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Tag: voter

  • Commentary: Here’s why the redistricting fight is raging. And why it may be moot

    A handful of seats are all that keep Republicans in control of the House, giving President Trump untrammeled sway over, well, pretty much everything, from the economy to the jokes on late-night TV to the design of the Cracker Barrel logo.

    It’s a number that’s both tantalizing and fraught, depending on your political perspective.

    For Democrats, that eyelash-thin margin means they’re thisclose to regaining power and a political toehold in next year’s midterm election. All they need is a gain of three House seats. For Trump and fellow Republicans, it means their hegemony over Washington and life as we know it dangles by a perilously thin thread.

    That tension explains the redistricting wars now blazing throughout our great land.

    It started in Texas, where Trump pressured Republicans to redraw congressional lines in hopes of handing the GOP as many as five additional seats. That led California Democrats to ask voters, in a Nov. 4 special election, to approve an eye-for-an-eye gerrymander that could yield their party five new lawmakers.

    Several other states have waded into the fight, assuming control of the House might be decided next year by just a few seats, one way or the other.

    Which could happen.

    Or not.

    Anyone claiming to know for sure is either lying, trying to frighten you into giving money, or both.

    “History is on Democrats’ side, but it’s too early to know what the national political environment is going to be like,” said Nathan Gonzales, one of the country’s top political handicappers and publisher of the nonpartisan campaign guide Inside Elections. “We don’t know the overall mood of the electorate, how satisfied voters [will be] with Republicans in power in Washington or how open to change they’ll be a year from now.”

    A look back offers some clues, though it should be said no two election cycles are alike and the past is only illuminating insofar as it casts light on certain patterns.

    (Take that as a caveat, weasel words or whatever you care to call it.)

    In the last half century, there have been 13 midterm elections. The out party — that is, the one that doesn’t hold the presidency — has won 13 or more House seats in eight of those elections. Going back even further, since World War II the out party has gained an average of more than two dozen House seats.

    In Trump’s last midterm election, in 2018, Democrats won 40 House seats — including seven in California — to seize control. (That was 17 more than they needed.) A Democratic gain of that magnitude seems unlikely next year, barring a complete and utter GOP collapse. That’s because there are fewer Republicans sitting in districts that Democrats carried in the most recent presidential election, which left them highly vulnerable.

    In 2018, 25 Republicans represented districts won by Hillary Clinton. In 2026, there are just three Republicans in districts Kamala Harris carried. (Thirteen Democrats represent districts that Trump won.)

    Let’s pause before diving into more numbers.

    OK. Ready?

    There are 435 House seats on the ballot next year. Most are a lock for one party or the other.

    Based on the current congressional map, Inside Elections rates 64 House seats nationwide as being at least somewhat competitive, with a dozen considered toss-ups. The Cook Political Report, another gold-plated handicapper, rates 72 seats competitive or having the potential to be so, with 18 toss-ups.

    Both agree that two of those coin-flip races are in California, where Democrats Adam Gray and Derek Tran are fighting to hang onto seats they narrowly won in, respectively, the Central Valley and Orange County. (The Democratic gerrymander seeks to shore up those incumbents.)

    You really can’t assess the 2026 odds without knowing how the redistricting fight comes out.

    Republicans could pick up as many as 16 seats through partisan map-making, Inside Elections forecasts, a number that would be reduced if California voters approve Proposition 50. Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, puts GOP gains as high as 13, again depending on the November outcome in California.

    Obviously, that would boost the GOP’s chances of hanging onto the House, which is precisely why Trump pushed for the extraordinary mid-decade redistricting.

    But there are many other factors at play.

    One huge element is Trump’s approval rating. Simply put, the less popular a president, the more his party tends to suffer at the polls.

    Right now Trump’s approval rating is a dismal 43%, according to the Cook Report’s PollTracker. That could change, but it’s a danger sign for Republicans. Over the past three decades, every time the president’s net job approval was negative a year from the midterm election, his party lost House seats.

    Another thing Democats have going for them is the passion of their voters, who’ve been flocking to the polls in off-year and special elections. The Downballot, which tracks races nationwide, finds Democratic candidates have far surpassed Kamala Harris’ 2024 performance, a potential harbinger of strong turnout in 2026.

    Those advantages are somewhat offset by a GOP edge in two other measures. Republicans have significantly outraised Democrats and have limited the number of House members retiring. Generally speaking, it’s tougher for a party to defend a seat when it comes open.

    In short, for all the partisan passions, the redistricting wars aren’t likely to decide control of the House.

    “Opinions of the economy and Trump’s handling of it, the popularity (or lack thereof) of Republicans’ signature legislation” — the tax-cutting, Medicaid-slashing bill passed in July — as well as “partisan enthusiasm to vote are going to be more determinative to the 2026 outcome than redistricting alone,” Amy Walter, the Cook Report’s editor-in-chief, wrote in a recent analysis.

    In other words, control of the House will most likely rest in the hands of voters, not scheming politicians.

    Which is exactly where it belongs.

    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • California woman accused of registering dog to vote, casting mail-in ballots

    AS IS REQUIRED BY LAW. TONIGHT, AN ORANGE COUNTY WOMAN FACES FIVE FELONIES ACCUSED OF REGISTERING HER DOG TO VOTE, ACCORDING TO THE ORANGE COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY. 62 YEAR OLD LAURA YORK OF COSTA MESA, CAST BALLOTS IN HER DOG’S NAME, AND THOSE BALLOTS WERE FOR THE RECALL OF THE GOVERNOR IN 2021 AND THE 2022 PRIMARY. THE DOGS VOTE WAS SUCCESSFULLY COUNTED IN 2021, BUT IT WAS REJECTED IN 2022. PROSECUTORS SAY YOUR NEXT POSTED A SOCIAL MEDIA PICTURE OF HER DOG WEARING AN I VOTED STICKER. IF CONVI

    California woman accused of registering dog to vote, casting mail-in ballots

    Updated: 12:50 AM EDT Sep 9, 2025

    Editorial Standards ⓘ

    A Southern California woman has been charged with multiple felonies after she allegedly registered her dog to vote and cast mail-in ballots in her pet’s name, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.Officials said Laura Lee Yourex, 62, of Costa Mesa, had registered her dog, Maya Jean, to vote and successfully cast a ballot in the dog’s name in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election. She tried to cast another ballot in the dog’s name in the 2022 primary election, but that ballot was rejected.Yourex was also open about her actions on social media, officials said. She allegedly posted a photo of her dog wearing an “I voted” sticker with a ballot in January 2022, and in a post from October 2024, shared a photograph of her dog’s tag and a vote-by-mail ballot with the caption: “Maya is still getting her ballot,” after the dog’s death.The district attorney’s office said Yourex self-reported the voter fraud to the Orange County Registrar of Voters’ Office. The registrar’s office then contacted the district attorney’s office.Yourex is charged with one count of perjury, one count of procuring or offering a false or forged document to be filed, two counts of casting a ballot when not entitled to vote, and one count of registering a non-existent person to vote.”According to the California Elections Code, in order to vote, a person must be registered as a voter by filling out and submitting an Affidavit of Registration, which includes the voter’s name, residence, mailing address, date of birth, political party preference, and a certification that the voter is a citizen of the United States. The affidavit must be signed under penalty of perjury,” the district attorney’s office stated in a news release.In California state elections, an ID is not required to cast a ballot. However, proof of residence and registration is required for first-time voters in a federal election, which is why the 2022 ballot was rejected.Voter identification laws in recent years have become a heated topic, often brought up in discussions of voter fraud or immigration legal status. In fall 2024, California enacted a law prohibiting local governments from enforcing a voter ID requirement. That law came after voters in Huntington Beach, which is in Orange County, approved a measure that would let the city require voters to show their ID when casting ballots.The 2021 election to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom was voted down by 61.9% of voters, so Maya’s alleged vote would not have swayed the outcome.However, anyone who suspects any voter fraud is urged to contact their county.

    A Southern California woman has been charged with multiple felonies after she allegedly registered her dog to vote and cast mail-in ballots in her pet’s name, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.

    Officials said Laura Lee Yourex, 62, of Costa Mesa, had registered her dog, Maya Jean, to vote and successfully cast a ballot in the dog’s name in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election. She tried to cast another ballot in the dog’s name in the 2022 primary election, but that ballot was rejected.

    Yourex was also open about her actions on social media, officials said. She allegedly posted a photo of her dog wearing an “I voted” sticker with a ballot in January 2022, and in a post from October 2024, shared a photograph of her dog’s tag and a vote-by-mail ballot with the caption: “Maya is still getting her ballot,” after the dog’s death.

    The district attorney’s office said Yourex self-reported the voter fraud to the Orange County Registrar of Voters’ Office. The registrar’s office then contacted the district attorney’s office.

    Yourex is charged with one count of perjury, one count of procuring or offering a false or forged document to be filed, two counts of casting a ballot when not entitled to vote, and one count of registering a non-existent person to vote.

    “According to the California Elections Code, in order to vote, a person must be registered as a voter by filling out and submitting an Affidavit of Registration, which includes the voter’s name, residence, mailing address, date of birth, political party preference, and a certification that the voter is a citizen of the United States. The affidavit must be signed under penalty of perjury,” the district attorney’s office stated in a news release.

    In California state elections, an ID is not required to cast a ballot. However, proof of residence and registration is required for first-time voters in a federal election, which is why the 2022 ballot was rejected.

    Voter identification laws in recent years have become a heated topic, often brought up in discussions of voter fraud or immigration legal status. In fall 2024, California enacted a law prohibiting local governments from enforcing a voter ID requirement. That law came after voters in Huntington Beach, which is in Orange County, approved a measure that would let the city require voters to show their ID when casting ballots.

    The 2021 election to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom was voted down by 61.9% of voters, so Maya’s alleged vote would not have swayed the outcome.

    However, anyone who suspects any voter fraud is urged to contact their county.

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  • Commentary: Finally some fairness in redistricting fight. In Utah, a judge stands up for voters

    It’s been more than 60 years since Utah backed a Democrat for president. The state’s last Democratic U.S. senator left office nearly half a century ago and the last Utah Democrat to serve in the House lost his seat in 2020.

    But, improbably enough, Utah has suddenly emerged as a rare Democratic bright spot in the red-vs.-blue redistricting wars.

    Late last month, a judge tossed out the state’s slanted congressional lines and ordered Utah’s GOP-run Legislature to draw a new political map, ruling that lawmakers improperly thumbed their noses and overrode voters who created an independent redistricting commission to end gerrymandering.

    It’s a welcome pushback against the growing pattern of lawmakers arrogantly ignoring voters and pursuing their preferred agenda. You don’t have to be a partisan to think that elections should matter and when voters express their will it should be honored.

    Otherwise, what’s the point of holding elections?

    Anyhow, redistricting. Did you ever dream you’d spend this much time thinking about the subject? Typically, it’s an arcane and extremely nerdy process that occurs once a decade, after the census, and mainly draws attention from a small priesthood of line-drawing experts and political obsessives.

    Suddenly, everyone is fixated on congressional boundaries, for which we can thank our voraciously self-absorbed president.

    Trump started the whole sorry gerrymandering business — voters and democracy be damned — by browbeating Texas into redrawing its congressional map to try to nab Republicans as many as five additional House seats in 2026. The paranoid president is looking to bolster his party ahead of a tough midterm election, when Democrats need to gain just three seats to win a House majority and attain some measure of control over Trump’s rogue regime.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to Texas with a proposed Democratic gerrymander and perhaps you’re thinking, well, what about his attempted power grab? While your friendly columnist has deplored efforts to end-run the state’s voter-established redistricting commission, at least the matter is going on the ballot in a Nov. 4 special election, allowing the people to decide.

    Meantime, the political race to the bottom continues.

    Lawmakers in Republican-run Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio may tear up their congressional maps in favor of partisan gerrymanders, and Democrats in Illinois and New York are being urged to do the same.

    When all is said and done, 10 or so additional seats could be locked up by one party or the other, even before a single ballot is cast; this when the competitive congressional map nationwide has already shrunk to a postage stamp-sized historic low.

    If you think that sort of pre-baked election and voter obsolescence is a good thing, you might consider switching your registration to Russia or China.

    Utah, at least, offers a small ray of positivity.

    In 2018, voters there narrowly approved Proposition 4, taking the map-drawing process away from self-interested lawmakers and creating an independent commission to handle redistricting. In 2021, the Republican-run Legislature chose to ignore voters, gutting the commission and passing a congressional map that allowed the GOP to easily win all four of Utah’s House seats.

    The trick was slicing and dicing Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, the state’s most populous and densely packed, and scattering its voters among four predominantly Republican districts.

    “There’s always going to be someone who disagrees,” Carson Jorgensen, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party, said airily as lawmakers prepared to give voters their middle finger.

    In July 2024, Utah’s five Supreme Court justices — all Republican appointees — found that the Legislature’s repeal and replacement of Proposition 4 was unconstitutional. The ruling kicked the case over to Salt Lake County District Judge Dianna Gibson, who on Aug. 25 rejected the partisan maps drawn by GOP lawmakers.

    Cue the predictable outrage.

    “Monday’s Court Order in Utah is absolutely Unconstitutional,” Trump bleated on social media. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?”

    In Gibson’s case, the answer is her appointment by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican who would be considered a radical leftist in the same way a hot fudge sundae could be described as diet food.

    Others offered the usual condemnation of “judicial activism,” which is political-speak for whenever a court decision doesn’t go your way.

    “It’s a terrible day … for the rule of law,” lamented Utah’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who is apparently concerned with legal proprieties only insofar as they serve his party’s president and the GOP, having schemed with Trump allies in their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

    In a ruling last week rejecting lawmakers’ request to pause her decision, Gibson wrote that “Utah has an opportunity to be different.”

    “While other states are currently redrawing their congressional maps to intentionally render some citizen votes meaningless, Utah could redesign its congressional plan with the intention to protect its citizens’ right to vote and to ensure that each citizen’s vote is meaningful.”

    That’s true. Utah can not only be different from other states, as Gibson suggested.

    It can be better.

    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • News Analysis: ‘The party is in shambles.’ But some Democrats see reasons for optimism

    WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party’s standing in public opinion polls has sunk to its lowest point in more than 30 years. Many of the party’s own voters think their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against President Trump. In one survey, the words they used most often were “weak” and “tepid.”

    “The party is in shambles,” said James Carville, the political strategist who helped Bill Clinton win the White House after a similar bout of disarray a generation ago.

    And yet, in recent weeks, the beleaguered party has begun to exhibit signs of life.

    Its brand is still unpopular, but its chances of winning next year’s congressional elections appear to be growing; in recent polls, the share of voters saying they plan to vote Democratic has reached a roughly 5% lead over the GOP. Potential presidential candidates, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, are competing noisily for the title of fiercest Trump-fighter. And they have an ace in the hole: As unloved as the Democratic Party is, Trump is increasingly unpopular, too, with an approval rating sagging to 40% or below in some polls.

    “There’s no requirement that people love the Democratic Party in order to vote for it,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini said last week. “In an era of negative partisanship, people are motivated to vote more by dislike of the other party than by love for their own.”

    So Carville, despite his diagnosis of “shambles,” thinks things are looking up in the long run.

    “The Democratic Party’s present looks pretty bad, but I think its future looks pretty good,” he said. “I think we’re going to be fine.”

    He cited several straws in the wind: the Democrats’ new energy as they campaign against Trump; the encouraging poll numbers on next year’s congressional elections; and an impressive bench of up-and-coming leaders.

    “The talent level in the current Democratic Party is the highest I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Whoever comes out on top of that competition is going to be a pretty strong candidate.”

    But that nomination is three years away — and meanwhile, Democrats face daunting hurdles. For one, Trump has pressed Texas and other Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to cement GOP control of the House of Representatives — an effort that could succeed despite Newsom’s attempt to counter it in California.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a measure to redraw California’s congressional map to aid Democrats.

    (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

    The Democrats, by comparison, remain leaderless and divided — arguing over the lessons of their 2024 defeat and debating how to regain their lost support among working-class and minority voters.

    In a historical sense, the party is going through a familiar ordeal: the struggle a party normally faces after losing an election.

    So Carville and other strategists have sketched out variations of what you might call a three-step recovery plan: First, get out of Washington and rally public opposition to Trump. Second, focus their message on “kitchen table issues,” mainly voters’ concerns over rising prices and a seemingly sluggish economy. Third, organize to win House and Senate elections next year.

    “We have to do well in 2026 to demonstrate we’re not so toxic that people won’t vote for us anymore,” said Doug Sosnik, another former Clinton aide.

    They’re arguing over the lessons of defeat and debating how to regain lost support among working-class and minority voters.

    In battling Trump, they say they’ve found a starting point.

    “We’ve found our footing. We’ve gone on the offensive,” argued Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), who spent most of the summer campaigning across the country. “Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and tax breaks for billionaires have given us a message we can unite around.”

    They still have plenty of differences over specific policies — but a spirited debate, some say, is exactly what the party needs.

    “The most important task of the Democratic Party is to organize … the most robust debate Democrats have had in a generation,” said William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, a former Clinton aide who argues that the party needs to move to the center.

    Here’s what most Democratic leaders agree on: They’ve heard their voters’ demands for a more vigorous fight against Trump. They agree that they need to reconnect with working-class voters who don’t believe the party really cares about them. They need to cast themselves as a party of change, not the status quo. And they need to begin by regaining control of the House of Representatives next year.

    Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) says the Democrats have "found our footing."

    Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) says the Democrats have “found our footing.”

    (Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)

    Most Democrats also agree that they need to focus on a positive message on economic issues such as the cost of living — to use this year’s buzzword, “affordability.”

    But they differ on the specifics.

    Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have focused on “fighting oligarchy,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and government-run health insurance.

    Khanna, a Silicon Valley progressive, is campaigning for a program he calls “economic patriotism” — essentially, industrial policies to spur investments in strategic sectors.

    Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a blunt-spoken populist, wants to make capitalism do more for ordinary workers. “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “We’re afraid of saying, like, ‘Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.’”

    And from the party’s centrist wing, former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel describes his program as “build, baby, build,” arguing that Democrats should focus on making housing affordable and expanding technical and vocational education.

    A sharper debate has opened over social and cultural issues: Should Democrats break with the identity politics — the stuff Republicans deride as “woke” — that animates much of their progressive wing? Moderate Democrats argue that “wokeness” has alienated voters in the center and made it impossible to win presidential elections.

    “I think there’s a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told NPR last month.

    The controversy over transgender women and girls in women’s sports has become an early test. Newsom, Buttigieg and Emanuel have broken with the left, arguing that there’s a case for barring transgender women from competition. “It is an issue of fairness,” Newsom said on his podcast in March.

    Their statements prompted fierce backlash from LGBTQ+ rights advocates. “I’m now going to go into a witness protection plan,” Emanuel joked in an interview with conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly in July.

    Other Democrats have tread more cautiously. “We need to make a compelling economic vision … our first, second and third priority,” Khanna said. Meanwhile, be said, “we can stay true to our values.”

    Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin was blunter. “We have to stand up for every LGBTQ kid and their family who want to play sports like any other kid,” he said last week.

    Those battles will play out over the long campaign, already in its first stirrings, for the next presidential nomination — the traditional way American political parties settle on a single message.

    “It takes time for a party to get up off the mat,” acknowledged Sosnik, the former Clinton strategist. “We didn’t get here overnight. We’re not going to get out of it overnight.”

    Doyle McManus

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  • Millions of dollars of special-election redistricting TV ads scheduled to start airing Tuesday

    Millions of dollars worth of political TV ads are expected to start airing Tuesday in an effort to sway Californians about a November ballot measure seeking to send more Democrats to Congress and counter President Trump and the GOP agenda, according to television airtime purchases.

    The special-election ballot measure — Prop. 50 — will likely shape control of the U.S. House of Representatives and determine the fate of many of Trump’s far-right policies

    The opposition to the rare California mid-decade redistricting has booked more than $10 million dollars of airtime for ads between Tuesday and Sept. 23 in media markets across the state, according to media buyers who are not affiliated with either campaign. Supporters of the effort have bought at least $2 million in ads starting on Tuesday, a number expected to grow exponentially as they are aggressively trying to secure time in coming weeks on broadcast and cable television.

    “This early start is a bit stealthy on the part of the no side, but has been used as a ploy in past campaigns to try to show strength early and gain advantage by forcing the opposing side to play catch up,” said Sheri Sadler, a veteran Democratic political media operative who is not working for either campaign. “This promises to be an expensive campaign for a special election, especially starting so early.”

    Millions of dollars have already flowed into the nascent campaigns sparring over the Nov. 4 special-election ballot measure that asks voters to set aside the congressional boundaries drawn in 2021 by California’s independent redistricting commission. The panel was created by the state’s voters in 2010 to stop gerrymandering and incumbent protection by both major political parties.

    The campaign will be a sprint — glossy multi-page mailers arrived in Californians’ mailboxes before the state legislature voted in late August to call the special election. Voters will begin receiving mail ballots in early October.

    Redistricting, typically an esoteric process that takes place once a decade following the U.S. Census, is receiving an unusual level of attention because of partisan efforts to tilt control of Congress in next year’s midterm election. Republicans have a narrow edge in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the party that wins control of the White House often loses congressional seats in the following election.

    Earlier this summer, Trump asked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s congressional districts to add five GOP members to the House, setting off a redistricting arms race across the nation. California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a campaign to redraw the state’s congressional districts in an effort to boost the number of Democrats in Congress, negating the Texas gains for Republicans, but it must be approved by voters.

    The coalition opposing the effort is an intriguing mix: former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, wealthy Republican donor Charles Munger Jr., former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, Assemblyman Alex Lee (D-San Jose), the chair of the Legislative Progressive Caucus, and Gloria Chun Hoo, the president of the League of Women Voters of California.

    Many partisans — in both political parties — opposed independent redistricting when it was championed by Schwarzenegger and Munger in 2010.

    Jessica Millan Patterson, the former state GOP chairwoman who is leading McCarthy’s effort to oppose new congressional boundaries, demurred when asked about the dissonance. Voters, she said, made their choice clear at the ballot box about their preference to have an independent commission draw congressional districts rather than Sacramento politicians.

    “The people of California have spoken,” she said, adding that most voters agree that an independent commission is preferable to partisan politicians drawing districts.

    The “Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab” committee that Patterson leads plans on focusing on conservative and right-of-center voters, and will be well funded, she said.

    McCarthy was a prodigious fundraiser while in Congress and his long-time friend, major GOP fundraiser Jeff Miller, is raising money to oppose the ballot measure.

    Schwarzenegger is not part of the McCarthy effort, instead backing the good-government message of the Munger team. Patterson argues that anything the former governor does only brings more attention to their shared goal, even if he isn’t part of their effort.

    “Gov. Schwarzenegger is Gov. Schwarzenegger,” Patterson said, pointing to an X post of the global celebrity wearing a T-shirt that said “Terminate Gerrymandering” while working out on Aug. 15. “He is a celebrity, a box-office guy. He’s going to make sure reasonable people know that we don’t want to put this power back in Sacramento. He will bring the glitz and glamour, like he always does.”

    Schwarzenegger has long championed political reform. During his final year as governor, he prioritized the ballot measure that created independent congressional redistricting. Since leaving office, he made good governance a priority at his institute at the University of Southern California and campaigned for independent redistricting across the nation.

    “Here are some of the things that are more popular than Congress: hemorrhoids, Nickelback, traffic jams, cockroaches, root canals, colonoscopies, herpes,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2017 Facebook video. “Even herpes, they couldn’t beat herpes in the polls,”

    The former governor is reportedly backing the effort by Munger, the son of a billionaire, who bankrolled the ballot measure that created independent congressional redistricting in 2010. Munger has donated more than $10 million to an effort opposing the November ballot measure; the organization he funded has booked more than $10 million in television spots through Sept. 23.

    “These ads are the start of our campaign’s effort to communicate directly with voters about the dangers of allowing politicians to choose their voters and abandoning our gold standard citizen-led redistricting process,” said Amy Thoma, a spokesperson for the Munger-backed Voters First Coalition.

    Supporters of the effort to redraw the districts argued that Republicans are trying to cement GOP control of the nation’s policies.

    “Trump cronies … are spending big to defeat [Prop.] 50 and help Trump rig the 2026 election before a single person [has] voted,” said Hannah Milgrom, a spokesperson for the campaign. “They are spending big — and early — to trick California voters into allowing Trump to keep total control over the federal government for two more years. “

    Seema Mehta

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  • Padilla sidesteps questions about a possible run for governor, says he is focused on redistricting

    SACRAMENTO — U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) on Wednesday brushed aside questions about whether he might jump into California’s 2026 governor’s race but declined to rule out the idea.

    Padilla instead said he was wholly focused on promoting the special election in November when voters will be asked to redraw California’s congressional districts to counter efforts by President Trump and other GOP leaders to keep Republicans in control of Congress.

    “I’m focused and I’d encourage everybody to focus on this Nov. 4 special election,” Padilla said during an interview at a political summit in Sacramento sponsored by Politico.

    The 52-year-old added that the effort to redraw congressional districts, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to similar efforts in GOP-led states, is not solely about the arcane process known as redistricting.

    “My Republican colleagues and especially the White House know how unpopular and damaging what they’re doing is, from gutting Medicare, nutrition assistance programs, really all these other areas of budget cuts to underwrite tax breaks for billionaires,” Padilla said. “So their only hope of staying in power beyond next November is to rig the system.”

    In recent days, Padilla’s name has emerged as a possible candidate to replace Newsom, who cannot run for another term. The field is unsettled, with independent polling conducted after former Vice President Kamala Harris opted not to run for governor showing large numbers of voters are undecided and with no clear front-runner.

    Padilla pointed to his more than quarter-century history of serving Californians at every level of government when asked what might be appealing about the job.

    “I love California, right?” he said. “And I’ve had the privilege and the honor of serving in so many different capacities.”

    In 1999, the then-26-year-old was elected to the Los Angeles City Council. At the time, the MIT grad still lived with his parents — a Mexican-born housekeeper and a short-order cook — in Pacoima.

    Padilla continued his steady climb through the state’s political ranks in the decades that followed, serving in the state Senate and as California secretary of state. Newsom appointed him to fill Harris’ Senate seat in 2020, making him the first Latino to represent California in the Senate, and Padilla was elected to fill a full term in 2022. His current Senate term doesn’t end until 2029, meaning he wouldn’t have to risk his seat to run for governor.

    Seema Mehta, Julia Wick

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  • On U.S. direction under Trump, Californians split sharply along partisan lines, poll finds

    California voters are heavily divided along partisan lines when it comes to President Trump, with large majorities of Democrats and unaffiliated voters disapproving of him and believing the country is headed in the wrong direction under his leadership, and many Republicans feeling the opposite, according to a new poll conducted for The Times.

    The findings are remarkably consistent with past polling on the Republican president in the nation’s most populous blue state, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll.

    “If you look at all the job ratings we’ve done about President Trump — and this carries back all the way through his first term — voters have pretty much maintained the same posture,” DiCamillo said. “Voters know who he is.”

    The same partisan divide also showed up in the poll on a number of hot-button issues, such as Medicaid cuts and tariffs, DiCamillo said — with Democrats “almost uniformly” opposed to Trump’s agenda and Republicans “pretty much on board with what Trump is doing.”

    Asked whether the sweeping tariffs that Trump has imposed on international trading partners have had a “noticeable negative impact” on their family spending, 71% of Democrats said yes, while 76% of Republicans said no.

    “If you’re a Republican, you tend to discount the impacts — you downplay them or you just ignore them,” while Democrats “tend to blame everything on Trump,” DiCamillo said.

    Asked whether they were confident that the Trump administration would provide California with the nearly $40 billion in wildfire relief aid it has requested in response to the devastating L.A.-area fires in January, 93% of Democrats said they were not confident — compared with the 43% of Republicans who said they were confident.

    In a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1, the effect is that Trump fared terribly in the poll overall, just as he has in recent presidential votes in the state.

    The poll — conducted Aug. 11-17 with 4,950 registered voters interviewed — found 69% of likely California voters disapproved of Trump, with 62% strongly disapproving, while 29% approved of him. A similar majority, 68%, said they believed the country is headed in the wrong direction, while 26% said it’s headed in the right direction.

    Whereas 90% of Democrats and 75% of unaffiliated voters said the country is on the wrong track, just 20% of Republicans felt that way, the poll found.

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the poll.

    Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the findings prove Trump’s agenda “is devastating communities across California who are dealing with the harmful, real life consequences” of the president’s policies.

    “The Trump Administration does not represent the views of the vast majority of Californians and it’s why Trump has chosen California to push the limits of his constitutional power,” Padilla said. “As more Americans across the nation continue to feel the impacts of his destructive policies, public support will continue to erode.”

    G. Cristina Mora, co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, or IGS, said the findings were interesting, especially in light of other recent polling for The Times that found slightly more nuanced Republican impressions — and more wariness — when it comes to Trump’s immigration agenda and tactics.

    On his overall approval and on other parts of his agenda, including the tariffs and Medicaid cuts, “the strength of the partisanship is very clear,” Mora said.

    Cuts to Medicaid

    Voters in the state are similarly divided when it comes to recent decisions on Medicaid health insurance for low-income residents, the poll found. The state’s version is known as Medi-Cal.

    For instance, Californians largely disapprove of new work requirements for Medicaid and Medi-Cal recipients under the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump championed and congressional Republicans recently passed into law, the poll found.

    The bill requires most Medicaid recipients ages 18 to 64 to work at least 80 hours per month in order to continue receiving benefits. Republicans trumpeted the change as holding people accountable and safeguarding against abuses of federal taxpayer dollars, while Democrats denounced it as a threat to public health that would strip millions of vulnerable Americans of their health insurance.

    The poll found 61% of Californians disapproved of the change, with 43% strongly disapproving of it, while 36% approved of it, with 21% strongly approving of it. Voters were sharply divided along party lines, however, with 80% of Republicans approving of the changes and 85% of Democrats disapproving of them.

    Californians also disapproved — though by a smaller margin — of a move by California Democrats and Gov. Gavin Newsom to help close a budget shortfall by barring undocumented immigrant adults from newly enrolling in Medi-Cal benefits.

    A slight majority of poll respondents, or 52%, said they disapproved of the new restriction, with 17% strongly disapproving of it. The poll found 43% of respondents approved of the change, including 30% who strongly approved of it.

    Among Democrats, 77% disapproved of the change. Among Republicans, 87% approved of it. Among voters with no party preference, 52% disapproved.

    More than half the poll respondents — 57% — said neither they nor their immediate family members receive Medi-Cal benefits, while 35% said they did. Of those who receive Medi-Cal, two-thirds — or 67% — said they were very or somewhat worried about losing, or about someone in their immediate family losing, their coverage due to changes by the Trump administration.

    Nadereh Pourat, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said there is historical evidence to show what is going to happen next under the changes — and it’s not good.

    The work requirement will undoubtedly result in people losing health coverage, just as thousands did when Arkansas implemented a similar requirement years ago, she said.

    When people lose coverage, the cost of preventative care goes up and they generally receive less of it, she said. “If the doctor’s visit competes with food on the table or rent, then people are going to skip those primary care visits,” she said — and often “end up in the emergency room” instead.

    And that’s more expensive not just for them, but also for local and state healthcare systems, she said.

    Cuts to high-speed rail

    Californians also are heavily divided over the state’s efforts to build a high-speed rail line through the Central Valley, after the Trump administration announced it was clawing back $4 billion in promised federal funding.

    The project was initially envisioned as connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco by 2026, but officials have since set new goals of connecting Bakersfield to Merced by 2030. The project is substantially over budget, and Trump administration officials have called in a “boondoggle.”

    The poll found that 49% of Californians support the project, with 28% of them strongly in favor of it. It found 42% oppose the project, including 28% who strongly oppose it.

    Among Democrats, 66% were in favor of the project. Among Republicans, 77% were opposed. Among voters with no party preference, 49% were in favor while 39% were opposed.

    In Los Angeles County, 54% of voters were in favor of the project continuing, while 58% of voters in the Bay Area were in favor. In the Central Valley, 51% of voters were opposed, compared with 41% in favor.

    State Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San José), who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee, said political rhetoric around the project has clearly had an effect on how voters feel about it, and that is partly because state leaders haven’t done enough to lay out why the project makes sense economically.

    “Healthy skepticism is a good thing, especially when you’re dealing with billions of dollars,” he said. “It’s on legislators and the governor right now in California to lay out a strategy that you can’t poke a lot of holes in, and that hasn’t been the case in the past.”

    Cortese said he started life as an orchard farmer in what is now Silicon Valley, knows what major public infrastructure investments can mean for rural communities such as those in the Central Valley, and will be hyperfocused on that message moving forward.

    “There is no part of California that I know of that’s been waiting for more economic development than Bakersfield. Probably second is Fresno,” he said.

    He said he also will be stressing to local skeptics of the project that supporting the Trump administration taking $4 billion away from California would be a silly thing to do no matter their politics. Conservative local officials who understand that will be “key to help us turn the tide,” he said.

    Last month, California’s high-speed rail authority sued the Trump administration over the withdrawal of funds. The state is also suing the Trump administration over various changes to Medicaid, over Trump’s tariffs and over immigration enforcement tactics.

    Mora said the sharp divide among Democrats and Republicans on Trump and his agenda called to mind other recent polling that showed many voters immediately changed their views of the economy after Trump took office — with Republicans suddenly feeling more optimistic, and Democrats more pessimistic.

    It’s all a reflection of our modern, hyperpartisan politics, she said, where people’s perceptions — including about their own economic well-being — are “tied now much more closely to ideas about who’s in power.”

    Kevin Rector

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  • Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections

    The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.Related video above — Get the Facts: Redistricting or Gerrymandering? The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering. The nature of the violation lies in “the Legislature’s refusal to respect the people’s exercise of their constitutional lawmaking power and to honor the people’s right to reform their government,” Gibson said in her ruling.New maps will need to be drawn quickly for the 2026 midterm elections. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections official, asked the courts for the case to be finalized by November to leave time for the process before candidates start filing in early January. But appeals promised by Republican lawmakers could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.The ruling creates uncertainty in a state that was thought to be a clean sweep for the GOP as the party is preparing to defend its slim majority in the U.S. House. Nationally, Democrats need to net three seats next year to take control of the chamber. The sitting president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms, as was the case for President Donald Trump in 2018.Trump has urged several Republican-led states to add winnable seats for the GOP. In Texas, a plan awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s approval includes five new districts that would favor Republicans. Ohio Republicans already were scheduled to revise their maps to make them more partisan, and Indiana, Florida and Missouri may choose to make changes. Some Democrat-led states say they may enter the redistricting battle, but so far only California has taken action to offset GOP gains in Texas.

    The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.

    Related video above — Get the Facts: Redistricting or Gerrymandering?

    The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.

    District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering. The nature of the violation lies in “the Legislature’s refusal to respect the people’s exercise of their constitutional lawmaking power and to honor the people’s right to reform their government,” Gibson said in her ruling.

    New maps will need to be drawn quickly for the 2026 midterm elections. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections official, asked the courts for the case to be finalized by November to leave time for the process before candidates start filing in early January. But appeals promised by Republican lawmakers could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.

    The ruling creates uncertainty in a state that was thought to be a clean sweep for the GOP as the party is preparing to defend its slim majority in the U.S. House. Nationally, Democrats need to net three seats next year to take control of the chamber. The sitting president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms, as was the case for President Donald Trump in 2018.

    Trump has urged several Republican-led states to add winnable seats for the GOP. In Texas, a plan awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s approval includes five new districts that would favor Republicans. Ohio Republicans already were scheduled to revise their maps to make them more partisan, and Indiana, Florida and Missouri may choose to make changes. Some Democrat-led states say they may enter the redistricting battle, but so far only California has taken action to offset GOP gains in Texas.

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  • Contributor: Democrats will pay for ignoring base’s qualms about Gaza

    As the Democratic Party searches for direction in the post-2024 landscape, its leaders seem bent on alienating their own base over Gaza. This is not a matter of nuance or tactical positioning; it’s a profound moral and political miscalculation.

    That failure is on vivid display in the decision by House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (Redlands) to help lead a delegation of mostly freshman Democratic representatives recently to Israel. The trip included meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption in Israel and is the subject of arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    Polling makes the disconnect impossible to ignore. In July, Gallup found that just 8% of Democrats approve of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, with disapproval overwhelming. Pew Research Center reported in April that 69% of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israel — a striking shift from just a few years ago. And Data for Progress has consistently found supermajority Democratic support for a permanent ceasefire; in May 2024, 83% of Democrats backed a permanent ceasefire, and in a June 12, 2024, poll a majority of Democrats said they believed Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza.

    Aguilar’s role makes this especially galling. He isn’t a backbencher; he’s a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party leadership. That gives him a particular responsibility to model principled conduct for newer members. Instead, he’s showing them the wrong lesson: that obedience to the donor class matters more than representing constituents. The point is underscored by his fundraising: OpenSecrets reports Aguilar received about $678,000 from donors categorized as “Pro-Israel” in the 2023–24 cycle.

    The mechanics of that influence are no mystery. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied pro-Israel PACs reward loyalty with torrents of campaign cash and punish dissent with lavishly funded primary challenges. Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush — both outspoken critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza — have been textbook examples: Bowman was unseated after record outside spending flooded his race, and Bush faced a barrage of super-PAC money that ultimately toppled her. The incentive structure is clear: Toe the line and your coffers swell; cross it and a financial juggernaut rolls over you.

    There is a political price for complying with this pressure, however. The Institute for Middle East Understanding, using YouGov, found that among voters who backed Joe Biden in 2020 but chose someone else in 2024 “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top issue for 29% nationally — ahead of the economy — and 20% in battleground states. Those results point to a straightforward conclusion: Ignoring Democratic voters on Gaza depresses enthusiasm and peels away enough support to matter in close races.

    Gaza is politically damaging not only because of the issue itself — though the moral stakes could hardly be higher — but also because it has become a measure of where leaders’ loyalties lie. Voters read it as a test of whether their representatives will stand with the people who elected them or with wealthy donors and foreign lobbies. Fail that test and many will assume you might betray them on other critical issues in the future.

    The Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to adapt is not just bad politics; it’s a betrayal of basic democratic principles. Rank-and-file Democrats overwhelmingly want an end to the carnage, an end to unconditional military aid to Israel, and policies rooted in human rights and international law. Yet too many leaders seem more concerned with keeping favor in donor circles than with honoring the public’s will.

    If Democrats hope to retain their coalition, they need to realign policy with their voters’ values: call for a permanent ceasefire; condition U.S. military assistance on compliance with international law; and replace photo-op delegations with diplomacy that centers on justice and accountability.

    Until then, every AIPAC-sponsored trip led by a party leader will read like a declaration of priorities — and a reminder of the price the party will continue to pay at the ballot box.

    George Bisharat is a professor emeritus at UC Law San Francisco and a longtime commentator on U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

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    Ideas expressed in the piece

    • The Democratic Party elite continues to cling to pro-Israel policies despite a dramatic shift in voter sentiment, with DNC chair Ken Martin exemplifying this resistance by backing resolutions that maintain commitments to Israel’s “qualitative military edge” while pressuring pro-Palestine delegates to water down alternative proposals[3]. The party leadership’s obedience to pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel contradicts the clear will of Democratic voters who increasingly oppose the status quo[3].

    • Polling data consistently demonstrates overwhelming Democratic opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza, with just 8% of Democratic voters approving of Israel’s military campaign according to recent Gallup surveys, down dramatically from earlier periods in the conflict[5][6]. This represents the lowest approval rating among Democrats since polling began on the issue, creating a stark disconnect between party leadership and base voters[5].

    • The influence of pro-Israel campaign contributions is evident in the behavior of Democratic representatives who continue to participate in AIPAC-sponsored trips to Israel despite their constituents’ opposition, with California representatives receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from pro-Israel groups while ignoring polling showing 92% of Democrats oppose Israel’s actions[2]. These trips occur while Gaza faces unprecedented humanitarian devastation, with over 60,000 Palestinian civilians killed and two million people facing starvation[2].

    • The declining number of Democrats willing to participate in AIPAC trips reflects growing awareness among elected officials of their constituents’ opposition, with recent delegations representing the smallest ever congressional group of Democrats to visit Israel as many invited House members reportedly declined to participate[4]. This trend suggests that elected officials are beginning to respond to public pressure despite continued lobbying efforts[2].

    Different views on the topic

    • Pro-Israel Democratic organizations argue that divisive resolutions calling for arms embargos and Palestinian state recognition would damage party unity and provide political advantages to Republicans, particularly as the party approaches midterm elections where maintaining cohesion is crucial for retaking Congress[1]. These groups contend that such measures fail to address the root cause of the conflict by not mentioning Hamas’s October 7 attacks or the terrorist organization’s role in perpetuating the war[1].

    • Supporters of continued military aid to Israel maintain that arms embargos would actually prolong the conflict and extend suffering on both sides, arguing that pressure should instead be directed toward Hamas to accept ceasefire deals and release hostages[1]. The Democratic Majority for Israel emphasizes that unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state would reward terrorism and embolden Israel’s adversaries in the region[1].

    • Pro-Israel advocates stress that the fundamental relationship between the United States and Israel remains strong due to shared democratic values and mutual security interests that have endured for over 75 years, suggesting that temporary political pressures should not override these longstanding strategic considerations[1]. Congressional delegations to Israel are defended as necessary to witness firsthand the aftermath of terrorist attacks and assess ongoing security threats[4].

    George Bisharat

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  • Most California voters disapprove of Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, poll shows

    Most California voters strongly disapprove of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and believe that raids in the state have unfairly targeted Latinos, according to a new poll.

    The findings, released Sunday, reflected striking emotional reactions to immigration enforcement. When voters were asked to describe their feelings about news reports or videos of immigration raids, 64% chose rage or sadness “because what is happening is unfair.”

    Among Democrats, 91% felt enraged or sad. Conversely, 65% of Republicans felt hopeful, “like justice is finally being served.”

    Such divisions were consistent across 11 questions about the administration’s overall immigration strategy and specific aspects of the way enforcement is playing out in the state, with divisions along partisan lines. The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll was conducted for the Los Angeles Times.

    Democrats almost unanimously oppose President Trump’s tactics on immigration, the poll showed. Most Republicans support the president, though they are not as united as Democrats in their approval.

    “It was essential to show the strength of feelings because Democrats are strongly on the negative side of each of these policies,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll. “That struck me. I don’t usually see that kind of extreme fervor on a poll response.”

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    The poll found that 69% of respondents disapprove of the way immigration enforcement is being carried out in the state.

    Among Democrats, 95% disapprove, as well as 72% of voters with no party preference or others not affiliated with the two major parties, whereas 79% of Republicans approve.

    The poll was completed online in English and Spanish from Aug. 11-17 by 4,950 registered voters in California.

    A question that showed the least unified support among Republican voters asked respondents whether they agree or disagree that federal agents should be required to show clear identification when carrying out their work. The question comes as immigration agents have carried out raids using face coverings, unmarked cars and while wearing casual clothing.

    Some 50% of Republicans agreed that agents should have to identify themselves, while 92% of Democrats agreed.

    G. Cristina Mora, IGS co-director and a sociology professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and immigration, helped develop the poll questions. She said the poll shows that Republican voters are much more nuanced than Democrats. They also split on questions about due process, birthright citizenship and immigration enforcement in sensitive locations.

    “Republicans are much more fractured in their thinking about immigration across the state,” Mora said.

    Mora said she developed the question about agent identification in response to the recent bill led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that would require immigration officers to display their agency and name or badge number during public-facing enforcement actions, similar to police and other local law enforcement.

    Padilla also spearheaded a letter last month to Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons seeking information about the agency’s policies regarding the identification of agents while on duty. ICE has justified the tactics by stating that agents are at risk of doxxing and have faced increased assault on the job.

    “The public has a right to know which officials are exercising police power, and anonymous enforcement undermines both constitutional norms and democratic oversight,” Padilla and 13 other Democrats wrote in the letter.

    Another poll question that garnered mixed support of Republicans asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement, “ICE agents should expand immigration enforcement into schools, hospitals, parks and other public locations.”

    Among Republicans, 53% agreed with that statement, though fewer than 1 in 3 agree strongly. Meanwhile, 94% of Democrats disagreed.

    Shortly after Trump took office, his administration rescinded a 2011 memo that restricted immigration agents from making arrests in sensitive locations, such as churches, schools and hospitals. Since then, agents have been filmed entering locations that were previously considered off limits, putting immigrant communities on edge.

    Schools in Los Angeles reopened this month with “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods and changed bus routes with less exposure to immigration agents. An 18-year-old high school senior, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, was walking his family’s dog in Van Nuys when he was taken into federal immigration custody.

    Mora said the varied responses illustrate how California Republicans view the Trump administration’s immigration tactics with “degrees of acceptability.” They might feel strongly that immigrants with violent criminal histories should be deported, she said, but the takeover of MacArthur Park, when a convoy of immigration agents in armored vehicles descended there in a show of force, or the enforcement actions outside of public schools “might have been a step too far.”

    Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who wrote a book about how Latinos have transformed democracy, said the split among Republicans is consistent with national polling. The trend is problematic for Trump, he said, because it means he is losing big swaths of his base.

    “This is becoming viewed as overreach more than it is immigration control,” he said. “The idea sets a frame for it, but the actual implementation is widely unpopular.”

    Republicans were largely united in response to other questions. Asked about the Trump administration’s proposal to do away with birthright citizenship — which confers citizenship to all children born in the U.S. regardless of their parent’s legal status — 67% of GOP respondents approved, and most of them strongly approved. By contrast, 92% of Democrats disapproved, and as did seven in 10 respondents overall.

    Mora said she was surprised by the fact that Latinos didn’t stand out as substantially more opposed to Trump’s actions than voters of other racial and ethnic groups. For example, 69% of Latino voters said ICE raids have unfairly targeted Latinos, just five percentage points higher than the 64% of white non-Latino voters who agreed.

    “You would imagine Latinos would be through the roof here, but they’re not,” Mora said. She said this reminded her of research around the tendency for Latinos to individualize their experiences instead of seeing them as racially unjust.

    Broadly, 72% of Latinos disagree with the way the Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws in California, while 25% approve and 3% have no strong opinion.

    Among Latino voter subgroups, older men and third-generation (or beyond) women are the more likely to support the way immigration enforcement is being handled in California, with 38% of Latino men over age 40 in agreement compared to 11% of Latinas ages 18-39, although among both groups majorities disapprove.

    Madrid said that’s consistent with national polling showing a decrease in support for Republicans among Latinos after record gains in the last presidential election. The question, he said, is whether Trump’s approval ratings among Latinos could regress substantially enough to flip control of Congress in the midterms.

    “We’re not there yet,” he said.

    Andrea Castillo

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  • California’s lightning-fast push for partisan redistricting reflects Trump’s new America

    In an evening social media post about a supremely partisan battle that could reshape American political power for generations, President Trump sounded ebullient.

    “Big WIN for the Great State of Texas!!! Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself,” Trump wrote, of the nation’s most populous red state pushing a mid-decade redistricting plan designed to win more Republican seats in Congress and protect Trump’s power through the 2026 midterms.

    “Texas never lets us down. Florida, Indiana, and others are looking to do the same thing,” Trump wrote — nodding to a potential proliferation of such efforts across the country.

    The next day, Gov. Gavin Newsom — projecting a fresh swagger as Trump’s chief antagonist on the issue — stood with fellow lawmakers from the nation’s most populous blue state to announce their own legislative success in putting to voters a redrawn congressional map for California that strongly favors Democrats.

    “We got here because the president of the United States is one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history,” Newsom said, couching the California effort as defensive rather than offensive. “We got here because he recognizes that he will lose the election, [and that] Congress will go back into the hands of the Democratic Party next November.”

    In the last week, with lightning speed, the nation’s foremost political leaders have jettisoned any pretense of political fairness — any notion of voters being equal or elected representatives reflecting their constituencies — in favor of an all-out partisan war for power that has some politicians and many political observers concerned for the future of American democracy.

    “America is headed towards true authoritarian rule if people do not stand up,” Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat from the Houston area, said Friday on a call with reporters.

    The race to redistrict began with Trump, whose approval ratings have plummeted, pressuring Texas to manipulate maps to secure more House seats for Republicans so he wouldn’t face a hostile House majority in the second half of his second term. It escalated when Newsom and other California leaders said they wouldn’t stand idly by and started working to put a new map of their own on the November ballot — formally asking voters to jettison the state’s independent redistricting commission to counter Trump’s gambit in Texas.

    Those two states alone are home to some 70 million Americans, but the fight is hardly limited there. As Trump suggested, other states are also eyeing whether to redraw lines — raising the prospect of a country divided between blue and red power centers more than ever before, and the voice of millions of minority-party voters being all but erased in the halls of Congress.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom answers questions on Thursday after signing legislation calling for a special election on a redrawn congressional map.

    (Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)

    Of course, gerrymandering is not new, and already exists in many states across the country. But the bold, unapologetic and bipartisan bent of the latest redistricting race is something new and different, experts said. It is a clear product of Trump’s new America, where political warfare is increasingly untethered to — and unbound by — long-standing political norms, and where leaders of both political parties seem increasingly willing to toss aside pretense and politeness in order to pursue power.

    Trump on the campaign trail promised a new “Golden Age,” and he has long said his goal is to return America to some purportedly greater, more aspirational and proud past. But he has also signaled, repeatedly and with hardly any ambiguity, an intention to manipulate the political system to further empower himself and his fellow Republicans — whether through redistricting, ending mail-in ballots, or other measures aimed at curtailing voter turnout.

    “In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump told a crowd of evangelical Christians a little over a year ago, in the thick of his presidential campaign. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

    ‘No democracy left’

    The redistricting war has dominated political news for weeks now, given its potential implications for reshaping Congress and further emboldening Trump in his second term.

    Sam Wang, president of the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton University, has studied gerrymandering for years, but said during the media call with Wu that he has never received more inquiries than in the last few weeks, when his inbox has filled with questions from media around the world.

    Wang said gerrymandering reached a high point more than a decade ago, but had been subsiding due to court battles and state legislatures establishing independent commissions to draw district lines.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defends his state's redistricting move while calling California's "a joke."

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defends his state’s redistricting move while calling California’s “a joke.”

    (Eric Gay / Associated Press)

    Now, however, the efforts of Texas and California are threatening that progress and pushing things “to a new low point,” he said — leaving some voters feeling disenfranchised and Wang worried about further erosion of voter protections under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he said the conservative Supreme Court may be preparing to weaken.

    Wu said allowing politicians to redraw congressional lines whenever they want in order to “make sure that they never lose” sets a dangerous precedent that will especially disenfranchise minority voters — because “politicians and leaders would no longer listen to the people.”

    “There would be no democracy left,” he said.

    That said, Wu drew a sharp distinction between Texas Republicans unilaterally redrawing maps to their and Trump’s advantage — in part by “hacking” apart minority populations — and California asking voters to counteract that power grab with a new map of their own.

    “California is defending the nation,” he said. “Texas is doing something illegal.”

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday took the opposition position, saying Texas’ new map was constitutional while California’s was “a joke” and likely to be overturned. He also hinted at further efforts in other Republican-led states to add more House seats for the party.

    “Republicans are not finished in the United States,” Abbott said.

    Two legal experts on the call expressed grave concerns with such partisanship — especially in Texas.

    Sara Rohani, assistant counsel with the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF, said her organization has been fighting for decades to ensure that the promises of the Voting Rights Act for Black and other minority groups aren’t infringed upon by unscrupulous and racist political leaders in search of power.

    “Fair representation isn’t optional in this country. It’s the right of all Americans to [have] equal voting power,” she said.

    That said, “voters of color have been excluded” from that promise consistently, both before and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and “in 2025, it’s clear that our fight for fair maps continues,” Rohani said.

    Major victories have been won in the courts in recent years in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, and those battles are only going to continue, she said. Asked specifically if her group is preparing to sue over Texas’ maps, Rohani demurred — but didn’t back down, saying LDF will get involved “in any jurisdiction where Black voters are being targeted.”

    Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said there are definitely going to be challenges to Texas’ maps.

    By their own admission, Saenz said, Texas lawmakers redrew their maps in 2021 in order to maximize Republican advantage in congressional races — with the only limits being those imposed by the Voting Rights Act. That means in order to gain even more seats now, “they have to violate the Voting Rights Act,” he said.

    Texas Republicans have argued that they are acting in part in response to a warning from the Justice Department that their current maps, from 2021, are unlawful. But Saenz noted that the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit challenging those maps when Trump took office — meaning any threats to sue again are an empty ploy and “clearly orchestrated with one objective: Donald Trump’s objective.”

    The fate of any legal challenges to the redistricting efforts is unclear, in part because gerrymandering has become much harder to challenge in court.

    In 2019, the Supreme Court threw out claims that highly partisan state election maps are unconstitutional. Chief Justice John G. Roberts said such district-by-district line drawing “presents political questions” and there are no reliable “legal standards” for deciding what is fair and just.

    It was not a new view for Roberts.

    In 2006, shortly after he joined the court, the justices rejected a challenge to a mid-decade redistricting engineered by Texas Republicans, but ordered the state — over Roberts’ dissent — to redraw one of its majority-Latino districts to transfer some of its voters to another Latino-leaning district.

    Roberts expressed his frustration at the time, writing that it “is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

    Some legal experts say the new Texas redistricting could face a legal challenge if Black or Latino lawmakers are in danger of losing their seats. But the Supreme Court conservatives are skeptical of such claims — and have given signs they may shrink the scope of the Voting Rights Act.

    In March, the justices considered a Louisiana case to decide if the state must create a second congressional district that would elect a Black candidate to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and if so, how it should be drawn.

    But the court failed to issue a decision. Instead, on Aug. 1, the court said it would hear further arguments this fall on “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district” violates the Constitution.

    Justice Clarence Thomas has long argued it is unconstitutional to draw election districts based on racial lines, regardless of the Voting Rights Act, and he may now have a majority that agrees with him.

    If so, such a ruling could squelch discrimination claims from Black and Latino lawmakers in Texas or elsewhere — further clearing the path for partisan gerrymandering.

    Looking ahead

    Given the intensity of the battle and the uncertainty of the related legal challenges, few of America’s top political leaders are thinking to the future. They’re fighting in the present — focused on swaying public perception.

    In a YouTube Live video with thousands of supporters on Thursday, Newsom said Trump “doesn’t believe in the rule of law — he believes in the rule of Don; period, full stop,” and that he hoped it was “dawning on more and more Americans what’s at stake.”

    Newsom said that when Trump “made the phone call to rig the elections to Greg Abbott in Texas,” he expected Democrats to just roll over and take it. In response, he said, Democrats have to stop thinking about “whether or not we should play hardball,” and start focusing on “how we play hardball.”

    On Friday, Newsom said he was “very proud of the Legislature for moving quickly” to counter Texas, and that he is confident voters will support the ballot measure to change the state’s maps despite polls showing a sluggish start to the campaign.

    A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, conducted for The Times, found 48% of voters said they would cast ballots in favor of temporary gerrymandering efforts, though 20% were undecided.

    Asked if he is encouraging Democratic leaders in other states to revisit their own maps, Newsom said he appreciated both Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signaling that they may be willing to do just that.

    “I do believe that the actions of [the California] Legislature will inspire other legislative leaders to … meet this moment, to save this democracy and to stop this authoritarian and his continued actions to literally vandalize and gut our Constitution and our democratic principles,” Newsom said.

    Kevin Rector, David G. Savage, Melody Gutierrez, Laura J. Nelson

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  • CA redistricting special election approved; Proposed congressional maps no longer hinge on Texas

    It’s official. California voters this fall will be asked to approve Democratic-drawn congressional maps, after the Legislature approved a bill Thursday calling for a special election in the fall. Earlier Thursday, California’s Democratic leaders moved forward with an effort to change the congressional district maps so that they heavily favor Democrats, regardless of what Texas or other Republican states do. (Video below: Gov. Newsom, Democratic lawmakers answer questions about the redistricting special election.)The effort that was promoted by California Democrats as a way to counteract efforts in Texas to send more Republicans to Congress will no longer rely on the action in the Lone Star state or others that allegedly spurred redistricting efforts, according to legislative documents KCRA 3 obtained Thursday. Democratic state lawmakers in the California Assembly made changes to the legislation known as ACA 8 on Thursday morning, minutes before they began debating and voting on the proposed ballot measure that would present the new maps to voters in a special statewide election this fall.(Video below: Gov. Newsom speaks with legislative leaders at a bill signing.)The changes clarifying that the maps do not rely on Texas or other states were put in a separate bill that lawmakers are prepared to approve on Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democratic leaders have repeatedly insisted that California would have no need to enact new Congressional maps if Texas and other GOP states cease redistricting efforts. It has been part of a bitter fight between states over which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives halfway through President Donald Trump’s term.But now the legislation, known as the Election Rigging Response Act in California, has all references to any red state’s redistricting efforts stricken out of the language. That special election would ask voters to allow the new, politically drawn maps heavily favoring Democrats to take effect 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections. It could be a legal gamble in the state, where voters in 2008 and 2010 took the power away from politicians to draw Congressional districts and gave it to an independent, citizens-led redistricting commission. (VIDEO BELOW: How did we get here?)The change comes a day after the Texas House approved new Congressional maps that attempt to remove five Democrats from its representation and replace them with Republicans. The maps are now halfway through that state’s process. The Republican-controlled state Senate was scheduled to vote on a map Thursday night. “Yesterday, Texas moved forward with their Trump power grab so this notion of “conditioning” is no longer applicable — it is self-evident that California will need to move forward in response to what Texas has done,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said in a statement.The governor’s office noted California’s change is also meant to simplify the question that is presented to voters this fall. Republican states will no longer be mentioned in the ballot measure, which will ask voters to simultaneously approve the new politically drawn congressional maps and support independent redistricting nationwide. The act of redrawing district lines to specifically favor a political party is known as gerrymandering, a once taboo practice to openly admit to that is now being boasted by both Democrats and Republicans.California Democrats began publicly advocating for redistricting after President Donald Trump called on Texas to send five additional Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Trump made the request because midterm elections could typically lead to shifts in power.California lawmakers approved legislation Thursday that will establish the Nov. 4 special election. The Assembly approved ACA 8 with 57 ayes and 20 nos, with Democrat Alex Lee abstaining from the vote. Democrat Dawn Addis was absent on Thursday.The state Senate then voted to approve ACA 8 on a 30-8 vote. The ballot measure is expected to be known as Proposition 50. The cost of a special election is not yet public, but it is expected to cost at least $200 million, which is around what it cost for the 2021 election that attempted to recall Newsom from office. Newsom signed two pieces of legislation later Thursday that outline the logistics for the special election and provide resources and money for it. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

    It’s official.

    California voters this fall will be asked to approve Democratic-drawn congressional maps, after the Legislature approved a bill Thursday calling for a special election in the fall.

    Earlier Thursday, California’s Democratic leaders moved forward with an effort to change the congressional district maps so that they heavily favor Democrats, regardless of what Texas or other Republican states do.

    (Video below: Gov. Newsom, Democratic lawmakers answer questions about the redistricting special election.)

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    The effort that was promoted by California Democrats as a way to counteract efforts in Texas to send more Republicans to Congress will no longer rely on the action in the Lone Star state or others that allegedly spurred redistricting efforts, according to legislative documents KCRA 3 obtained Thursday.

    Democratic state lawmakers in the California Assembly made changes to the legislation known as ACA 8 on Thursday morning, minutes before they began debating and voting on the proposed ballot measure that would present the new maps to voters in a special statewide election this fall.

    (Video below: Gov. Newsom speaks with legislative leaders at a bill signing.)

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    The changes clarifying that the maps do not rely on Texas or other states were put in a separate bill that lawmakers are prepared to approve on Monday.

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    Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democratic leaders have repeatedly insisted that California would have no need to enact new Congressional maps if Texas and other GOP states cease redistricting efforts. It has been part of a bitter fight between states over which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives halfway through President Donald Trump’s term.

    But now the legislation, known as the Election Rigging Response Act in California, has all references to any red state’s redistricting efforts stricken out of the language.

    That special election would ask voters to allow the new, politically drawn maps heavily favoring Democrats to take effect 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections. It could be a legal gamble in the state, where voters in 2008 and 2010 took the power away from politicians to draw Congressional districts and gave it to an independent, citizens-led redistricting commission.

    (VIDEO BELOW: How did we get here?)

    The change comes a day after the Texas House approved new Congressional maps that attempt to remove five Democrats from its representation and replace them with Republicans. The maps are now halfway through that state’s process. The Republican-controlled state Senate was scheduled to vote on a map Thursday night.

    “Yesterday, Texas moved forward with their Trump power grab so this notion of “conditioning” is no longer applicable — it is self-evident that California will need to move forward in response to what Texas has done,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said in a statement.

    The governor’s office noted California’s change is also meant to simplify the question that is presented to voters this fall. Republican states will no longer be mentioned in the ballot measure, which will ask voters to simultaneously approve the new politically drawn congressional maps and support independent redistricting nationwide.

    The act of redrawing district lines to specifically favor a political party is known as gerrymandering, a once taboo practice to openly admit to that is now being boasted by both Democrats and Republicans.

    California Democrats began publicly advocating for redistricting after President Donald Trump called on Texas to send five additional Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Trump made the request because midterm elections could typically lead to shifts in power.

    California lawmakers approved legislation Thursday that will establish the Nov. 4 special election.

    The Assembly approved ACA 8 with 57 ayes and 20 nos, with Democrat Alex Lee abstaining from the vote. Democrat Dawn Addis was absent on Thursday.

    The state Senate then voted to approve ACA 8 on a 30-8 vote.

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    The ballot measure is expected to be known as Proposition 50.

    The cost of a special election is not yet public, but it is expected to cost at least $200 million, which is around what it cost for the 2021 election that attempted to recall Newsom from office.

    Newsom signed two pieces of legislation later Thursday that outline the logistics for the special election and provide resources and money for it.

    See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel

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  • Obama endorses redrawing California congressional districts to counter Trump

    Former President Obama endorsed California Democrats’ plans to redraw congressional districts if Texas or another Republican-led state does so to increase the GOP’s chances of maintaining control of Congress after next year’s midterm election.

    Obama said that while he opposes partisan gerrymandering, Republicans in Texas acting at President Trump’s behest have forced Democrats’ hand.

    If Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy,” he said at a fundraiser Tuesday in Martha’s Vineyard that was first reported by the Associated Press on Wednesday.

    “I wanted just a fair fight between Republicans and Democrats based on who’s got better ideas, and take it to the voters and see what happens,” Obama said, “… but we cannot unilaterally allow one of the two major parties to rig the game. And California is one of the states that has the capacity to offset a large state like Texas.”

    Redistricting typically only occurs once a decade, after the census, to account for population shifts. In 2010, Californians voted to create an independent redistricting commission to end partisan gerrymandering. California’s 52 congressional districts were last redrawn in 2021.

    Earlier this summer, Trump urged Texas leaders to redraw its congressional boundaries to increase the number of Republicans in Congress. Led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California Democrats responded and proposed redrawing the state’s district lines and putting the matter before voters in a special election in November.

    The issue came to a head this week, with Texas lawmakers expected to vote on their new districts on Wednesday, and California legislators expected to vote on Thursday to call the special election.

    Obama called Newsom’s approach “responsible,” because the matter will ultimately be decided by voters, and if approved, would only go into effect if Texas or another state embarks on a mid-decade redistricting, and line-drawing would revert to the independent commission after the 2030 census.

    “I think that approach is a smart, measured approach, designed to address a very particular problem in a very particular moment in time,” Obama said.

    Seema Mehta

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  • Obama applauds Newsom’s California redistricting plan as ‘responsible’ as Texas GOP pushes new maps

    Former President Barack Obama has waded into states’ efforts at rare mid-decade redistricting efforts, saying he agrees with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response to alter his state’s congressional maps, in the wake of Texas redistricting efforts promoted by President Donald Trump aimed at shoring up Republicans’ position in next year’s elections. “I believe that Gov. Newsom’s approach is a responsible approach. He said this is going to be responsible. We’re not going to try to completely maximize it,” Obama said at a Tuesday fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, according to excerpts obtained by The Associated Press. “We’re only going to do it if and when Texas and/or other Republican states begin to pull these maneuvers. Otherwise, this doesn’t go into effect.”While noting that “political gerrymandering” is not his “preference,” Obama said that, if Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy.”According to organizers, the event raised $2 million for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates, one of which has filed and supported litigation in several states over GOP-drawn districts. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general and heads up the group, also appeared.The former president’s comments come as Texas lawmakers return to Austin this week, renewing a heated debate over a new congressional map creating five new potential GOP seats. The plan is the result of prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives. Texas Democratic lawmakers delayed a vote for 15 days by leaving the state in protest, depriving the House of enough members to do business.Spurred on by the Texas situation, Democratic governors, including Newsom, have pondered ways to possibly strengthen their party’s position by way of redrawing U.S. House district lines, five years out from the Census count that typically leads into such procedures.In California — where voters in 2010 gave the power to draw congressional maps to an independent commission, with the goal of making the process less partisan — Democrats have unveiled a proposal that could give that state’s dominant political party an additional five U.S. House seats in a bid to win the fight for control of Congress next year. If approved by voters in November, the blueprint could nearly erase Republican House members in the nation’s most populous state, with Democrats intending to win the party 48 of its 52 U.S. House seats, up from 43.A hearing over that measure devolved into a shouting match Tuesday as a Republican lawmaker clashed with Democrats, and a committee voted along party lines to advance the new congressional map. California Democrats do not need any Republican votes to move ahead, and legislators are expected to approve a proposed congressional map and declare a Nov. 4 special election by Thursday to get required voter approval.Newsom and Democratic leaders say they’ll ask voters to approve their new maps only for the next few elections, returning map-drawing power to the commission following the 2030 census — and only if a Republican state moves forward with new maps. Obama applauded that temporary timeline.”And we’re going to do it in a temporary basis because we’re keeping our eye on where we want to be long term,” Obama said, referencing Newsom’s take on the California plan. “I think that approach is a smart, measured approach, designed to address a very particular problem in a very particular moment in time.”___Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAPSee more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

    Former President Barack Obama has waded into states’ efforts at rare mid-decade redistricting efforts, saying he agrees with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response to alter his state’s congressional maps, in the wake of Texas redistricting efforts promoted by President Donald Trump aimed at shoring up Republicans’ position in next year’s elections.

    “I believe that Gov. Newsom’s approach is a responsible approach. He said this is going to be responsible. We’re not going to try to completely maximize it,” Obama said at a Tuesday fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, according to excerpts obtained by The Associated Press. “We’re only going to do it if and when Texas and/or other Republican states begin to pull these maneuvers. Otherwise, this doesn’t go into effect.”

    While noting that “political gerrymandering” is not his “preference,” Obama said that, if Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy.”

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    You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

    According to organizers, the event raised $2 million for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates, one of which has filed and supported litigation in several states over GOP-drawn districts. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general and heads up the group, also appeared.

    The former president’s comments come as Texas lawmakers return to Austin this week, renewing a heated debate over a new congressional map creating five new potential GOP seats. The plan is the result of prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives. Texas Democratic lawmakers delayed a vote for 15 days by leaving the state in protest, depriving the House of enough members to do business.

    Spurred on by the Texas situation, Democratic governors, including Newsom, have pondered ways to possibly strengthen their party’s position by way of redrawing U.S. House district lines, five years out from the Census count that typically leads into such procedures.

    In California — where voters in 2010 gave the power to draw congressional maps to an independent commission, with the goal of making the process less partisan — Democrats have unveiled a proposal that could give that state’s dominant political party an additional five U.S. House seats in a bid to win the fight for control of Congress next year. If approved by voters in November, the blueprint could nearly erase Republican House members in the nation’s most populous state, with Democrats intending to win the party 48 of its 52 U.S. House seats, up from 43.

    A hearing over that measure devolved into a shouting match Tuesday as a Republican lawmaker clashed with Democrats, and a committee voted along party lines to advance the new congressional map. California Democrats do not need any Republican votes to move ahead, and legislators are expected to approve a proposed congressional map and declare a Nov. 4 special election by Thursday to get required voter approval.

    Newsom and Democratic leaders say they’ll ask voters to approve their new maps only for the next few elections, returning map-drawing power to the commission following the 2030 census — and only if a Republican state moves forward with new maps. Obama applauded that temporary timeline.

    “And we’re going to do it in a temporary basis because we’re keeping our eye on where we want to be long term,” Obama said, referencing Newsom’s take on the California plan. “I think that approach is a smart, measured approach, designed to address a very particular problem in a very particular moment in time.”

    ___

    Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

    See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel

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  • California Republicans push Democrats on transparency, timeline for redistricting

    SACRAMENTO — California’s push to redraw the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats faced early opposition Tuesday during legislative hearings, a preview of the obstacles ahead for Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies as they try to convince voters to back the effort.

    California Democrats entered the redistricting fray after Republicans in Texas moved to reconfigure their political districts to increase by five the number of GOP members of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections, a move that could sway the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections.

    The proposed map of new districts in California that could go before voters in November could cost as many as five Golden State Republicans their seats in Congress.

    In Sacramento, Republicans criticized Democrats for trying to scrap the independent redistricting process approved by voters in 2010, a change designed to remove self-serving politics and partisan game-playing. GOP lawmakers argued that the public and legislators had little time to review the maps of the proposed congressional districts and questioned who crafted the new districts and bankrolled the effort.

    In an attempt to slow down the push by Democrats, California Republicans filed an emergency petition at the California Supreme Court, arguing that Democrats violated the state Constitution by rushing the bills through the legislature.

    The state Constitution requires lawmakers to introduce non-budget bills 30 days before they are voted on, unless the Legislature waives that rule by a three-fourths majority vote. The bills were introduced Monday through a common process known as “gut and amend,” where lawmakers strip out the language from an older pending bill and replace it with a new proposal.

    The lawsuit said that without the Supreme Court’s intervention, the state could enact “significant new legislation that the public has only seen for, at most, a few days,” according to the lawsuit filed by GOP state Sens. Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach and Suzette Martinez Valladares of Acton and Assemblymembers Tri Ta of Westminster and Kathryn Sanchez of Trabuco Canyon.

    Democrats bristled at the questions about their actions, including grilling by reporters and Republicans about who had drawn the proposed congressional districts that the party wants to put before voters.

    “When I go to a restaurant, I don’t need to meet the chef,” said Assembly Elections Committee chair Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz).

    Democrats unveiled their campaign to suspend the independent redistricting commission’s work Thursday, proposed maps of the redrawn districts were submitted to state legislative leaders Friday, and the three bills were introduced in the legislature Monday.

    If passed by a two-thirds vote in both bodies of the legislature and signed by Newsom this week, as expected, the measure will be on the ballot on Nov. 4.

    On Tuesday, lawmakers listened to hours of testimony and debate, frequently engaging in testy exchanges.

    After heated arguing and interrupting during an Assembly Elections Committee hearing, Pellerin admonished Assemblymembers Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) and David Tangipa (R-Clovis).

    “I would like you both to give me a little time and respect,” Pellerin said near the end of a hearing that lasted about five hours.

    Tangipa and the committee’s vice chair, Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo (R-Tulare), repeatedly questioned witnesses about issues that the GOP is likely to continue to raise: the speed with which the legislation is being pushed through, the cost of the special election, the limited opportunity for public comment on the maps, who drew the proposed new districts and who is funding the effort.

    Tangipa voiced concerns that legislators had too little time to review the legislation.

    “That’s insanity, and that’s heartbreaking to the rest of Californians,” Tangipa said. “How can you say you actually care about the people of California?

    Berman dismissed the criticism, saying the bill was five pages long.

    In a Senate elections committee hearing, State Sen. Steve Choi (R-Irvine), the only Republican on the panel, repeatedly pressed Democrats about how the maps had been drawn before they were presented.

    Tom Willis, Newsom’s campaign counsel who appeared as a witness to support the redistricting bills, said the map was “publicly submitted, and then the legislature reviewed it carefully and made sure that it was legally compliant.”

    But, Choi asked, who drew the maps in the first place? Willis said he couldn’t answer, because he “wasn’t a part of that process.”

    In response to questions about why California should change their independent redistricting ethos to respond to potential moves by Texas, state Sen. Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) was blunt.

    “This is a partisan gerrymander,” she said, to counter the impacts of Trump administration policy decisions, from healthcare cuts to immigration raids, that are disproportionately impacting Californians. “That’s what we’re talking about here.”

    Her comments prompted a GOP operative who is aiding the opposition campaign to the ballot measure to say, “It made me salivate.”

    California Common Cause, an ardent supporter of independent redistricting, initially signaled openness to revisiting the state’s independent redistricting rules because they would not “call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarianism.”

    But on Tuesday, the group announced its opposition to a state Senate bill.

    “it would create significant rollbacks in voter protections,” the group said in a statement, arguing that the legislation would result in reduced in-person voting, less opportunities for underrepresented communities to cast ballots and dampens opportunities for public input. “These changes to the Elections Code … would hinder full voter participation, with likely disproportionate harm falling to already underrepresented Californians.”

    Seema Mehta, Laura J. Nelson

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  • Commentary: Newsom’s redistricting move isn’t pretty. California GOP leaders are uglier

    King Gavin is at it again!

    That’s the cry coming from Republicans across California as Newsom pushes the state Legislature to approve a November special election like none this state has ever seen. Voters would have the chance to approve a congressional map drawn by Democrats hoping to wipe out GOP-held seats and counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Trump-driven redistricting.

    The president “doesn’t play by a different set of rules — he doesn’t believe in the rules,” the governor told a roaring crowd packed with Democratic heavyweights last week at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. “And 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 meet fire with fire.”

    California Republicans are responding to this the way a kid reacts if you take away their Pikachu.

    “An absolutely ridiculous gerrymander!” whined Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents the state’s rural northeast corner, on social media. Under the Democratic plan, his district would swing all the way down to ultra-liberal Marin County.

    The California Republican Party deemed the new maps a “MASTERCLASS IN CORRUPTION” (Trumpian caps in the original). National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said “Newscum” was giving “a giant middle finger to every Californian.”

    Intelligent minds can disagree on whether countering an extreme political move with an extreme political move is the right thing. The new maps would supersede the ones devised just four years ago by an independent redistricting commission established to keep politics out of the process, which typically occurs once a decade after the latest census.

    Good government types, from the League of Women Voters to Charles Munger Jr. — the billionaire who bankrolled the 2010 proposition that created independent redistricting for California congressional races — have criticized Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Response Act. So has former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fierce Trump critic who posted a photo of himself on social media working out in a T-shirt that read, “F*** the Politicians / Terminate Gerrymandering.”

    I’m not fully convinced that Newsom’s plan is the MAGA killer he thinks it is. If the economy somehow rebounds next year, Republicans would most likely keep Congress anyway, and Newsom would have upended California politics for nothing.

    I also don’t discount the moderate streak in California voters that pops up from time to time to quash what seem like liberal gimmes, like the failed attempt via ballot measure to repeal affirmative action in 2020 and the passage last year of Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of California voters want to keep redistricting away from the Legislature, according to a POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll released last week.

    If Californians reject Newsom’s plan, that would torpedo his presidential ambitions and leave egg on the face of state Democratic leaders for years, if not a generation.

    For now, though, I’m going to enjoy all the tears that California Republicans are shedding. As they face the prospect of even fewer congressional seats than the paltry nine they now hold, they suddenly care about rescuing American democracy?

    In this image from video, Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa speaks at the U.S. Capitol in 2020.

    (House Television via Associated Press)

    Where were they during Trump’s fusillade of lawsuits and threats against California? When he sent the National Guard and Marines to occupy parts of Los Angeles this summer after protests against his deportation deluge? When his underlings spew hate about the Golden State on Fox News and social media?

    Now they care about political decency? What about when LaMalfa and fellow California GOP House members Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa — whose seats the Newsom maps would also eliminate — voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory? When the state Republican Party backed a ridiculous recall against Newsom that cost taxpayers $200 million? Or when the Republican congressional delegation unanimously voted to pass Trump’s Big Bloated Bill, even though it’s expected to gut healthcare and food programs for millions of Californians in red counties? Or even when Trump first pushed Abbott to pursue the very gerrymandering Newsom is now emulating?

    We’re supposed to believe them when they proclaim Newsom is a pompadoured potentate who threatens all Californians, just because he wants to redo congressional maps?

    Pot, meet black hole.

    If these GOPers had even an iota of decency or genuine care for the Golden State, they would back a bill by one of their own that I actually support. Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose seat is also targeted for elimination by the Newsom maps, wants to ban all mid-decade congressional redistricting. He stated via a press release that this would “stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”

    That’s an effort that any believer in liberty can and should back. But Kiley’s bill has no co-sponsors so far. And Kevin: Why can’t you say that your man Trump created this fiasco in the first place?

    We live in scary times for our democracy. If you don’t believe it, consider that a bunch of masked Border Patrol agents just happened to show up outside the Japanese American National Museum — situated on a historic site where citizens of Japanese ancestry boarded buses to incarceration camps during World War II — at the same time Newsom was delivering his redistricting remarks. Sector Chief Gregory Bovino was there, migra cameramen documenting his every smirk, including when he told a reporter that his agents were there to make “Los Angeles a safer place, since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves.”

    The show of force was so obviously an authoritarian flex that Newsom filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who authorized what and why. Meanwhile, referring to Trump, he described the action on X as “an attempt to advance a playbook from the despots he admires in Russia and North Korea.”

    Newsom is not everyone’s cup of horchata, myself included. Whether you support it or not, watching him rip up the California Constitution’s redistricting section and assuring us it’s OK, because he’s the one doing it, is discomfiting.

    But you know what’s worse? Trump anything. And even worse? The California GOP leaders who have loudly cheered him on, damn the consequences to the state they supposedly love.

    History will castigate their cultish devotion to Trump far worse than any of Newsom’s attempts to counter that scourge.

    Gustavo Arellano

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  • How Democrats plan to reshape California’s congressional delegation and thwart Trump

    A decade and a half after California voters stripped lawmakers of the ability to draw the boundaries of congressional districts, Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democrats are pushing to take that partisan power back.

    The redistricting plan taking shape in Sacramento and headed toward voters in November could shift the Golden State’s political landscape for at least six years, if not longer. The outcome could also sway which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections, which will be pivotal to the fate of President Trump’s political agenda.

    What Golden State voters choose to do will reverberate nationwide, killing some political careers and launching others, provoking other states to reconfigure their own congressional districts and boosting Newsom’s profile as a top Trump nemesis and leader of the nation’s Democratic resistance.

    The new maps, drawn by Democratic strategists and lawmakers behind closed doors, were submitted Friday to legislative leaders by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the group that works to elect House Democrats.

    The maps are expected to appear on a Nov. 4 special election ballot, along with a constitutional amendment that would override the state’s voter-approved, independent redistricting commission.

    The changes would ripple across more than 1,000 miles of California, from the forests near the Oregon state line through the deserts of Death Valley and Palm Springs to the U.S.-Mexico border, expanding Democrats’ grip on California and further isolating Republicans.

    The proposed map would concentrate Republican voters in a handful of deep-red districts and eliminate an Inland Empire congressional seat represented by the longest-serving member of California’s GOP delegation. For Democrats, the plans would boost the fortunes of up-and-coming politicians and shore up vulnerable incumbents, including two new lawmakers who won election by fewer than 1,000 votes last fall.

    Under the proposal, Democrats could pick up five seats currently held by Republicans while bolstering vulnerable Democratic incumbent Reps. Adam Gray, Josh Harder, George Whitesides, Derek Tran and Dave Min, which would save the party millions of dollars in costly reelection fights.

    In a letter to the state Legislature, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee director Julie Merz said the map “serves the best interest of California voters, while also attempting to push back against the corrupt scheme occurring in Texas and other Republican-majority states.”

    The National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that works to elect House Republicans, said they are “prepared to fight this illegal power grab in the courts and at the ballot box to stop Newsom in his tracks.”

    “This is the final declaration of political war between California and the Trump administration,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

    How will the ballot measure work?

    For the state to reverse the independent redistricting process that the electorate approved in 2010, a majority of California voters would have to approve the measure, which backers are calling the “Election Rigging Response Act.”

    The state Legislature, where Democrats hold a supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, will consider the ballot language next week when lawmakers return from summer recess. Both chambers would need to pass the ballot language by a two-thirds majority and get the bill to Newsom’s desk by Aug. 22, leaving just enough time for voter guides to be mailed and ballots to be printed.

    Approving the new map would be up to the state’s electorate, which backed independent redistricting in 2010 by more than 61%. Registered Democrats outnumber Republican voters by almost a two-to-one margin in California.

    Newsom has said that the measure would include a “trigger,” meaning the state’s maps would only take effect if a Republican state — such as Texas, Florida or Indiana — approve new mid-decade maps.

    “There’s still an exit ramp,” Newsom said. “We’re hopeful they don’t move forward.”

    Explaining the esoteric concept of redistricting and getting voters to participate in an off-year election will require that Newsom and his allies, including organized labor, launch what is expected to be an expensive campaign very quickly.

    “It’s summer in California,” Kousser said. “People are not focused on this.”

    California has no limit on campaign contributions for ballot measures, and a measure that pits Democrats against Trump, and Republicans against Newsom, could become a high-stakes, high-cost national brawl.

    “It’s tens of millions of dollars, and it’s going to be determined on the basis of what an opposition looks like as well,” Newsom said Thursday. The fundraising effort, he said, is “not insignificant… considering the 90-day sprint.”

    The ballot measure’s campaign website mentions three major funding sources thus far: Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign, the main political action committee for House Democrats in Washington, and Manhattan Beach businessman Bill Bloomfield, a longtime donor to California Democrats.

    The opposition is also expected to be well-funded. A representative of a coalition fighting the effort said that Charles Munger Jr., who bankrolled the 2010 ballot measure that created the independent commission, is committed to defending the electoral reform.

    What’s at stake?

    Control of the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance.

    The party that holds the White House tends to lose House seats during the midterm election. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House, and Democrats taking control of chamber in 2026 would stymie Trump’s controversial, right-wing agenda in his final two years in office.

    Redistricting typically only happens once a decade, after the U.S. Census. But Trump has been prodding Republican states, starting with Texas, to redraw their lines in the middle of the decade to boost the GOP’s chances in the midterms.

    At Trump’s encouragement, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to redraw the Texas congressional map to favor five more Republicans. In response, Newsom and other California Democrats have called for their own maps that would favor five more Democrats.

    Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum and stop the vote. They faced daily fines, death threats and calls to be removed from office. They agreed to return to Austin after the special session ended on Friday, with one condition being that California Democrats moved forward with their redistricting plan.

    The situation has the potential to spiral into an all-out redistricting arms race, with Trump leaning on Indiana, Florida, Ohio and Missouri to redraw their maps, while Newsom is asking the same of blue states including New York and Illinois.

    California Republicans in the crosshairs

    The California gerrymandering plan targets five of California’s nine Republican members of Congress: Reps. Kevin Kiley and Doug LaMalfa in Northern California, Rep. David Valadao in the Central Valley, and Reps. Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa in Southern California.

    The map consolidates Republican voters into a smaller number of ruby-red districts known as “vote sinks.” Some conservative and rural areas would be shifted into districts where Republican voters would be diluted by high voter registration advantage for Democrats.

    The biggest change would be for Calvert, who would see his Inland Empire district eliminated.

    Calvert has been in Congress since 1992 and represents a sprawling Riverside County district that includes Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Palm Springs and his home base of Corona. Calvert, who oversees defense spending on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, comfortably won reelection last year despite a well-funded national campaign by Democrats.

    Under the proposed map, the Inland Empire district would be carved up and redistributed, parceled out to a district represented by Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills). Liberal Palm Springs would be shifted into the district represented by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), which would help tilt the district from Republican to a narrowly divided swing seat.

    Members of Congress are not required to live in their districts, but there would not be an obvious seat for Calvert to run for, unless he ran against Kim or Issa.

    Leaked screenshots of the map began to circulate Friday afternoon, prompting fierce and immediate pushback from California Republicans. The lines are “third-world dictator stuff,” Orange County GOP chair Will O’Neill said on X, and the “slicing and dicing of Orange County cities is obscene.”

    In Northern California, the boundaries of Kiley’s district would shrink and dogleg into the Sacramento suburbs to add registered Democrats. Kiley said in a post on X that he expected his district to stay the same because voters would “defeat Newsom’s sham initiative and vindicate the will of California voters.”

    LaMalfa’s district would shift south, away from the rural and conservative areas along the Oregon border, and pick up more liberal areas in parts of Sonoma County. Democrat Audrey Denney, who lost to LaMalfa in 2018 and 2020, said Friday that if voters approve the new map, she would run again.

    In Central California, boundaries would shift to shore up Harder and Gray, who won election last year by 187 votes, the narrowest margin in the country.

    Valadao, a perennial target for Democrats, would see the northern boundary of his district stretch into the bluer suburbs of Fresno. Democrats have tried for years to unseat Valadao, who represents a district that has a strong Democratic voter registration advantage on paper, but where turnout among blue voters is lackluster.

    Democrats eye open seats

    Eight of the state’s 52 congressional districts would be left unchanged under the new map, including the three historic Black districts in Los Angeles and Oakland. Three districts with the highest number of Asian American voters would be preserved, while a Latino lawmaker would likely be elected from a new Los Angeles-area seat.

    That new congressional seat in Los Angeles County that would stretch through the southeast cities of Downey, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier and Lakewood. An open seat in Congress is a rare opportunity for politicians, especially in deep-blue Los Angeles County, where incumbent lawmakers can keep their jobs for decades.

    Portions of that district were once represented by retired U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, the first Mexican American woman elected to Congress. That seat was eliminated in the 2021 redistricting cycle, when California lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

    Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis has told members of the California Congressional delegation that she is thinking about running for the new seat.

    Another possible contender, former Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon of Lakewood, launched a campaign for state superintendent of schools in late July and said he is not interested in vying to represent the new district.

    Other lawmakers who represent the area or areas nearby include State Sen. Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park), state Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera) and state Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier).

    In Northern California, the southern tip of LaMalfa’s district would stretch south into the Sonoma County cities of Santa Rosa and Healdsberg, home to Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire. McGuire will be termed out of the state Senate next year, and the new seat might present a prime opportunity for him to go to Washington.

    Times staff writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento contributed to this report.

    Laura J. Nelson, Seema Mehta

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  • Commentary: Newsom vows Texas will be ‘neutered’ by California. Will voters let him do it?

    Gov. Gavin Newsom made a ballsy threat this week to Texas legislators who are trying to gerrymander voting maps in favor of Republicans.

    “Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California, and they will pay that price,” Newsom said. “They’ve triggered this response. And we’re not going to roll over, and we’re going to fight fire with fire.”

    The “we” in that sentence is you, California voters, who may soon be asked to fix the Texas menace via the ballot box. If Newsom has his way, voters in November would face some version of an if/then question: “If Texas cheats on their voting maps, then (and only then) should California cheat on ours?”

    In these days of creeping authoritarianism, it’s a fair query, but also one rife with personal interests and risks large enough to remake American democracy, or even inadvertently crush it.

    But such is the state of our union that even those determined to preserve it are ready to throw out its basic tenets — myself included, sort of — and cause a national kerfuffle by considering remaking voting maps to supposedly benefit, if not a party, democracy as a whole.

    “This is something that we have just never seen before, right?” Mindy Romero told me Tuesday. She’s an assistant professor and the founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

    Romero is against gerrymandering, but also agrees that we are in “unprecedented times,” a phrase that doesn’t seem to do justice to the daily trampling of democratic safeguards by our president.

    Most of you are aware by now that the Texas Legislature, allegedly after pressure from President Trump, is contemplating redrawing its voting maps in the hopes of scooping up more seats for Republicans in Congress during the 2026 midterms — the very election that Democrats are praying will deliver them control of at least one chamber.

    With the possibility that this Texas two-step could hand Trump an even more solidly compliant Congress, Newsom has come up with a plan to gerrymander our own maps. But to make it (hopefully) legal, he needs voters to go along with it because this ain’t Texas, and we don’t ignore rules. We bend them.

    Whoever thought redistricting could be this exciting? But stay calm, redistricting nerds: It remains boring to the majority of voters, which is both the problem and the brilliance of the plan — you have to engage voters, but also not so much that they think too deeply.

    The difference between Texas and California is our ballot initiative process, which would ultimately make voters responsible for any gerrymandering here. In Texas, it’s backroom stuff.

    But will voters go for it? For many, it will come down to simple choices that miss the complexity of what is being asked: California vs. Texas, Newsom vs. Trump, democracy vs. authoritarianism.

    Romero warns that once you smash a norm, even for a virtuous reason, it’s hard to get it back. She worries that despite Newsom’s claim that the rigged maps would disappear in 2030, the gerrymandering might remain.

    California has one of the best systems in the country right now for nonpartisan redistricting, with an independent commission that draws lines without regard to party.

    It was put in place because decades of gerrymandering left voters disenchanted.

    In the 1980s, political icon Phillip Burton allegedly wrangled an infamous gerrymander that still shows just how bad things could be. He did it in part to protect the seat of his brother, John Burton ( a colorful fellow who served in both the state Legislature and Congress before becoming chair of the California Democratic Party) creating a district that wound around the Bay Area in a nonsensical fashion to scrape up the necessary votes.

    “Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Phillip Burton described that questionable territory to the Washington Post at the time. “It curls in and out like a snake.”

    That was just the way business was done before our redistricting commission was put in place in 2008, with a hefty push by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who remains a vocal critic of gerrymandering and who has vowed to fight Newsom’s plan.

    But that nonpartisan system was hard won, and in reality, neither party really loved the idea.

    “We’ve gone through this and in cooler times,” Romero pointed out. “The Democrats and the Republicans in California did not want independent redistricting. Let’s make that clear. But a lot of people came together and worked towards this.”

    So while any upcoming ballot measure will likely focus on the righteousness of fighting fire with fire, it’s also true that the Democratic party and some Democratic politicians would hope to reap personal gain from such a vote.

    As much as this might be about saving democracy, politics is always about personal and party gain. Some California state legislators would surely desire to win a newly drawn seat in Congress. And, of course, there are Newsom’s political ambitions.

    “It’s really difficult to disentangle people that may be sincerely scared for our democracy” from those “that may be jumping on this, seeing it as a political opportunity. And I think we have to be really honest about that,” Romero said.

    That’s the choice that voters will ultimately be asked to make.

    But we also can’t ignore the precarious nature of the times, and the reality that our checks and balances are disintegrating. Do we save election integrity and maybe risk democracy, or try to save democracy and risk election integrity?

    Two paths lead into the dark. Do voters follow Newsom or Trump?

    Anita Chabria

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  • Column: Kamala Harris won’t cure what ails the Democratic Party

    William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term.

    Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.)

    Everyone else since Harrison’s era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don’t like losers.

    These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House.

    But history isn’t what she should worry about. It’s the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. It’s net favorability ( 30 points) is nearly triple the GOP’s (11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump’s unpopularity with Democrats should be having the opposite effect, 63% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the party.

    Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party — both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he’s in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, “Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.”

    It’s not all Harris’ fault. Indeed, the lion’s share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again.

    Harris’ dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn’t monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is visceral desire to win. That’s awkward for a politician best known for losing.

    Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew.

    Of course, most Democrats don’t see her race and gender as a problem, and in the abstract they shouldn’t. Indeed, every VP pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition.

    So Harris’ problem isn’t her race or sex; it’s her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn’t lose because of low Democratic turnout, she lost because she’s uncompelling to a changing electorate.

    Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. With the exception of reproductive rights, her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups, at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Biden’s insistence she not distance herself from him.

    Such clubby deference to the establishment combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies — learned from years of San Francisco and California politics — makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

    Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network’s decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrow-casts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate.

    “I don’t want to go back into the system. I think it’s broken,” Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the “naïve” and “feckless” lack of “leadership” and the “capitulation” of those who “consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.”

    That’s all catnip to Colbert’s ideologically committed audience. But that’s not the audience Democrats need to win. And that’s why, if Democrats nominate her again, she’ll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won’t be “Who was the 48th president of the United States?”

    @JonahDispatch

    Insights

    L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.

    Perspectives

    The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.

    Ideas expressed in the piece

    • The Democratic Party faces historic unpopularity, with a net favorability 30 points lower than Republicans, driven by widespread dissatisfaction among its own base over losses to Trump and perceived ineffectiveness in opposing his policies[1].
    • Kamala Harris’ political challenges stem from internal Democratic factions: progressives blame her for insufficient fight while centrists view her as emblematic of leftward shifts on cultural issues, both detractors united by a desire to win[1].
    • Harris’s VP selection was viewed as a diversity-driven symbolic gesture by Biden, limiting her ability to build broader appeal beyond traditional Democratic coalitions, as seen in her 2024 loss[1].
    • Her communication style is criticized as overly generic and focus-group-driven, lacking authenticity required to attract Trump voters, while her ties to Biden and reluctance to distance herself from his leadership are seen as electoral liabilities[1].
    • Historical precedents suggest candidates who lose once rarely regain viability in subsequent elections, with Harris’ potential 2028 bid viewed skeptically in light of this pattern[1].
    • Democratic messaging under Harris risks pandering to niche progressive audiences (e.g., her Colbert interview appeal) rather than expanding outreach to swing voters, exacerbating perceptions of elitism[1].

    Different views on the topic

    • Harris remains a strong potential front-runner in the 2026 California governor’s race, with analysts noting her viability despite a crowded field and lingering questions about Biden’s health influencing her decision-making[1].
    • The Democratic Party is actively reassessing its strategy post-2024, focusing on reconnecting with working-class voters and addressing core issues like affordability and homelessness, suggesting a shift toward pragmatic problem-solving[1].
    • Harris’ announcement to forgo the governor’s race has been interpreted as positioning for a 2028 presidential bid, reflecting her ability to navigate political calculations with long-term ambition[2].
    • Internal criticisms, such as Antonio Villaraigosa’s demand for transparency on Biden’s health, reflect broader party debates about leadership accountability rather than a rejection of Harris’ Senate or VP legacy[1].
    • Other rising Democratic voices, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gov. Tim Walz, embody alternatives to Harris’ messaging, indicating the party’s capacity to diversify leadership beyond established figures[2].

    Jonah Goldberg

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  • Levi’s heir and political outsider Daniel Lurie wins San Francisco mayor’s race

    SAN FRANCISCO —  Philanthropist and Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie has won the hard-fought race for San Francisco mayor, ushering in a new era of leadership for a city whose voters made clear they are fed up with brazen retail theft and sprawling tent cities.

    It took two days to determine a winner under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to select multiple candidates by order of preference. The city uses a multiround process to count the ballots, and it can take several rounds of tallying before a winner receives more than 50% of the vote. Though thousands of votes remained uncounted Thursday evening, the gap of support between Lurie and his opponents was deemed too big to bridge.

    Lurie, a centrist Democrat, outpaced incumbent Mayor London Breed and three other prominent local Democrats, receiving 56.2% of the total ranked-choice vote compared with Breed’s 43.8% as of Thursday’s count.

    Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, the only leading candidate running as an old-school progressive, came in third after being eliminated from the running with 21.6% of first-choice votes, and venture capitalist Mark Farrell, a moderate, trailed in fourth place. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí was knocked out of the running early after getting just 2.7% of first-choice votes.

    Lurie issued a brief statement on social media Thursday night thanking supporters. In an election night event Tuesday, he summarized his leadership vision for jubilant supporters gathered at a music venue in the Mission district to cheer him on.

    “Our challenge and opportunity is to show how government can deliver on its promise of a safer and more affordable city,” Lurie said. “And executing on these promises requires us to be courageous, compassionate and honest.

    “It’s never been more clear to me that so many people love this city, and it’s time for us to start making people feel like the city loves them back.”

    In a statement posted on social media Thursday evening, Breed said she had called Lurie to congratulate him.

    “Being mayor of San Francisco has been the greatest honor of my lifetime. I’m beyond grateful to our residents for the opportunity to serve the City that raised me,” Breed wrote. “During my final two months as your mayor, I will continue to lead this City as I have from Day One — as San Francisco’s biggest champion.”

    The transition from Breed to Lurie is a remarkable turn on many fronts.

    Breed, 50, made history six years ago when she became the city’s first Black female mayor. She was born into poverty in the Western Addition, at the time one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods, and raised by her grandmother. She lost a sister to a drug overdose and has a brother in prison for robbery. Before being elected mayor, she was president of the powerful Board of Supervisors.

    Lurie, 47, was also born in San Francisco, the son of a rabbi. His parents divorced when he was a young boy, and his mother, Miriam Haas, went on to marry Peter Haas, who helped raise Lurie. Peter Haas, now deceased, was the great-grandnephew of the Levi’s founder and a longtime executive at the company. Lurie and his mother are among the primary heirs of the Levi Strauss family fortune. Lurie has never before held elected office.

    Throughout the campaign, Lurie distinguished himself as a political outsider running against four City Hall veterans. He pledged to root out government corruption, a concern among voters following a series of political scandals in city departments and nonprofits in recent years.

    The election was broadly viewed as a referendum on Breed’s efforts to address homeless encampments, crime and a flagging post-pandemic economy that cut at voters’ sense of a safe, well-functioning city.

    “This is not an election that was about an ideological or policy-based shift or rejection of Breed,” said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. “It’s an outsider who is different and who was able to portray himself in that way as someone who will do things differently.”

    In a marked shift for San Francisco, the city’s wealthy tech sector played an influential role in this year’s race. Tech titans who have put down roots in the city poured millions of dollars into campaign contributions, pressing for an outcome that would infuse this famously liberal city with more centrist politics.

    That money overwhelmingly benefited Lurie, Farrell and Breed.

    “It’s been the billionaire election,” said Jim Ross, a veteran Bay Area Democratic strategist.

    San Francisco Mayor London Breed faced a tough reelection bid against four challengers who said she had not done enough to address property crime and homelessness in the city.

    (Eric Risberg / Associated Press)

    Breed was first elected in 2018, winning a special election after the unexpected death of then-Mayor Ed Lee. She led the city through a challenging period that includes the unsettling early spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent exodus of scores of downtown tech workers who, amid pandemic-related shutdowns, found themselves able to work remotely — and more cheaply — from other cities.

    Breed has never been a bleeding-heart progressive, despite San Francisco’s liberal reputation. But the Breed of six years ago was more open to experimenting with a progressive reformist agenda when it came to solving complex issues such as addiction and poverty.

    In the last two years, by contrast, she has become a leading voice in a movement to crack down on homeless people and addicts who refuse shelter or treatment. And this year she successfully championed two local ballot measures that bolstered police surveillance powers and will require drug screening and treatment for people receiving county welfare benefits who are suspected of illicit drug use.

    Many of her supporters noted her quick action to shut down San Francisco in the early days of the COVID emergency, a decision credited with saving thousands of lives.

    In making her case for reelection, Breed touted recent data showing improvements in some of San Francisco’s greatest problems, notably a reduction in property crime and violent crime over the last year.

    Her opponents dismissed that progress as too little, too late, and seized on voter dissatisfaction to pitch themselves as more qualified alternatives.

    Both Lurie and Farrell promised a more concerted crackdown on crime and homelessness and to reinvigorate the downtown economy.

    Lurie had the advantage of his family’s vast wealth to strengthen his name recognition. He showered his campaign with more than $8 million of his own money. His mother contributed more than $1 million to an independent committee backing his mayoral bid.

    He showcased his role as founder of Tipping Point, a San Francisco nonprofit that funds efforts to lift people out of poverty, to highlight his commitment to solving intractable problems. He said the organization has funneled $500 million to Bay Area organizations focused on early childhood education, scholarships, housing and job training since its founding nearly two decades ago.

    Farrell entered the race with support generated during his seven years as a supervisor, and made the case that his blend of political and business experience made him most qualified to get San Francisco back on track. But his campaign floundered amid ethical concerns. This week, he agreed to pay a fine of $108,000 following an ethics investigation that determined he had illegally financed his mayoral campaign with money poured into a separate ballot measure committee he sponsored to reduce the number of government commissions in San Francisco.

    Peskin, a longtime supervisor, organized a robust grassroots campaign focused on traditional liberal ideals, such as making the city affordable for nurses, teachers, and the artists and bohemians who have long made San Francisco a creative hub.

    Hannah Wiley

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