How California Bluffed Its Way Into A Redistricting War With Trump

When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?

Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.

“It seemed to me worth a bluff,” Lofgren said. “If the Texans and Trump thought they'd go through all of this and they'd end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”

“But they didn't stop,” she added. “They just doubled down.”

So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency.

“It got very real, very fast,” recounted Newsom, whose provocative podcast appearances and social media posturing lit the fuse for this slapdash effort — and positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party in advance of his likely 2028 White House run.

Texas Republicans approved a gerrymandered map early Saturday morning.

POLITICO spoke with nearly 50 people involved with the California effort, including lawmakers, political operatives, staffers and redistricting wonks. Many were granted anonymity to share details of private deliberations of the tightly-guarded process, which spanned multiple states and levels of government. Together, they paint a picture of a showdown propelled not by painstaking deliberations but by its own self-generating momentum and the opportunity for a rudderless Democratic party to remake itself as a political street brawler.

What initially felt improbable was, by mid-August, inevitable. Data experts and members of Congress spent their House recess in marathon Zoom sessions drawing dozens and dozens of revisions to new district lines. In Sacramento, Newsom’s team built out a campaign apparatus for the daunting and expensive task of selling the partisan map to voters. National Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, began hitting up their donor networks in anticipation of a nine-figure ballot clash.

“This is happening in California, but it’s bigger than California,” said Mike Smith, president of House Majority PAC, the primary House Democratic super PAC. “It’s about Democrats’ effort to actually take a stand and win back the House.”

‘The threat and the action’

The rumors started as early as April that Texas Republicans were contemplating redrawing their maps this year — six years before the decennial process was due up. By June, the plan had seeped into public view, and the state’s endangered Democrats took it upon themselves to convince their counterparts outside Texas that it could very well happen.

With few options at their disposal, Texas Democrats in the statehouse and in Congress lobbied blue-state lawmakers and governors for help. Their hope was that the mere possibility of retaliatory gerrymanders would be enough to dissuade Texas Republicans, who were initially reluctant about a sudden redistricting but were facing escalating pressure from Trump.

In June and July, Democratic Texas state lawmakers and party leaders fanned out to blue states, speaking with prominent Democrats such as Govs. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Ned Lamont of Connecticut and Illinois’ JB Pritzker, who had a private meeting with Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder during a visit to neighboring Oklahoma. The request for public support also reached Newsom, who released a simple statement vowing to have Texas Democrats’ back.

The pitch was a deliberately soft sell. Democrats would not have to commit to changing their maps or even identify a mechanism to do so. Texas state lawmakers followed a tight script in their meetings with other Democrats, keeping the focus on opposition to GOP-drawn maps.

“Everyone had specific instructions on a piece of paper. At no point were they to ask to redistrict,” said a person close to the Democratic caucus.

California’s congressional Democrats were happy to participate in the chest-thumping. But at that point, it was merely a head fake. Members of the caucus were hardly enthused at the prospect of rejiggering their district maps, a process that is notoriously sharp-elbowed in the best of circumstances.

“There was the threat and there was the action,” said California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the third-ranking Democrat in the House. “The Texans wanted us to make the threat, which was fine and we were all comfortable doing that. But the action we knew would be very, very hard … so we were pretty cautious about that.”

‘Two can play at that game’

Several years before the current redistricting standoff began, then-Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison had broached with Newsom an idea of pausing the state’s independent redistricting commission.

Harrison had made a similar plea to leaders in other blue states with independent panels. His worry was that Democrats were sacrificing political advantage, while Republican-led legislatures were continuing to draw partisan gerrymanders.

“Gerrymandering is a cancer to our democracy but at the same time, I don't believe that you can just allow the Republicans to gerrymander their states and then all the blue states have non-partisan commissions,” Harrison recounted. “It just can't work that way. Either it's all 50 states or it’s no states.”

At the time, Newsom demurred, telling Harrison he did not think Californians would want to undermine a commission they voted to put in place.

But by this summer, the governor had changed his mind. He was increasingly convinced every political battle was a national one, and the cascade of crises in his state this year had instilled a wartime mindset. His office formed a rapid response communications team during the Los Angeles wildfires in January to bat down misleading online rumors — and incoming criticism — about the disaster. That infrastructure later amplified his furious response to Trump’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles that began in early June. Internally, his team became more open than ever to unorthodox ideas — like redrawing the state’s maps.

By late June, Newsom and his top aides were batting around options of how California could respond to Texas. The governor was in a punchy mood. He had just made a swing through the early primary state of South Carolina and then was in Tennessee to tape a sprawling podcast with MAGA-friendly podcaster Shawn Ryan.

“When you're about to spend four hours with someone, particularly someone that's a well-known Trump supporter … you have a sort of a mindset about what's going on in this country and a sort of clarity. You prepare in that respect to go to battle,” Newsom said.

Amped up by his preparation for the contentious chat, he dropped his first public hints that he was considering retaliation against Texas in an interview with a liberal outlet, The Tennessee Holler.

Five days later, Trump told Texas Republicans that he wanted new maps with five additional GOP seats. Newsom responded on X, “Two can play at that game.”

The declaration came as a complete surprise to California’s congressional Democrats, including Aguilar. After coming across Newsom’s post online “just like everybody else,” he said he thought to himself, “the California delegation meeting this week just got a lot more interesting.”

A blessing from the former Speaker

The weekly delegation lunch was slated for the day after Newsom’s social media bomb, and it featured a special guest: Jeffries.

He had been invited by Lofgren who was, at that point, still in “bluff mode.” She hoped a Jeffries drop-by, which would surely get noticed on the gossipy Hill, would signal to Texans that California was considering a counterattack, even though, in truth, skepticism still reigned among many in the delegation.

Jeffries did not explicitly ask the Californians to proceed in that meeting, according to people present. He spoke about the stakes of the upcoming midterms and how Democrats’ chances of winning back the House could be endangered if Texas and other red states redrew their maps.

Also piping up was Pelosi, who had spent much of the summer until that point keeping her opinion closely held. The day before the delegation lunch, she huddled with Texas Democrats during votes on the House floor, including Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the dean of the Texas delegation. Now, her message to her California colleagues was firm: “California was not going to unilaterally disarm” if Texas crossed what she saw as a line in the sand, said a person familiar with Pelosi’s involvement.

“She was definitely one of the people that was like, ‘If they proceed down this path, we’re going down with them,’” the person said.

The confluence of three major party figures — Newsom, Pelosi and Jeffries — all signaling the green light marked a significant turning point. Five days later, the Texas Legislature went into special session with redistricting on the agenda. A Texas-California collision was looking more and more likely.

The recall team reassembles

In Texas, all Abbott needed for new maps was the Legislature’s approval. But Newsom’s aides determined that would be legally fraught in California, where an independent line-drawing commission controls congressional and legislative district boundaries. Voters would have to agree to amend the state’s constitution to allow for the lines to be redrawn. A special election in the fall would be the better option.

Newsom quickly turned to his political kitchen Cabinet, most of whom were veterans of his 2021 recall battle. There was a degree of muscle memory for the reassembled team, who had familiarity with running a nationalized campaign in an off-year.

The first task was to decide the question they would put before voters. Some outside operatives argued this was a chance to do away with the commission entirely, as well as the top-two election format that partisans on both sides had grumbled about for years as an unnecessary complication.

But simply jettisoning the commission was viewed internally as untenable; Newsom’s pollster found that the panel had sky-high favorability ratings with the public (findings that would be echoed a few weeks later in a POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll). Newsom advisers argued against touching other voter-backed reforms like top-two. The focus, they insisted, had to be Texas — and Trump.

“After the first round of results, the challenge became clearer,” said one Newsom political adviser. “There was the question of, ‘Do two wrongs make a right?’ that we needed to overcome.”

The team then refined what they’d be asking of voters. The new maps would be temporary, and the measure would enshrine the panel’s line-drawing authority in law after the 2030 census. There would be language stating the maps would only go into effect if Texas or another state proceeded with a mid-decade redistricting. A fresh round of polls found a slim majority of voters backed the proposal, enough to show a pathway to success but a perilous spot for any ballot measure campaign.

The fledgling campaign apparatus started approaching donors to test their appetites for a ballot fight that could easily cost north of $100 million. Democratic funders, they knew, were burned out after losing the White House last year, and Newsom’s team assumed national Republicans would have no trouble mustering the dollars to defeat the measure.

Pelosi began tapping into her prolific fundraising Rolodex. House Majority PAC, which is aligned with Jeffries, made the California measure central to its pitch to donors, arguing that without the additional Democratic pick-ups in the state, their chances of winning the House in 2026 were significantly diminished. Stalwart Democratic allies such as labor unions pledged their support before there were even maps to rally around.

Chicken nuggets and congressional maps

In late July, as Newsom and his political team were building a campaign on the fly, the crafting of the new maps began in earnest in a separate, parallel effort.

Paul Mitchell was supposed to be in Europe with his family on a summer vacation. Instead, the state’s foremost redistricting expert was stuck at home, glued to his computer and subsisting on warmed-over chicken nuggets and Diet Coke.

Mitchell had been a consultant for the California Democratic delegation during past redistricting cycles, so he was a known and trusted quantity. He had an especially long-standing relationship with Lofgren, who called him with a task: Find five more Democratic seats to offset the Texas GOP gains.

Mitchell had been one of the loudest skeptics of the redistricting effort when the topic was first broached in June. But a month later, as he and a half-dozen other redistricting professionals started testing the feasibility of Lofgren’s request, he saw that it would be possible to draw five seats ripe for Democratic pick-up while shoring up the party’s four most vulnerable incumbents — all without running afoul of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority political representation.

“The challenge was: Can you get five seats without breaking everything?” Mitchell said. “That was my personal goal.”

Other Democratic consultants began circulating outlandish maps to maximize the party’s gains, including ones that carved regions of the state into thin “bacon-strip districts” — a redistricting term of art — that drew wildly distant cities into one long spindly seat.

But those leading the California map-drawing effort ultimately figured such a bare-knuckled approach would be too risky to alienate the progressive lawmakers and civil rights groups they would need to endorse the plan.

“I just don't think that it's something that the voters of California would have supported. I don't think it's something that the California Legislature would have supported, and I don't think that the California [congressional] delegation would have gotten there,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar, Lofgren and Mitchell held a series of 30-minute Zoom meetings with each delegation member, talking through the proposed changes and soliciting feedback. Some members in safe blue seats were set to take in substantial numbers of conservative voters, and others were not thrilled about losing territory they had long represented. But none of those lawmakers aired their grievances publicly, enabling the delegation to project a united front.

“Once the governor signaled very clearly that he was serious, we all got serious about it,” said one California representative. “I don’t think this took a lot of convincing, honestly. People got it.”

‘Passing the baton’

Meanwhile, the Texas Democratic state lawmakers were on the run. In a bid to stave off the GOP redistricting plan, they left Austin to deny a quorum and suddenly became the hottest commodity in Democratic politics. Many took up refuge in suburban Chicago, appearing with Pritzker, another possible 2028 hopeful. Newsom twice hosted groups of Texas legislators in Sacramento. Even former President Barack Obama chimed in to offer support during a virtual meeting in mid-August.

“He painted the reality of what’s going on right now, the value of our democracy, what it takes to preserve democracy and that it's not in a straight line,” Texas Rep. Ramon Romero Jr. said of the call with Obama. “There are bumps and ups and downs. So we're a part of that preservation of democracy.”

The quorum break gave Democrats time to organize, but it wasn’t ultimately going to stop the Republican redistricting push. Meanwhile, the strain of the journey was starting to pile up: Lawmakers were levied a daily fine for their absence, and top Texas Republicans threatened to send the FBI or other authorities to track them down. Eventually, it was clear the lawmakers would be heading home.

"We are passing the baton,” Ramon Jr. said, echoing Obama’s message to the Texans. “We’ve run a good first leg.”

The lawmakers returned to Texas earlier this week, paving the way for the state Legislature to approve the new GOP-friendly maps. With Texas moving forward, California Democrats struck their trigger language from their proposal, a tacit acknowledgement their bluff had failed to convince Texas Republicans to fold.

Meanwhile, the redistricting arms race began to spread to other states. Senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance, met with Republicans in Indiana to urge them to draw new maps. After some opposition to the idea, the White House is now considering backing primary challengers to uncooperative Indiana Republicans. Ohio is obligated by law to redraw its maps ahead of 2026, which could net Republicans additional seats, while lawmakers in Missouri and Florida have also indicated an openness to mid-cycle redistricting.

Some blue-state governors, such as New York’s Kathy Hochul, have signaled they’re willing to respond. But none have taken concrete steps like California. Marc Veasey, a Democratic congressmember from Fort Worth, said more Democrats should be following the California governor’s example and engaging in the redistricting war.

“Mutually assured destruction is the only way how you stop mid-decade redistricting moving forward,” he said.

Flipping the script

When California state lawmakers broke for recess in mid-July, they had no idea their return to work four weeks later would be dominated by redistricting. Several legislators said they had first heard of Newsom’s gambit through podcasts and social media, stirring up familiar frustrations among Democrats who have chafed at the governor surprising them with splashy announcements.

To put the question to voters, Newsom needed near-unanimous support from Democrats in the state Legislature. And they would have to act on their first week back from recess to get the procedural gears turning in time for a Nov. 4 special election.

The bulk of the map-drawing was being feverishly hashed out among members of Congress, but legislators would need to feel some ownership as well. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas began fielding messages from members of Congress, particularly Lofgren, Aguilar and Pelosi. He commissioned his own poll to gauge voter sentiments on redistricting. He held virtual caucus meetings over the break, with members calling in from trips outside the state or country.

One lawmaker described the presentations on those calls, which included Lofgren, Aguilar and Mitchell, as tightly scripted, conveying a sense that the train was moving and it was time to get on board. Maps were officially submitted to the Legislature by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee three days before state lawmakers reconvened, though legislators and staff continued to make small adjustments to the proposed boundaries.

As the proposal wound its way through the Legislature, Republicans excoriated the maneuver as the exact kind of backroom self-dealing that led California voters to remove elected officials from congressional redistricting 15 years ago. They insinuated Newsom was in it to boost his presidential bid and warned Democrats were undermining democracy by following Texas down the gerrymandering spiral.

“No matter what the justification is, why would we engage in behavior that is considered unacceptable by those who elected us?” said Assemblymember Tom Lackey during floor debate on Thursday. It was a preview of the opposition campaign, as the national GOP establishment and independent redistricting proponents embark on an unlikely alliance to sink the measure.

In the end, 87 of 90 Democrats voted to put the maps on the ballot — a display of consensus that Rivas said was made possible by the California-under-siege mentality that had been building up ever since Trump re-took the White House.

“It’s Whac-a-mole. We’ve been trying to play defense,” Rivas said. “But we finally just threw up our hands and said, ‘We’ve got to flip the script.’”