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    ‘No-holds-barred fight’: California’s governor takes off his gloves to punch back at Trump

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    In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Gavin Newsom wagered that peacemaking was best: a tarmac greeting for Air Force One, an Oval Office visit and a podcast slot for Maga’s biggest names. But then Trump came for California, and its governor dropped the niceties.With a flood of all-caps social media posts, a counterpunching redistricting proposal and a string of lawsuits challenging the new administration, Newsom is not just taking on Trump, he’s stealing his tactics: fight, fight, fight.“We’ve got to wake up, disabuse ourselves as Democrats,” Newsom said on a podcast last week. “I’m sick of being weak. I’m sick of being effete. I’m sick of being non-consequential. It’s not good enough to say it – it’s time to do.”Newsom has charged on to the national stage as a recast political brawler willing to wield power as ruthlessly as the other side. On Thursday, he signed redistricting legislation establishing a special election to ask voters to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional boundaries and give Democrats as many as five additional US House seats in next year’s midterm elections.The ballot measure is a direct attempt to “neuter and neutralize” Texas’s partisan gerrymander, engineered at Trump’s behest, to safeguard Republicans’ fragile House majority. At a bill-signing ceremony on Thursday, Newsom cited the president’s claim that he was “entitled” to five additional congressional seats in the Lone Star state: “That should put chills up your spine.”Now the California referendum transforms an off-cycle election year into a high-stakes national showdown that could determine control of Congress – and set the stage for 2028. For Newsom, who’s term-limited and widely viewed as a presidential contender, the success – or failure – of this 11-week sprint could carry major consequences for his political future.The November special election gives voters in deep-blue California a chance to strike back at Trump, who has relentlessly tormented the state since returning to the White House. But by temporarily overriding California’s independent redistricting commission – long a point of pride in the Golden state – Democrats are being asked to “compromise their own values,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento.“That’s been a guiding light for a lot of Democrats – the whole ‘they go low, we go high’ idea,” she said. “One of the risks is that the Democratic party – and Newsom himself – become associated with this all-out brawl, no-holds-barred fighting, rather than having a particular set of political principles that they stand by no matter what.”How Californians will decide remains uncertain. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released on Friday shows 48% of registered voters in the state support Newsom’s redistricting plan, compared with 32% who oppose it. Another 20% are undecided, providing an opening for either campaign to make their pitch.“If Proposition 50 passes, and Californians succeed in adding more House seats, and is partially, if not completely, responsible for flipping the House next year, he’s a hero, plain and simple,” said Bill Whalen, a Hoover Institution fellow who was a speechwriter for Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor of California.Even if the initiative falls short in November, Whalen believes Newsom still benefits. “He still gets credit among those same Democrats for fighting the good fight,” he said. “I don’t see how he fails.”The all-out political war between the president and California’s governor erupted earlier this summer, when Trump seized control of California’s national guard and deployed US marines to Los Angeles, over Newsom’s objections, to suppress protests against the federal immigration crackdown. The raids are ongoing, and Trump has targeted the state in other ways: an attempt to strip federal funding from UCLA, and tariffs that threaten California’s economy – the fourth largest in the world.Newsom has argued that Trump was not just a threat to his state – but to the entire 249-year-old American project. While his approach might offend virtue-minded Democrats, he says the moment demands it.“Yes, I’ve changed,” he said recently in a local news interview. “The facts have changed. We need to change.”In recent weeks, as Newsom has stepped up his attacks on Trump as a “weak” and a “failed” leader, his social media team has trolled the president online – unleashing a jumble of unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness rants, AI-generated political fan art and schoolyard taunts, some of it signed with the governor’s initials, GCN, meant to parody the president’s own chaotic posting style.View image in fullscreenNewsom says he’s simply holding up a mirror. “If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out,” he told reporters last week, “you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president.”The posts have gone viral – racking up millions of views, thousands of comments and driving a flood of engagement. They’ve also caught the attention of the right. Fox News hosts, Kid Rock, JD Vance and even Trump himself have all taken the bait, provoking what the governor’s staff gleefully dubbed “Maga meltdowns”.“JESSE WATTERS KEPT CALLING ME ‘DADDY’ (VERY WEIRD, NOT INTERESTED, BUT THANK YOU!)” his office clapped back, in an 188-word tweet about Fox News’s breathless coverage of Newsom’s furious posting streak.“Gavin Newsom can mimic Donald Trump all that he wants to,” Vance told Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “they’re still going to lose unless they get better policies that actually serve the American people.”Trump, for his part, weighed in on his own social media platform, Truth Social, vowing to save “the Once Great State of California” from “Newscum”.“Triggered?” Newsom replied with a wink.The Berkley poll suggested that California voters back his gloves-off strategy with the president by a nearly two-to-one margin, with just 29% saying they’d prefer a more cooperative approach. The tougher posture lands especially well with younger voters: 71% of Californians under 30 say they approve.In a blitz of media appearances last week, Newsom escalated his rhetoric.“We’re fighting fire with fire,” he said on The Siren podcast. “And we’re going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”The response was telling: no ​Democratic moralizing, no rebuke from party leaders, no pressure on Newsom to apologize. Instead, his team promoted the interview to his legions of new followers and supporters replied with MAGAesque AI images of the governor as a superhero.“People are just not used to seeing this kind of rough around the edges, non-poll-tested messaging coming from Democrats,” said Olivia Julianna, a 22-year-old Democratic activist from Texas and social media influencer who interviewed Newsom for the episode. “It’s real, it’s raw, it’s authentic, and it shows that he’s a fighter.”As Democrats brace for the loss of up to five US House seats in her state, under the redistricting plan approved by the Texas legislature on Saturday, Julianna said voters alarmed by Trump’s increasingly brazen power grabs are desperate for leaders who offer more than just fighting words.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We want to feel like someone is standing on the frontlines ready to go to battle for us,” she said. “And that’s what it feels like Gavin Newsom is doing.”Newsom’s new fight-fire-with-fire strategy isn’t always trained on Trump.When the Bed Bath & Beyond chair announced on Wednesday that he wouldn’t reopen stores in the state, calling it “overregulated, expensive and risky”, Newsom’s press office fired back. “After their bankruptcy and closure of every store, like most Americans, we thought Bed, Bath & Beyond no longer existed,” it said. “We wish them well in their efforts to become relevant again.”He’s also taken on his own party. Earlier this year, Newsom declared the Democratic brand “toxic” in an interview with provocateur Bill Maher – a diagnosis backed by polling and voter registration trends, but striking language for the leader of the largest blue state who could seek that same party’s nomination.He enraged progressives – already wary of his record on housing and homelessness – when he questioned the fairness of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. The comments, during a conversation with rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk on the inaugural episode of the governor’s podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, marked a split from other top Democrats on the issue and rattled some of his LGBTQ+ allies.In response to a Guardian story about the loss of care for trans youth in California, a Newsom spokesperson said critics should point the finger at Trump, not at a governor whose “record supporting the trans community is unmatched”.“Everyone wants to blame Gavin Newsom for everything. But instead of indulging in Newsom derangement syndrome, maybe folks should look to Washington,” the spokesperson said – invoking a pejorative phrase, “derangement syndrome”, used by Trump supporters to mock the president’s detractors.While his sharper tone has angered some on the left, the redistricting gambit has managed to unite progressives and establishment Democrats – sending Newsom’s once-stalled approval rating soaring.His redistricting plan has drawn praise from across the party, including Barack Obama, who called it “a responsible approach”, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the entire congressional delegation of California Democrats. With the ballot initiative in motion, he challenged other blue state leaders to follow suit, laying down the gauntlet for fellow Democratic governors with presidential ambitions as Trump expands his push to secure Republican advantages in states such as Indiana, Ohio and Missouri.That aggressive posture – in effect becoming an “anti-Trump troll” – has been cathartic for many Democrats, Nalder said.“Democrats nationwide have been feeling like the Trump administration has been punching their values and their party and democracy itself in the face repeatedly day after day and they’re just ready for somebody to punch the bully back,” she said. “And Newsom right now looks like he could be that guy.”View image in fullscreenNewsom’s campaign faces mounting opposition from Republicans, including those not in Trump’s Maga camp. The popular former Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a longtime Trump critic and advocate of independent redistricting, has promised to TERMINATE GERRYMANDERING”.Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, has also vowed to pump money into what some observers predict could quickly become one of the most expensive contests in Golden state history.“The voters of California have a say,” he said in an interview on CNN. “If you truly believe in your power of your own vote, you should vote against this.”Newsom has raised more than $6.2m from 200,000 donations in the week since he officially launched the ballot campaign at a rally in Los Angeles last week, according to his team.There, Newsom stood side by side with labor leaders, members of the teacher’s union and the head of California’s Planned Parenthood. His redistrticting plan even earned the endorsement of Sara Sadhwani, a Democrat who served on California’s 2020 independent redistricting commission. Making the case for tossing out her work, she declared: “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures”.As Newsome spoke at the Japanese American National Museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy earlier this month, federal agents, armed and masked, fanned out across the complex. Newsom said their presence could not have been coincidental, though a Trump administration official called the accusation “misinformed”.The next day, the governor’s office filed a freedom of information request seeking details on the administration’s involvement in the decision to send border patrol agents to that location.It was just more fuel for Newsom’s argument: his campaign is not just about congressional districts, but a referendum on Trump – and American democracy.“Donald Trump, you have poked the bear,” Newsom says in a new ad for the redistricting campaign, as the camera flashes to the grizzly on the state’s flag. “And we will punch back.” More

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      Schwarzenegger’s mission: terminate partisan rigging of California’s electoral maps

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      Arnold Schwarzenegger brags in his X profile that “I killed the Predator”, but even he was shocked when, as the freshly elected governor of California more than 20 years ago, he saw how unfairly the state’s electoral boundaries were carved up.One district in the eastern part of the state had such a long, thin middle section it was nicknamed the “swan”. Another was known as the “Jesus district” because you had to walk on water to get from one side to the other. Yet another, in LA’s San Fernando Valley, was memorably described by the Stanford law professor Pam Karlan as “a ghastly-looking, multi-headed, insect-like polygon with 385 sides”.This was the time-honored dark art of gerrymandering, practiced in state after state by whichever party happened to have a majority in the state legislature and wanted to keep things that way. To Schwarzenegger, though, a political neophyte after his long career as a Hollywood action hero, it looked a lot like election-rigging.“For a long time I thought that was something that happened way back in the 1800s,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2005 address to the state, “but the practice is still alive and well today.”What shocked Schwarzenegger was not that Democrats, then as now in control of the state legislature, were stealing seats from Republicans. (Decades earlier, Republicans had done much the same in the opposite direction.) It was, rather, that gerrymandering neutered the power of people’s votes. The year before his speech, in 2004, not a single one of California’s 153 congressional and state legislative seats changed party hands.“What kind of democracy is that?” he asked.It was an unusual question for any US politician to ask – most elected officials, of both parties, accepted gerrymandering back then as part of the price of doing business – and it set Schwarzenegger on a reformist path he has never relinquished.First, he proposed appointing a panel of judges to take over from the state legislature in redrawing district lines. When that was rejected by voters, he advocated instead for an independent redistricting commission, which began redrawing state legislative lines in 2008 and congressional district lines in 2010 – a reform that has proved enduringly popular with voters and has made California one of the most competitive states in the union for seats in the US House of Representatives.It’s a legacy Schwarzenegger has no intention of relinquishing, not even now that Texas Republicans, acting on the orders of Donald Trump, have redrawn their state maps to add another five Republican-leaning congressional districts, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has vowed to “fight fire with fire” with an initiative to suspend California’s independent commission and add five Democrat-leaning districts in the Golden state.“I’m not going to go back on my promise,” Schwarzenegger told the New York Times last week. “I’m going to fight for my promise.”Schwarzenegger, a rare moderate Republican in an increasingly radical party, is an outspoken Trump critic and said he hated what the president had asked the Texas Republicans to do.But, he said, sinking to the same level in California was no answer, and it made no difference to him that Newsom was pitching his plan as a temporary arrangement. “We are not going to go into a stinking contest with a skunk,” he said. “We are moving forward.”To underline that he meant business, Schwarzenegger appeared for the interview – and later in a post on X – in a T-shirt that read: “F*** the politicians, terminate gerrymandering.”Thus the stage is set for a showdown between the current California governor, who will take his emergency redistricting proposal to voters in November, and the formidable former holder of the same office.Already, Schwarzenegger has started tapping into his old political networks to set up a campaign and fundraising machine to thwart Newsom, and according to his staff he is planning a major policy address – in effect, a campaign launch – sometime in September.The issue is energizing Republicans across California. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, has ambitions to raise more than $100m to defeat Newsom’s Proposition 50, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act. Charles Munger Jr, the billionaire son of Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charles Munger Sr, is reported to have pledged $30m towards the same effort.The California Young Republican Federation has described Newsom’s initiative as a “dangerous power grab” – echoing almost exactly Democratic rhetoric about the Trump-inspired gerrymander in Texas – and Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate running to succeed Newsom next year, is helping to spearhead a legal challenge.Hilton argues that the independent redistricting commission was already skewed unfairly in favour of the Democrats, since Republicans won a little under 40% of vote in California last November but hold just 17% of California’s 52 House seats.“If we had truly independent districting and fair representation, Republicans would have an extra 12 House seats today,” Hilton says, rounding the number in his party’s favour. (Commissioners would counter that he is overlooking a handful of highly competitive races in Republican-leaning districts that Democrats won by narrow margins.)View image in fullscreenThe first polls on Newsom’s initiative are inconclusive, with voters seemingly split between liking independently drawn districts and a narrow plurality – especially Democrats – understanding the desire to counter what the Republicans are doing in Texas. Independents and Republicans are far more skeptical, if not outright hostile.Still, the campaign to stop Newsom will start at an inherent disadvantage, since Democrats have not lost a statewide election since 2006 and California voters, while not as liberal as Republican politicians sometimes like to portray them, have consistently shown a visceral dislike of all things Trump.Schwarzenegger is likely to be the most powerful weapon in the anti-Newsom arsenal, because he has no fondness for Trump and because his embrace of independently drawn electoral boundaries transcends any partisan allegiance. Since leaving office in 2010 he has campaigned in favour of independent commissions around the country – in states that lean both blue and red – and has spoken outside the supreme court when the justices have considered gerrymandering cases.He is also likely to serve as a bridge between Republican partisans and civic groups like the League of Women Voters of California, which views Newsom’s initiative as a slippery slope from which there may be no easy recovery.“Temporary exceptions rarely stay temporary,” the League warned in a statement. “Once you break a safeguard, you don’t just risk one or two or three elections, you set a precedent that future politicians can and will use again … Long-term damage to democratic norms will outlast any short-term gain.”California’s state legislature voted on Thursday to put Newsom’s initiative on the ballot but, after Texas voted to finalize its own maps, stripped out language that would have automatically abandoned California’s proposed partisan gerrymander if Texas chose to reverse course. Democratic lawmakers argued the escape clause was unnecessary because the Texas legislature had already acted. But scrapping it may also create the perception that Democrats, who enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature, have lost interest in playing fair – exactly the scenario Schwarzenegger warned against back in 2005.“The system is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office … not the interests of those who put them there,” he said then. “And we must reform it.” More

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      Obama calls California’s redistricting plan ‘a responsible approach’

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      Barack Obama waded into states’ efforts at rare mid-decade redistricting efforts, saying he agreed with California governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to counter the new Texas congressional map by launching an effort to redraw his own state’s map and create more Democratic-friendly districts, calling it “a responsible approach”.“I believe that governor 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. “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.”Obama also called Newsom’s strategy “measured”, as it only temporarily grants the California legislature the ability to redraw maps mid-decade.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 $2m for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates, one of which has filed and supported litigation in several states over Republican-drawn districts. The 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 approved a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts, passing a new map on Wednesday that fulfills Donald Trump’s desire to tilt the US House map in his favor before the 2026 midterm elections.The vote was 88 in favor and 52 against.The map could give Republicans five new House seats in 2026 and took more than two weeks to pass, after Democratic state lawmakers staged a walkout over what they described as a “a power grab”. Several legislators traveled to states run by Democrats, and the protest ultimately set the stage for a redistricting battle now playing out across the country.Spurred on by the Texas situation, Democratic governors including Newsom have pondered ways to possibly strengthen their party’s position by way of redrawing US 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 US House seats in a bid to win the fight to control 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 US House seats, up from 43.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA 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 4 November 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.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Newsom says California will push to redraw maps in riposte to Texas plan

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      Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said on Thursday state Democratic lawmakers would move forward with a redistricting plan to counter the Republican-led map-drawing effort in Texas aimed at securing a House majority after the midterm elections.As he spoke at the Japanese American National museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy – a venue deliberately chosen for its symbolism – federal agents, armed and masked, fanned out across the complex, led by Gregory Bovino, head of the border patrol’s El Centro sector. Local news footage showed a man being led away in handcuffs.Newsom, joined by congressional Democrats and legislative leaders, unveiled a plan, known as the election rigging response act, that would override California’s independent redistricting commission and draw new congressional lines – a direct counter to a Texas effort, sought by Donald Trump, to push through mid-cycle maps that could hand Republicans five extra US House seats. The governor vowed the move would “neuter and neutralize” Texas’s proposal.“Today is liberation day in the state of California,” Newsom declared at a rally in Los Angeles, in which he formally called for a 4 November special election to approve a new congressional map. “We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country.”After the rally, Newsom called the presence of border patrol agents “sick and pathetic” and accused Trump of ordering the operation to intimidate Democrats. “Wake up, America,” Newsom warned. “You will not have a country if he rigs this election.”Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat who was not attending the event, arrived on the scene to condemn the raid. In remarks to reporters, she argued that it was not “a coincidence” the raid took place steps from where Newsom was speaking.. “The White House just sent federal agents to try to intimidate elected officials at a press conference,” she said in a social media post. “The problem for them is Los Angeles doesn’t get scared and Los Angeles doesn’t back down. We never have and we never will”.”The Department of Homeland Security said Bass “must be misinformed”.“Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law – not about Gavin Newsom. CBP patrols all areas of Los Angeles every day with over 40 teams on the ground to make LA safe,” Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary, said in a post on social media.The California map would only take effect if Texas – or any other Republican-led state – advanced a a partisan redistricting plan. Newsom said he preferred all states adopt independent commission, as California does, and had previously said in a letter to Trump that he would “happily” stand down if Texas abandoned its effort.Earlier on Thursday, a group of Texas Democrats, who had blocked a vote on the measure by fleeing the state, said they were prepared to end their two-week walkout when California releases its redrawn map proposal. Their return to the state legislature would allow Republicans to plow ahead. Accepting that reality, Newsom said California – with a population larger than the 21 smallest states combined – would not “unilaterally disarm”.“It’s not complicated,” he said. “We’re doing this in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, ‘Find me five seats.’”View image in fullscreenIn a recent interview, Trump claimed that Republicans were “entitled to five more seats” in Texas because he won the state overwhelmingly in the 2024 presidential election.The new map, Newsom said, would remain in place through the 2030 elections, after which mapmaking power would return to the independent redistricting commission, approved by voters more than a decade ago. The Democratic-led state legislature will introduce legislation on Monday, he added, expressing confidence the initiative would pass and ultimately prevail at the ballot box in November.California has 52 House seats – 43 held by Democrats – and several of the nation’s most competitive races, including a handful that helped Republicans claim the majority in 2024.How California voters will respond is uncertain: polls have found deep support for the state’s independent redistricting commission, suggesting Democrats will have to work quickly over the next three months to persuade voters to support their plan.Sara Sadhwani, a Democrat who served on California’s 2020 independent redistricting commission, said she wanted partisan gerrymandering banned nationwide. But in Los Angeles on Thursday, Sadhwani stood side by side with Newsom, lawmakers, labor leaders and advocates in support of tearing up the maps she helped draw. “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said.Common Cause, a good government group that has long opposed partisan map-making, said in a statement this week that it would “not pre-emptively” oppose the effort by California to redraw its maps in response to partisan redistricting in Texas.“A blanket condemnation at this moment would be sitting on the sidelines in the face of authoritarianism,” the group stated.Eric Holder, a former attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said on Thursday that he backed “responsible and responsive” countermeasures to Trump’s “extreme and unjustified mid-decade gerrymanders in Texas and beyond”.“Our democracy is under attack,” he said. “We have no choice but to defend it.”Republicans have denounced the California proposal: “Gavin Newsom’s latest stunt has nothing to do with Californians and everything to do with consolidating radical Democrat power,” Christian Martinez, the National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson, said in a statement, accusing the governor of trampling the will of California voters to serve a “pathetic 2028 presidential pipe dream”.At the rally in Los Angeles, there was little sympathy for the nearly half-dozen California Republicans who could be out of job if the redistricting plan succeeds. Speaking before the governor, Jodi Hicks, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, had a message for the nine Republicans who backed legislation rolling back reproductive rights: “You take away our freedoms, we’ll take away your seats.”Texas’s pursuit of new maps has kicked off a redistricting “arms race” that has spread to state legislatures across the country. Leaders in Florida and Missouri – and in blue state like New York and Illinois – are weighing similar moves. “Other blue states need to stand up,” Newsom said.The campaign, with a freshly launched website, will be enormously costly and is expected to draw national attention and donors eager for a high-stakes, off-year political brawl. Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who championed independent redistricting, has already voiced opposition. Newsom said he had spoken to Schwarzenegger and shared his disdain for gerrymandering, but argued that this was about preserving American democracy.“It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be,” Newsom said. “We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt. And we have got to meet fire with fire.” More

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      Texas Democrats say they are prepared to return to state after two-week absence

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      Texas Democrats said on Thursday they are prepared to return to the state under certain conditions, ending a nearly two-week-long effort to block Republicans from passing a new congressional map that would add five GOP seats.The lawmakers said they would return as long as the legislature ends its first special session on Friday, which Republicans have said they plan to do. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately call another special session.The Democrats also said they would return once California introduces a new congressional map that would add five Democratic seats, offsetting the gains in Texas. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is expected to announce what he has teased as a “major” redistricting announcement on Thursday.Gene Wu, chair of the Texas house Democratic caucus, said in a statement that he and his colleagues “successfully mobilized the nation against Trump’s assault on minority voting rights”.“Facing threats of arrest, lawfare, financial penalties, harassment and bomb threats, we have stood firm in our fight against a proposed Jim Crow congressional district map,” he said. “Now, as Democrats across the nation join our fight to cause these maps to fail their political purpose, we’re prepared to bring this battle back to Texas under the right conditions and to take this fight to the courts.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe lawmakers said in a statement that returning to Texas would allow them to build a strong public and legislative record that could be used in legal challenges against the map. More

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      Newsom says California will draw new electoral maps after Trump ‘missed’ deadline

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      California governor Gavin Newsom says the state will draw new electoral maps after Donald Trump “missed” a deadline on Tuesday night in an ongoing redistricting battle between Democratic and Republican states.“DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!!”, Newsom’s office wrote on social media. “CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!)”.“BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM — YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR — THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GN,” reads the post.The post follows a series of snarky, all-caps tweets meant to mimic Trump’s social media writing style.Newsom was mocking Trump’s moniker, “Taco”, short for “Trump always chickens out”, prompted by his flip-flopping deadlines.Several states have waded into the redistricting wars, where Newsom and other Democratic state leaders had threatened to draw retaliatory maps if Texas were to move ahead with its redistricting scheme.Texas Democrats had left the state to stop Republicans from passing a new congressional map. The Texas senate passed the new congressional map on Tuesday, but it will not earn full approval from the legislature because of the quorum-break. Lawmakers are set to adjourn on Friday and Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately convene a new special session.In a letter sent to Trump on Monday, Newsom said he would prefer to leave the matter of congressional map-making to independent commissions, not partisan legislative bodies and emphasized that he would “happily” stand down if other states abandoned their redistricting effort. But, Newsom said: “California cannot stand idly by as this power grab unfolds.”Newsom’s office summarized the letter Monday in a mocking social media post to Trump: “DONALD TRUMP, IF YOU DO NOT STAND DOWN, WE WILL BE FORCED TO LEAD AN EFFORT TO REDRAW THE MAPS IN CA TO OFFSET THE RIGGING OF MAPS IN RED STATES. BUT IF THE OTHER STATES CALL OFF THEIR REDISTRICTING EFFORTS, WE WILL DO THE SAME. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”At a press conference with several quorum-breaking Texas lawmakers, as well as California’s legislative leaders, Newsom outlined his plan to ask voters to override the existing congressional maps drawn by an independent commission and accept a new proposal to create five more Democratic-leaning seats. The governor expressed confidence that voters would approve the plan and said the state legislature would act in time to get the measure on the ballot this November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has defended the Texas plan, arguing that he is “entitled to five more seats” because he won the state’s popular vote in the 2024 presidential election. The argument, however, is flawed – a popular vote win does not necessarily mean a president’s party is awarded more congressional seats.Despite Newsom’s appeal, the White House is seeking to enlist other red states in the redistricting clash. Last week, vice-president JD Vance traveled to Indiana, where he met with state Republican leaders to lobby them on the effort. Republicans have also targeted Ohio and Missouri.Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      Some Democrats want to use gerrymandering. That’s a bad idea | Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

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      When Texas Republicans unveiled yet another contorted congressional map last week – one that would all but erase Austin’s Latino-led seat and increase the Republican party’s federal House tally by up to five seats in total – the outcry from Democrats was immediate and justified. But beyond the Democratic state legislators’ brave effort to stymie the proposal by boycotting the vote, a different refrain has also been heard by leading Democrats in other states: if they do it, why can’t we?Governor Gavin Newsom of California has vowed to “fight fire with fire”, advancing a proposal that would redraw California’s own congressional map to offset Republican gains in Texas. New York’s Kathy Hochul has also embraced the prospect of aggressive gerrymandering in Democratic-controlled states, sidestepping the independent commissions that Democrats themselves had once championed and successfully implemented in both California and New York.It is an understandable impulse, but it is the wrong one – for both strategic and principled reasons. To begin with, Democrats are destined to lose a gerrymandering arms race. They control fewer state legislatures and the very nature of electoral map engineering currently favors Republican power-grabbing, since most Democratic voters live in densely populated urban areas, which makes it easier to concentrate them in fewer electoral districts.A simulation conducted through 538’s Atlas of Redistricting in which every state is aggressively gerrymandered to maximize the House seats of the party in power at the state level results in a notional House of 262 Republicans and 173 Democrats: a 30-plus seat jump for the Republican party compared with a non-partisan map that maximizes for district compactness. Nor is this a far-fetched scenario. Rather than forcing the other side to back down, retaliation appears more likely to lead to further escalation, in this as in other domains of all-out binary conflict.When running for governor of Illinois in 2018, JB Pritzker had initially pledged to back an independent districting commission but subsequently signed one of the most brutal Democratic gerrymandering plans in the country, which has yielded just three Republican districts out of 17 in a state where Donald Trump won 43% of the votes in 2024. That precedent is now being pointed to by Texas Republicans to justify their own gerrymandering plan.But there is also a deeper reason why “fighting fire with fire” is a bad idea when the goal is to protect democracy from purported challenges to it: the “fire” in question amounts to a violation of one of democracy’s core values – ultimately, the principle of voting equality – and would therefore end up doing the work of democracy’s enemies for them.The metaphor of “fighting fire with fire” can in fact be traced back to the thought of the German émigré scholar to the United States, Karl Loewenstein, who in the 1930s recommended the use of self-consciously “anti-democratic means” – such as party bans and restrictions of voting rights – to fight fascism, in the name of what he called “militant democracy”.Far from achieving their intended goal, such measures were instrumental in the consolidation of the Nazi regime in Germany, given that Adolf Hitler was first nominated chancellor through an emergency presidential decree intended to forestall the prospect of a socialist takeover (construed as a greater threat for German democracy than nazism itself), and that the ban on other political parties Hitler quickly imposed was justified on the grounds that it was necessary to protect the German constitutional order in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire of 1934.Similarly perverse uses of the logic of “militant democracy” have since become a standard component of the authoritarian playbook – from Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2016 counter-coup in Turkey, both of which undid democracy in their countries under the guise of protecting it against purported enemies.A fully gerrymandered congressional map in the United States would thus not just be bad for Democrats. It would also be terrible for American democracy since it would effectively disenfranchise local minorities across the country, yielding an overall competition between two mirroring forms of authoritarianism: Democratic or Republican one-party rule at the local level.If Democrats want to continue to portray themselves as the party of democracy against the Trump administration’s thinly veiled authoritarian ambitions, they should begin by practicing on own their turf the same principles of democratic civility and self-restraint they accuse their opponents of violating.Crucially, this doesn’t mean “doing nothing” in the face of Republican gerrymandering. The point is rather that (big and small “D”) Democrats should use democratic rather than authoritarian means to protect democracy against its enemies – which is to say, win elections by advancing more attractive policy platforms and mobilizing voters more effectively in support of them, rather than by changing the rules to their own benefit.That the Trump administration’s substantive policy decisions – from its inflationary trade wars to the fiscally regressive One Big Beautiful Bill Act – seem destined to do most harm its own electoral constituencies offers plenty of opportunity for fair-and-square political comeback. Ultimately, however, the Democrats’ chances of success in upcoming electoral cycles will depend on their capacity to present a more attractive political alternative to the current Republican party’s brand of populist authoritarianism.Instead of mirroring their opponents, Democrats should therefore seek to differentiate themselves from them, which at present can only mean: strict adherence to democratic norms and forthright advocacy of a more progressive policy platform. When a house is on fire, more fire won’t help. What is needed is water – which is to say, something different, that is at the same time an antidote against fire’s damaging effects.

      Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, City College More