By Jeanne Kuang
CalMatters Writer
As Republicans lambasted California lawmakers for rushing through their effort to gerrymander the state’s congressional map, Democrats are facing a quieter angst in their own party.
To counter what they call President Donald Trump’s undemocratic power grab for Republican seats in Texas, they’re asking voters to temporarily ditch California’s nonpartisan map-drawing process — touted as a national gold standard for fair elections and good governance — in favor of a politico-drawn map to tilt seats in Democrats’ favor.
At the polls, they’ll have to overcome not just Republican opponents but also some Democrats and independent voters who say California shouldn’t respond to partisan gerrymandering in Texas with the same frowned-upon tactics at home.
“This is the kind of moral conflict that, if this goes to the ballot, that every California voter is going to be faced with,” said Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor, Democrat and former member of the state’s independent redistricting commission, at a hearing over the measures Tuesday.
Sadhwani helped draw the state’s existing congressional map when she sat on the commission alongside fellow Democrats, Republicans and independents after the 2020 Census. Now she’s one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s partisan redistricting effort’s most vocal supporters.
Testifying in favor of the plan on Tuesday, she said lawmakers must respond to the “extreme attacks on our core democratic principles” in Texas and other red states that are considering redrawing their own maps.
“It brings me no joy to see the maps that we passed fairly by the commission to be tossed aside,” she said. “I do believe this is a necessary step in a much bigger battle to shore up free and fair elections in our nation.”
But even as state- and congressional-level Democrats embrace the plan as their answer to voters clamoring for the party to put up a resistance to Trump, there are misgivings among Democrats statewide.
On the other side of the issue in the hearing rooms weren’t the Republicans who have vowed to fight Newsom through lawsuits and at the ballot box. Instead, opponents presented members of prior nonpartisan redistricting commissions: Jeanne Raya and Cynthia Dai, who are Democrats, and Connie Archbold Robinson, an independent, to testify against the measures.
“Our citizens in other parts of the country, who are being held hostage by politicians who do not represent their interests, have been looking to California as the alternative, as the model,” Robinson said. “If we gut the great work that we have been doing there, then not only do we lose our credibility, those efforts actually get stalled and get reversed.”
Voters backed independent redistricting
Voters added the nonpartisan process for redrawing California’s political maps to the state constitution by a slim margin in 2008. In 2010 they approved using that same independent system to draw new congressional maps just as Republicans nationally campaigned to flip state legislatures for the purpose of drawing more GOP House seats in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.
Three other states use a similar process as California to draw congressional maps, but just over half of all states give that power directly to their legislatures, meaning the party in power can tilt seats to their advantage.
The current California congressional map gave Democrats a slight advantage. But while Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have called the map unfair to the GOP, Republicans in California have been, for the most part, satisfied with it. It maintained competitive districts that the GOP has been able to win or put up significant fights for — districts that will be eliminated under the partisan map voters will likely weigh in on this fall.
Statewide, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1. Recent polling shows voters favor independent redistricting by about the same margin.
California vs. Texas
To sell the redistricting measure to the public, Democrats have leaned heavily on framing it as a fight against Trump — and, ironically, in favor of fairer elections nationwide. In the state Senate elections committee, Democrats grilled the former map-drawers on whether it would ever be acceptable for them to draw new districts for political reasons and whether California ought to retaliate to discourage Texas’ efforts.
“Texas is actively reducing their own competitive seat count,” Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, a Riverside Democrat, said. “So then do you expect our communities to remain silent while their voices are being stripped away from Washington?”
Raya stressed she, too, opposed both the Trump administration and the Republican gerrymandering effort in Texas, which she called “reprehensible.”
“We’re living with … the despair that people have about the current political climate,” she said. “For me, this is not about declaring an emergency, and now, what do we do? This is, every day, we need to be doing something to make the system work and today what we need to do is protect the independent, nonpartisanship of drawing lines.”
But her fellow party members in the Senate said it’s not the time to go high.
“I will speak for myself. The conditions have been met for us to take action,” incoming Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, a Santa Barbara Democrat, said to the former commissioners. “I have utmost respect and recognition for the work that all of you do to protect our democracy.”
