Gavin Newsom's moment
Democrats have found their fight. Newsom is leading the charge.
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By Noah Berlatsky
Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he’s moving forward with a ballot initiative which would allow Democrats to put in place a partisan gerrymander in the state. The Trump administration was so enraged at this act of defiance that officials sent ICE troops to stage a raid in Little Tokyo outside the Japanese American National Museum as Newsom held a press conference there last Thursday.
The sight of federal agents terrorizing people at the site of a where Japanese Americans were rounded up for internment in World War II was stark and sickening. Newsom responded with a fiery rebuke.
“He’s a failed president,” he said. “Who else sends ICE at the same time we’re having a conversation like this? Someone who’s weak. Someone who’s broken.”
Newsom’s actions are a direct response to Donald Trump’s call for Texas to enact a norm-busting mid-decade redistricting which would give Republicans as many as five more seats in the US House. That would potentially allow Republicans to retain control of the chamber despite the massive unpopularity of most everything they’ve done this year.
Generally, partisan gerrymanders are a bad thing — that’s why California currently delegates districting to an independent bipartisan commission. But Trump and the GOP, enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court, are openly trying to use off-cycle gerrymanders to steal the 2026 election. If people cannot vote out the party in power, you don’t have a democracy any more. At best, you’ve got competitive authoritarianism.
In that context, Newsom’s threat to retaliate in kind is not a divisive attack on good governance. It is, instead, the only hope for democracy. Bipartisanship right now is appeasement. Democrats cannot and should not hide behind neutrality and fairness as MAGA incinerates the remaining tatters of our republic.
Newsom and other Democrats joining this battle are right to fight. And by fighting, they are demonstrating just how weak Trump is. When you bend the knee, MAGA looks invincible. As soon as you stand up, though, the orange god starts to look like a fetid bag of wind.
Not Texas vs. California, but Trump vs. everyone
States usually undertake redistricting every 10 years following the census. Republicans, however, are worried that their incredibly unpopular policies — like their massive Medicaid-slashing budget reconciliation bill — will sink their chances of holding the House.
So they’ve decided to play dirty. Trump declared that Republicans were “entitled to five more seats” and the Texas GOP has slavishly rushed to do his bidding. Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to redraw the map and break up Black majority districts, such as that held by Rep. Al Green. Democratic legislators boycotted the state to prevent a quorum — they are currently sheltering in blue states like Illinois, California, and New York.
At the beginning of the Texas showdown, analysts argued that MAGA held most of the cards. The Economist, for example, titled an article, “Democrats are likely to lose the redistricting wars.”
The main reason Democrats are disadvantaged is because they aren’t fascist authoritarians, and have a commitment to good government and fairness. Blue states like California and New York have provisions in place that make it more difficult for them to redistrict. A California ballot measure gave redistricting power to an independent commission more than 10 years ago, which is why Newsom needs another ballot measure to take power back for the state legislature.
The assumption, therefore, was that Texas Democrats would eventually have to return to the state, Texas would pass its gerrymander, and Democrats would have to wildly overperform to even have a chance at taking back the House as the country slides further into the tarpit of voter disempowerment.
A few weeks passed, though, and now things look rather different. Trump has (as is his wont) played the politics here about as badly as possible. By opening his orange mouth, he’s made it clear that he is the driving force behind the Texas redistricting. That makes him personally implicated. That’s a problem for Republicans, because Trump is getting more and more unpopular. His approval last week dropped to 41.7 percent and his net approval to –12.6 points, the lowest numbers of his term so far.
More, Trump is treating blue states and cities as partisan enemies. He’s (unconstitutionally) sent National Guard troops into LA; his tariffs and attacks on immigrant laborers also threaten to decimate California’s economy. National guard troops invaded Washington DC last week, and Trump’s been threatening other cities as well, including Chicago, Oakland, New York, and Baltimore.
Trump has made very clear to voters and leader that this is not some abstract technical battle over district lines. He has told blue states, and Democratic voters, that he wants to disenfranchise and subjugate them.
That’s made it relatively easy for Democrats to rally against the Texas gerrymander. Governors like Newsom, Pritzker, and Kathy Hochul of New York have welcomed refugee Texas legislators. And Newsom believes he has the votes and the enthusiasm to get a ballot measure passed by Democratic partisans who are less interested in good government and more interested in stopping Trump from destroying democratic government altogether.
More fighting needed
The gerrymander battle is one that can bridge the divide between centrists and progressives. The left was (rightly) angered when Newsom had a conversation with far-right activist Charlie Kirk where he cravenly agreed to abandon support for trans athletes. They’ve also been irritated that Hochul has so far refused to endorse progressive New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
On redistricting, though, the left, Hochul, and Newsom are all on the same page. Andrew O'Neill of progressive group Indivisible commented with some relief that “now there is some marriage of the rhetoric we've been seeing since Trump's inauguration with some actual action."
That kind of progressive and grassroots support is why Newsom feels comfortable defying good government groups like the League of Women Voters. (“With all due respect to them, they are dead wrong on this issue,” he said.) It’s also why he thinks he and other Democrats can win a ballot initiative, even though polls show that most Californians prefer the current independent commission.
Right now, most Californians don’t understand that a vote for a gerrymander in California is a vote against Trump. Once there’s a campaign explaining to them that it is, though, they may well vote for the gerrymander.
That doesn’t mean the fight is over or that it’s won. Trump is pushing Indiana to enact a right-wing gerrymander as well; Alabama is trying to get the Supreme Court to tear up the rest of the Voting Rights Act and allow the state to wipe out Black Democratic seats. New York Democrats are trying to redraw maps, though it’s not clear how they could do that under state law before next November. Broadly, Trump and the Republican Party have made it clear that they do not believe that voters should have the power to remove them from office, and as a result American democracy is teetering.
The nationwide attack on voting rights is bad, to put it mildly. But Democrats can’t resist by twiddling their thumbs and muttering about rules and fairness, which seems to be the preferred approach of the League of Women Voters. If Republicans don’t think there are any consequences for cheating and gutting democracy, they will simply cheat and gut democracy some more.
Now, though, Democrats seem to have not just a will to resist, but a strategy. Pritzker and other governors have provided resources and solidarity for Texas Democrats to slow redistricting. And Newsom has presented a plan and a timeline for striking back at Republicans and making them feel real pain if they continue to raze democracy. (His team has also been brilliantly trolling MAGA on social media by posting tweets satirizing Trump’s unhinged all-caps screeds.)
Even people who have been (rightly) disgusted with Newsom’s lack of support for trans people and the homeless have been excited and inspired by his pushback here. He’s showing not just that resistance is plausible, but that it can pay major political dividends — which hopefully will lead other Democrats to resist too.
That resistance is important, because the only thing that might dissuade the GOP at all is if the opposition fights and fights ugly. It’s late in the day for Democrats to have figured that out. But now is the time. Tomorrow there may not be any democracy to fight for.
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