembly last week and obtained by POLITICO found a majority of voters support a redrawn map, it also suggests the plan could be vulnerable if Democrats don’t turn out in November, with many independent voters skeptical of the concept of gerrymandering….

Alex Keena, Michael Latner, and Natasha Romero Moskala write at the Substack of the Houston Institute for Race & Justice.

Michael Parsons and Kevin Johnson in The Fulcrum:

The gerrymandering wars have laid bare the unique Achilles’ heel at the heart of our structural dysfunction: We give partisan institutions immense power over the rules of elections. No other peer democracy entrusts politicians with control over as many pieces of electoral machinery as the United States. Ignoring these major flaws has long left American democracy susceptible to authoritarian capture, and now the bill is coming due….

 One hidden cause of the current crisis is rising partisan manipulation of ballot measures, which has contributed significantly to the redistricting arms race over the past decade.

In three red states (Ohio, Missouri, and Utah), majorities backed strong, citizen-led anti-gerrymandering measures. But, in all three states, either Republican legislatures overrode the approved initiative, or Republican officials manipulated the ballot-measure process to deny the will of the voters. Had those voters’ wishes been respected, the constraints on gerrymandering facing blue and red states would be more closely balanced, the risk of an arms race would be contained, and Democrats would not be threatening to unwind two decades’ worth of progress toward fairer maps.”

Politico:

Democrats are scrambling to keep their nascent crusade against President Donald Trump’s national redistricting push from fizzling out.

House Democrats are considering establishing an organization to raise and spend for their remapping efforts as they look to counter an aggressive Republican move that could determine control of the chamber next year, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations. And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has privately discussed redistricting with blue-state governors, according to another person.

The Center for American Progress is urging blue states to abandon their independent redistricting commissions. And, through private strategy sessions and public appeals, Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu is asking Democrats across red and blue states to take a no-holds-barred approach to resisting GOP redistricting. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin praised Wu during a meeting in Minneapolis last week for “igniting a national movement within this party.”

“This is an all-out call to arms,” Wu, who helped lead Texas Democrats’ quorum break, said in an interview. “That chorus of ‘everyone needs to get off their ass and do something’ is growing louder and louder. And more and more elected Democrats who are seen as doing nothing — their commitment to our country is going to be questioned.”…