At the behest of President Donald Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has recalled the legislature to Austin for a special session from which Trump hopes Abbott can squeeze a few more Republican House seats out of the Lone Star State by redrawing congressional district maps.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has seized on this as fuel for his presidential ambitions, announcing that he is considering redrawing California’s maps to counter Texas. He also mentioned the idea in Tennessee and to hosts of Pod Save America, one of Democratic primary voters’ favorite podcasts.
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“We can act holier than thou,” Newsom added. “We can sit in the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be. Or, we can recognize the existential nature that is this moment.”
Whether Abbott’s effort to add GOP seats to Texas’s congressional map is “existential” can be left to historians to decide. But question aside, there are three problems with Newsom’s plan that suggest he should direct his efforts elsewhere.
The biggest problem Newsom’s redistricting faces is that despite his talk about being “holier than thou,” California is already far more gerrymandered than Texas. In 2024, Republican House candidates in Texas received 58% of the vote compared to just 40% for Democrats, netting Republicans a 66% seat advantage (25-13) in the Texas delegation to Congress. In California, where Democrats won a mirror image 60% of the House vote compared to Republicans’ 39%, Democrats netted 83% of all congressional seats (43-9), a whopping 23-point difference between their vote and seat total.
That shows California Democrats have already squeezed all the gerrymander juice they will likely get out of redistricting.
The real existential threat to Newsom and other Democrats is that California is rapidly losing population and, therefore, congressional seats, while Texas is gaining them. People are fleeing Democratic government. We won’t know the exact totals until 2030, but demographers estimate that by 2032, California will lose four House seats and Texas will gain four. Democratic strongholds such as Illinois, Minnesota, and New York will also lose seats to Republican states, including Florida, South Carolina, and Utah. Democrats can redraw congressional lines, but that is the losers’ exercise of dividing a shrinking pie. Until they figure out how to stop their middle-class population from fleeing to red states, their representation in Congress will keep shrinking.
Even worse for California Democrats is that the districts of which they have the tightest control are losing people the fastest. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, California congressional districts controlled by Republicans are seeing their populations rise. But in those districts where Democrats enjoy a 0-10 point margin, their populations decreased by an average of 6,000 between 2020 and 2023. Districts with a 10-19 point Democratic margin lost 15,000. And districts with a 20-plus-point Democratic margin lost 27,000 people on average. The more Democratic they are, the worse they’re governed and the faster people want to get out. It is going to be hard to create safer Democratic districts when Democratic districts are shriveling up fastest.
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When the Labor Department released state unemployment numbers last week, California tied with Nevada for having the nation’s highest unemployment rate. Newsom’s government keeps adding patronage jobs to keep government unions happy, but private sector employment continues to shrink as high taxes and burdensome regulations drive more families and businesses out of state.
Instead of engaging in a zero-sum political game, further disempowering the nearly powerless California Republican Party, Newsom could work with California Republicans to identify and end policies that kill private sector jobs and cause people to leave Democratic congressional districts.