Democrats Dream of Californication 🎶 🏖️
Dissecting the Democrats' newly-proposed congressional redistricting plan pushing back against the Texas GOP’s remap
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Election quick hits
52.1% of Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump's job performance, compared with 45.0% who approve. We collect all polls independently and update all of our polling averages daily.
Former Sen. Sherrod Brown will reportedly run for Senate in 2026. Brown, an Ohio Democrat, lost reelection in 2024 to now-Sen. Bernie Moreno, but will mount a comeback attempt for Ohio's other Senate seat. Ohio will host a special election for Senate in 2026 for the seat formerly held by Vice President JD Vance, which appointed Republican Sen. Jon Husted now occupies.
Democratic members of the Texas state House have begun to return to the state amid an ongoing redistricting battle. Members had left Texas to deny a quorum in an effort to block Republican efforts to pass a new congressional redistricting plan during an initial special legislative session. However, a second special session has just started.
Missouri's state legislature looks set to have a redistricting special session in September. The Republican-dominated body is expected to pursue a new map that would make the Kansas City-based 5th District winnable for Republicans. The GOP currently has a 6-2 edge in Missouri's U.S. House delegation.
California Democrats Release Redistricting Counterstrike
Hey, Texas — California has entered the chat.
On Friday, California Democrats released a proposal to redistrict their state’s congressional map with the aim of capturing as many as five Republican-held seats. If the state legislature passes the plan, it would go before California voters in a November special election that would decide whether the lines would replace the current map (which the state’s independent redistricting commission drew in 2021).
California Democrats have pursued this course in response to Texas Republicans’ ongoing efforts to redistrict the Lone Star State and capture as many as five Democratic-held congressional districts. These maneuvers form part of an escalating redistricting conflict precipitated by President Donald Trump’s demand that Republicans in Texas and other states mount mid-decade redraws ahead of the 2026 election to improve the GOP’s chances of retaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Two weeks ago, we dug into Texas Republicans’ redistricting plan. Now that California Democrats have released their proposal, we can judge how it might change California’s political calculus by analyzing the political and demographic makeup of the state’s 52 districts using redistricting data from UC Berkeley’s Statewide Database.
Like Texas Republicans, California Democrats have targeted five seats held by the opposition party. The Golden State’s plan would convert three GOP-controlled districts that voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 into ones that backed former Vice President Kamala Harris by at least 10 percentage points. Meanwhile, changes elsewhere would take two Republican-held seats and shift them close to or just beyond 50-50 in Democrats’ favor based on the 2024 vote. If Democrats flipped all five seats without losing any districts they already hold, the party would claim a 48-4 edge in California’s U.S. House delegation, up from 43-9 at present.
The proposal’s most aggressive alteration comes in Southern California, where it eliminates Republican Rep. Ken Calvert’s GOP-leaning 41st District. In its place, the plan creates a firmly Democratic seat that Harris would have carried by 14 points. Whereas the current 41st District is located in western Riverside County, the Democrats’ map would move it well to the west by mostly situating it in southeast Los Angeles County. In turn, the proposal places Calvert and fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim together in a much-redder 40th District — Calvert represents about half the new 40th’s population, Kim about one-third — which could set up an incumbent-versus-incumbent clash in the state’s 2026 primary.
Line changes in Northern California would likely produce two additional Democratic gains. In the 1st District, Rep. Doug LaMalfa would go from defending a Trump +25 seat to one Harris carried by 12 points — the largest shift in margin (37 points) for any district in the Democrats’ proposal. Nearby, Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley’s light-red 3rd District — which stretches from Lake Tahoe to Death Valley along California’s eastern border — would become a Harris +10 seat. The new lines would also situate the district exclusively in Northern California by removing the southern portion and replacing it with Democratic-leaning areas around Sacramento.
The Democrats’ plan would also give them a better shot at defeating two other Republicans, although in far more competitive districts. To the east and north of San Diego, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa’s 48th District would shift from a Trump +15 seat to Harris +3 in 2024. In the Central Valley, Republican Rep. David Valadao’s 22nd District would go from Trump +6 to Trump +2.
The 22nd would be Democrats' toughest mountain to climb if they want the new map to produce a five-seat gain. Beyond the seat’s baseline partisanship, Valadao has a lengthy track record of winning a Democratic-leaning seat (Trump lost the current 22nd by 13 points in 2020). Then in 2024, Valadao’s majority-Latino turf moved sharply to the right, making his life easier. Should GOP gains among Latinos mostly hold up in 2026, Valadao will continue to be difficult to oust.
On the whole, the Democrats’ proposal would increase California’s number of Harris-won congressional districts from 41 to 47. In particular, the map adds 10 more districts (from six to 16) that Harris would have carried by 10-to-20 points. The proposal also adds two seats that Harris would have carried by fewer than 10 points, while decreasing the number of seats Trump carried by fewer than 10 points from six to just one (Valadao’s seat). Much like their Texas Republican counterparts, California Democrats used classic approaches like “packing” and “cracking” to isolate many opposition votes in a smaller number of seats while spreading others across more solidly blue seats, reducing GOP voters’ influence.
However, California Democrats would have many more potentially competitive seats to defend than Republicans would in Texas. Under the Texas GOP’s proposal, every House Republican there would end up in a seat that Trump carried by at least 10 points in 2024. But in the California proposal, nine Democratic incumbents would face reelection campaigns in seats that Harris won by fewer than 10 points.
Part of the difference comes down to the fact that California Democrats aim to win an even larger proportion of their state’s seats (48 of 52, 92%) than Texas Republicans do (30 of 38, 79%). That means Democrats need to stretch their votes even farther to maximize their gains. But as the table below shows, the California Democrats’ plan would force some incumbents to defend seats that could still be vulnerable to GOP capture — perhaps as soon as in the 2026 midterms. Most especially, the sharp Republican trend from 2020 to 2024 in the six majority-Latino seats within this group could augur trouble for Democrats in the near future.
The most obviously endangered seat under the proposed lines would be the 13th District in the Central Valley, held by Democratic Rep. Adam Gray. Now, the plan would bolster the seat for Democrats, shifting it from Trump +5 under the current lines to Harris +1. And Gray won the 13th District by just 187 votes even as Trump carried it last year, so he’s shown himself capable of running ahead of his party’s baseline. Still, former President Joe Biden would have carried the proposed version of this seat by 11 points in 2020, demonstrating how the Republican swing among Latino voters has quickly imperiled formerly blue-leaning turf.
If Republicans can sustain those gains, at least two other majority-Latino seats held by Democrats could also be in danger. The proposal makes Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz’s 25th District somewhat bluer compared to its current configuration (going from Harris +2.5 to about Harris +6), but this is another place where, in 2024, Trump improved upon his 2020 showing by about 10 points. The good news for Democrats is that Ruiz won reelection by about 13 points in 2024 — far better than Harris’s showing in the district. The same can’t be said for Democratic Rep. Jim Costa in the 21st District. He won reelection by 5 points in 2024, about the same margin as Harris’ 4-point edge in the district, and the Democrats’ map proposal only moves the seat to the left a couple notches (to Harris +6).
Of course, this is only the beginning of a whirlwind redistricting process. While Texas Republicans only need to pass a regular law through their legislature and have the governor sign it, things are more complicated in California. That’s because in 2008 and 2010, California voters passed ballot measures that amended the state constitution to remove the legislature’s authority to redistrict state legislative and congressional districts and instead assign that duty to an independent redistricting commission. As a result, another constitutional amendment supported by voters is necessary to change the redistricting process.
Democrats in Sacramento have the two-thirds majorities necessary to pass a constitutional amendment and then send it to voters. However, they will have to act quickly: California’s secretary of state has set an Aug. 22 deadline for calling a November special election on the redistricting proposal. Assuming Democrats maintain party unity and push this process forward, they then have to convince voters to support replacing the map that the state’s independent commission drew in 2021. Republicans may have reason to hope that Democrats will fail on that front. A new Politico/Citrin Center/Possibility Lab survey found that 64% of registered voters preferred keeping the commission, while 36% supported returning authority to the state legislature.
However, this poll is not proof positive of opposition to the proposal. The Democrats’ plan would not end the commission system, but rather replace the current districts until the commission draws the next map after the 2030 census. Additionally, the new map would only be triggered if Texas passes a mid-decade remap of its own. In fact, California Democrats’ private polling reportedly found in early August that 52% of voters would support adopting temporary district maps if Texas or other states pursued mid-decade redistricting (41% opposed).
That survey might foreshadow a highly competitive vote, although gauging public opinion on ballot measures is difficult. Not only are measures sometimes quite complicated, but how pollsters phrase questions can greatly affect respondent support or opposition. Regardless, as one Republican strategist told Politico, a redistricting ballot measure “is a bad deal for Republicans.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats can make the vote about Trump, and Democrats could be more energized to show up for a low-turnout, irregularly-timed election than Republicans.
That means there is everything to play for when it comes to congressional redistricting in California. And Texas. And potentially more states, too.
Election Calendar
September 9, 2025
VA-11 Special Election
September 23, 2025
AZ-07 Special Election
October 7, 2025
TN-07 Special Election Primary