World War G in September

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The 2026 movie Pressure dramatizes the clash of Allied meteorologists in the run-up to D-Day.  The Americans relied on analog forecasting, looking for past weather maps that matched current conditions, and assuming that the weather would play out the same way.  The British were more alert to differences that the analog maps did not capture. Like the American forecasters in 1944, the Republicans assumed that the patterns of 2024 would remain in place in 2026.  They did not count on the extent to which Trump's actions alienated Hispanics and other voters.

They had similar problems in previous elections.

Andrew Howard and Aaron Pellish at POLITICO:

Republicans are growing increasingly worried their mid-decade gerrymandering push isn’t going to save their House majority.

The norm-breaking plan hatched by the White House last summer to draw new maps to protect the party from an unfavorable midterm environment is not on track to bear the fruits they hoped it would. Two months out from Election Day, Republicans are sweating races they thought they would win comfortably when they redrew district boundaries, according to conversations with a dozen Republican strategists on Friday.

...

Republicans redrew maps in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama — while Democrats only pulled off a gerrymander in California. (They got another seat from a Utah court decision but had their Virginia gerrymander blocked in court.) In a less hostile political environment, that could have netted the GOP more than a dozen seats.

But they’re not all looking so solid. Texas Republicans are growing increasingly worried that newly drawn Latino-heavy seats Trump carried by double digits in 2024 are looking shaky, and the five-seat net they’d hoped out of the state looks increasingly unrealistic by the day.“The Texas redistricting effort will for sure yield a two-seat gain, and more than likely yield a three-seat gain,” said Alfredo Rodriguez, a Dallas-based Republican strategist. “Picking up five seats will be difficult considering the environment and headwinds Republicans face this cycle.”In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis looks very much alive in a tough seat redrawn by the GOP to take him out.

And Florida’s new gerrymander isn’t looking bulletproof, either, with Democratic Reps. Darren Soto, Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz running hard to hold onto newly red-leaning territory.

World War G: Republicans Score Wins in VA and TN

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Sabrina Moreno at Axios:

The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the results of the state's redistricting referendum, which voters narrowly approved last month.

Why it matters: The ruling upends one of the most closely watched redistricting fights in the country.It follows months of legal challenges over whether the referendum was unconstitutional.

The big picture: The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade.That's after the state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election, and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters.

The new map would have been in effect for the November midterms and was expected to shift the state's congressional split from 6-5 favoring Democrats to 10-1.

 Katherine Chui and Emily Cochrane at NYT:

When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last week, Republicans saw new political opportunities across the South. Congressional districts that were considered strongholds for Democrats, often with majority Black populations, could be redrawn for the first time in decades.

Among Southern states, Tennessee was the first to redo its map, which Gov. Bill Lee signed into law on Thursday. The new map breaks the Ninth Congressional District — a longtime Democratic base encompassing Memphis — into three Republican-leaning districts.

The new map divides areas of Memphis where most of the population is Black among three districts with overwhelmingly white populations, eliminating the state’s sole majority Black district in the process.

Voting Rights And World War G

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog::

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”

Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns at POLITICO:

Excitable Republicans hailing the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act as the start of a golden age of neverending House majorities may need to pause and take breath.
...

How far can they go this year? With the ruling less than 24 hours old — and with the midterms just six months away — there’s uncertainty about what’s possible. But even in a maximalist scenario for Republicans, none of the experts Playbook spoke to believed this ruling will net the GOP more than a handful of House seats in November.

...

ABOUT THAT UNCERTAINTY: Four big factors will ultimately decide the extent of further Republican redistricting this year.

1. TIME PRESSURE: This was an extraordinary moment for the Supreme Court to drop this ruling. (In Louisiana, absentee ballots for next month’s primaries have already been sent out.) Those Southern states keen to redistrict before November are in for an almighty scramble. What’s possible will vary state to state.

2. GOP APPETITE: Not every state-level Republican will want to redraw maps on short notice. Some may see 2028 as a more realistic target. Others may be reluctant to move mid-decade at all. Don’t forget that state legislatures in Republican-run Indiana and Democratic-run Maryland already resisted pressure to accept redrawn maps this cycle.

3. TRUMP: The president remains the decisive factor. How hard the White House pushes for new maps this cycle remains an unknown factor, but may prove critical in how many states move immediately. Trump sounded keen yesterday —- “I would think that they would want to do it,” he told reporters — but had only just learned about the ruling.

4. LEGALITY: This wasn’t the “clean kill” Republicans hoped for, watering down rather than completely gutting Section 2 of the VRA. Experts believe there are legal uncertainties still to be ironed out. Pro-VRA litigation — even if ultimately fruitless — could slow the process down.

Democrats will likely retaliate.  (And after the midterms, they might control more legislative chambers.)

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Some Democrats who backed new redistricting commissions in the 2010s now look back on those efforts as tying one hand behind their back for the future.

“It seemed like a pitchfork moment. It did seem good,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The lesson is that there are some states that are never going to be able to do this. If you’re not going to do it nationally, you’re going to have an unlevel playing field.”

The California and Virginia referendums to let Democrats seize redistricting power represented mea culpas about political idealism that could spread to other blue states.

One of the nation’s oldest redistricting commissions is in Washington State, where voters in 1983 adopted a provision to shift map-drawing power from elected officials. Now Shasti Conrad, the state’s Democratic Party chairwoman, said that it could be undone if Democrats were to flip a handful of seats in the State Legislature and seize supermajority control next year.

If they do, Ms. Conrad said, Washington voters are likely to be asked in 2027 to allow lawmakers to enact a new congressional map. Now, Democrats hold eight of 10 House seats in the state.

“People have been asking, ‘What can Washington do with redistricting?’” Ms. Conrad said. “They’re seeing other states like Virginia do it, so why can’t we?”

Democratic regrets over their redistricting hurdles tend to quickly morph into the party’s most reliable political stance over the last decade: blaming Mr. Trump.

Virginia Redistricting

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Erin Doherty and Aaron Pellish at POLITICO:

After a narrow loss in Virginia, Republicans are pointing fingers as President Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering fight slips into a stalemate.

Multiple Republicans say the party should’ve spent much more, much earlier to have a better shot at blocking Democrats’ Virginia map, which could give the party as many as four more House seats. And pressure is now growing on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to make up for Democrats’ gains with a GOP-led redistricting effort in his state, as soon as next week.

...

Tuesday’s results in Virginia, combined with gains in California and a new court-drawn seat in Utah, have effectively erased the advantage Republicans built off new maps in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri. It’s a stark reversal nearly nine months after Trump first urged Republicans in the Lone Star State to redraw maps, upending the midterm battlefield.

Immigration Issues and the Texas Gerrymander

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

Myah Ward and Megan Messerly at Politico:

Home builders are warning President Donald Trump that his aggressive immigration enforcement efforts are hurting their industry. They’re cautioning that Republican candidates could soon be hurt, too.

Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.

Hill Republicans have held separate meetings with White House officials to share their own electoral concerns.

This story is based on eight interviews with home builders, lawmakers and others familiar with the meetings.

“I told [lawmakers] straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week.

...

The meetings this month came after Democrats crushed a Republican in a special runoff election for a state senate seat in a Trump-friendly district in Tarrant County, which includes most of Fort Worth, rattling Republicans nationally. New research from the American Business Immigration Coalition and Comité de 100, first obtained by POLITICO, shows how slipping support among Latino voters could affect Republican-leaning districts in Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida and California.

This study was buried in the POLITICO story. GOP could lose 6 seats (including 2 of their own!) they thought they gerrymandered Dems out of if Latinos swing 15% left https://t.co/HniLYDFYuc pic.twitter.com/Z6jtvnqDGm

— BeshearStan (@BeshearStan) February 14, 2026

The House Map and the Aggregate Vote

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

Hans Nichols and Kavya Beheraj at Axios:

House Democrats will need to overperform Vice President Harris by roughly three percentage points in swing districts to capture the majority in 2026, according to an Axios analysis of presidential margins in congressional districts.

Why it matters: In special elections over the last year, Democrats have been surpassing Harris' 2024 margins by double digits, putting the majority clearly in reach.

But the universe of competitive House seats is historically small, meaning that even an unambiguous national move toward the Democrats will result in a relatively narrow Democratic majority.

Flashback: The 2018 midterms saw a 6.5 percentage point swing in Democrats' favor compared to President Trump's 2016 margins, giving them 41 new seats for a 235 -199 majority, according to the Cook Political Report. A similar shift in 2026 would translate into 12 additional Democratic seats, giving them a 227-208 majority, according to the data, which includes redistricted maps, according to The Downballot and Sabato's Crystal Ball.

The other side: If GOP candidates fare just 1% better than Trump did last cycle, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) could add another 12 seats to his majority, putting him at a comfortable 232-204 margin.

Zoom out: Democrats are banking that the electorate will look a lot less Trumpy when the president's name is not on the ballot. Their voters, Democrats argue, are highly motivated and engaged when Trump is in office.

...

Zoom in: Presidential performance in a congressional district doesn't guarantee a predetermined outcome, but in the Trump era, the number of crossover districts is at a historic low.Thirteen House Democrats prevailed in seats that Trump carried in 2024. A total of three Republicans held on in Harris districts.

n 2008, after President Obama's first election, there were 83 crossover districts.Two of the best lawmakers at convincing voters to split their ticket — Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who won in a Harris +4.6 district, and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who won in a Trump +9 district — are both retiring.

What we're watching: After tit-for-tat redistricting in six states, Republicans appear to have drawn themselves another three seats.Democrats on Thursday proposed adding another four in Virginia (pending judicial review), but Republicans are plotting to equalize in Florida.

Vacancies and Margins

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

MIA MCCARTHY, CALEN RAZOR and BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM at POLITICO:

First, the GOP Conference’s long-planned, day-long policy retreat Tuesday at the Kennedy Center — intended to build unity around a legislative agenda in a midterm election year — was shaken by news of Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s unexpected death and Rep. Jim Baird’s hospitalization from a car accident.

It brought into stark relief the major math challenges House Republicans now face. LaMalfa’s passing brings the balance of the House to 218-213. And as long as Baird is out recovering, Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford to lose a single GOP vote on party-line legislative business on the chamber floor.

“We keep saying we are one breath away from the minority — that’s more true today than ever,” one House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill.

Lindsey Holden at Politico:

Newsom has 14 days to schedule a special election, which would take place by mid-May unless the governor holds off until the June 2 primary.

The new congressional boundaries California voters approved in November don’t kick in until that primary. This creates a scenario in which a short-timer elected by LaMalfa’s current constituents could serve out the end of his term, followed by a representative running in the newly drawn, more Democratic, district.

Or, one candidate could thread the needle of both districts and serve the two terms back to back. However, that situation is fairly unlikely, considering the sharp red-to-blue swing Prop 50 will initiate.

California elections expert Paul Mitchell, who was involved in drawing the new maps, predicted in an X post that Newsom will schedule the special election in March, with a June runoff, or align it with the midterm primary with an August runoff.

The Shrinking House Battlefield

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. The off-year elections were good for Democrats, but...

 Yasmeen Abutaleb at WP:

Of the 39 seats Democrats are competing for, 28 are in districts that Trump won by five or more percentage points.

A gerrymandering spree instigated by Trump has narrowed the number of truly competitive seats, furthering a trend that was already underway in recent elections as the nation has become more polarized. That has not affected the race for the Senate, which Republicans are favored to hold.

Just 36 races in this year’s election are rated competitive by the Cook Political Report, compared with 49 races at the same point in the 2018 cycle. Half of the seats rated competitive by Cook this year are already held by Democrats, leaving the party even less room to gain ground.

“Democrats will have a very narrow but viable path to the majority. That’s a different scenario than 2006 or 2018, when Democrats put a ton of Republican-held seats in play,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report. “There’s so little elasticity in U.S. House elections these days compared to prior eras.”

...

Democrats believe they have effectively neutralized Republican efforts to pick up additional seats through gerrymandering in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina by gaining seats of their own in California and Utah. The Indiana Senate rejected a partisan gerrymander last month, and Democrats are still exploring whether they could pick up seats in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. Wasserman said the post-gerrymandering landscape remains “pretty equitable to both parties.”

 

World War G: Trump Loses the Indiana Battle

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The passage of Prop 50 in CA will offset the Texas gerrymander.  The D victory in VA will partly offset GOP gerrymanders elsewhere.

Mitch Smith at NYT:

Republican members of the Indiana Senate bucked President Trump on Thursday and joined Democrats in voting down a new congressional map that would have positioned Republicans to sweep the state’s U.S. House seats.

The 19 to 31 vote was a highly public defeat for Mr. Trump, who has spent significant political capital pushing for redrawn maps in Republican-led states and who repeatedly threatened political consequences for Indiana Republicans who did not fall in line. The defiance of Mr. Trump comes as he faces other signs of rifts within his own party.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office after the vote, Mr. Trump downplayed the result in Indiana, saying that “we won every other state.” He also said that he hoped the president pro tem of the Indiana Senate, who voted against the map, loses his next primary.

The rejection of the map in the State Senate, where Republicans hold 40 of the 50 seats, followed months of presidential lobbying that turned increasingly pointed in recent weeks as it became clear that some holdouts were not budging. Mr. Trump had called some of them out by name on social media, openly questioning their loyalty to the party and pledging to back primary challengers against them.

Charting World War G

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The  passage of Prop 50 in CA will offset the Texas gerrymander.  The D victory in VA will partly offset GOP gerrymanders elsewhere.

 Bruce Mehlman:

World War G: The Battlefield Expands

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw congressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats to offset a recent Texas gerrymander.  The war is spreading.

Reid Epstein at NYT:

The next front in the nation’s pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats.

The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections. No other Democratic state has begun redistricting proceedings, while several Republican states have drawn new maps or are deliberating doing so.

Bruce Mehlman:

Traditionally redistricting is usually done once per decade, though this is not dictated by the Constitution or a specific law. President Trump is pushing Republican states to redraw maps in 2025 to maximize GOP advantage for 2026, and three have already done so (TX, NC, MO) with two more coming (OH, UT). Many Democratic governors such as California’s Gavin Newsom are moving to “fight fire with fire” with hyper-partisan gerrrymanders of their own. Up to 15 states in total (so far) are considering or acting: the 5 above plus CA, FL, IL, IN, KS, LA, MD, NE, SC, VA & WI.

...

Democrats could be in danger of losing around a dozen districts across the South if the court strikes down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, a case the court heard two weeks ago. “Without Section 2, which has been interpreted to require the creation of majority-minority districts, Republicans could eliminate upward of a dozen Democratic-held districts across the South.” (NYT)

Obamacare Politics

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Elena Shao and Margot Sanger-Katz at NYT:

More than 23 million Americans are currently enrolled in Obamacare plans, and nearly all of them will face higher health care costs next year if extra federal funding for subsidies expires, as scheduled, on Dec. 31.

Democrats in Congress are withholding their votes on a government spending bill to demand that Republicans extend these subsidies, which lower the cost of insurance for people who buy their own health care coverage in marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act. Since Congress introduced the extra funding in 2021, enrollment has doubled.

These Americans live nearly everywhere in the country, but their numbers are especially concentrated in a handful of red states whose governments have declined to expand Medicaid programs to cover poor, childless adults.

Fifty-seven percent of people with this type of insurance live in Republican congressional districts.

World War G: Cleaving Cleaver

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw congressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats to offset a recent Texas gerrymander.

 Fredreka Schouten at CNN:

Missouri’s Republican-controlled Senate on Friday passed a new congressional map, taking final legislative action to target one of the state’s Democratic seats in the US House and boost the GOP’s chances of retaining its fragile majority in the chamber.

The 21-11 vote came just two weeks after the state’s GOP Gov. Mike Kehoe first unveiled the map and ordered a special legislative session to approve it. It targets longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver by carving up his Kansas City-area district and stretching its boundaries into rural, Republican-friendly areas of central Missouri.

...

Missouri is the latest state to undertake a mid-decade redistricting as part of an extraordinary, multi-state campaign by President Donald Trump and his allies to preserve the balance of power in the House by changing district lines.

Republicans hope to win seven of Missouri’s eight congressional seats under the new map in next year’s midterm elections. The GOP currently controls six seats, and Democrats hold two.

Bad News, Good News for GOP

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem:

Alex Isenstadt:

Republican operatives and lawmakers are increasingly anxious about how inflation could affect the GOP in the 2026 midterms, and want President Trump to take more aggressive steps to address rising prices.

Why it matters: GOP insiders and lawmakers believe the cost of drugs and consumer items — and how the White House deals with Trump's tariffs potentially turbocharging prices and creating shortages — will be key to whether the GOP keeps control of Congress next year.

Zoom in: Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond praise Trump's recent focus on crime, but many are alarmed by internal polls and focus groups showing persistent — and increasing — concerns about prices.

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

For the American middle class, it has been a summer of cooling confidence.

Consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Pessimism about the job market increased, with more people surveyed saying they expect their income to decline, according to polling done by think tank the Conference Board.

The middle class—generally considered to include households making roughly $53,000 to $161,000 a year—is playing an outsize role in that waning optimism. After months of tracking high-income earners’ increasing confidence about the economy, households making between $50,000 and $100,000 made an abrupt about-face in June. They now more closely resemble low-income earners’ gloomier views, according to surveys done by Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm.

“There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world,” said John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. “Then things fell off a cliff.”

But....

At Politico, Lisa Kashinsky, Elena Schneider and Nicholas Wu write that Democrats are "hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats. Florida’s constitution has language restricting partisan gerrymandering, though its conservative-majority state Supreme Court recently upheld a GOP redraw."

Nate Cohn at NYT: "[If] the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results."

World War G Is Spreading

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw coingressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats.

Liz Crampton, Dustin Gardiner and Nick Reisman at Politico:

Texas Republicans on Saturday passed a new map that will help the GOP flip as many as five House seats — a partisan play at the hand of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, California Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom preemptively agreed to send a retaliatory ballot measure to voters — the first step in potentially offsetting Texas’ maneuver by creating new Democratic-leaning seats.


The nation’s two largest states had fired the opening salvo in what is likely to become an intense and protracted redistricting campaign by both parties to grasp power in Washington. Now other red and blue state governors face pressure to follow their lead and aggressively gerrymander their congressional maps.

Republicans hold a clear advantage in the arms race: The GOP is poised to move forward with redistricting in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, which could yield at least half a dozen more seats. Democrats, meanwhile, have struggled to get gerrymandering efforts moving in blue states beyond California, though leaders in New York, Illinois and Maryland say they are weighing options.

...

Efforts are underway to carve out more GOP seats in Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Florida — and Trump’s political operation is pressuring individual state lawmakers to act. On Thursday, Trump declared on X that Republicans in Missouri — where the GOP could pick up one more seat by splitting a district in Kansas City — are “IN!” to call a special session to redistrict.

The legal hurdles for Democrats in other deep-blue states could prove more formidable, hampering their party’s quest to retake the House in the 2026 midterms.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to disband a quasi-independent commission in charge of drawing House map. But the panel, created by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, cannot be erased until 2027 at the earliest.

California Pulls the Trigger

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw coingressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats.

 Laura J. Nelson, Seema Mehta and Melody Gutierrez at LAT:

Newsom initially said that new electoral districts in California would only take effect if another state redrew its lines before 2031. But after Texas moved toward approving its own maps this week that could give the GOP five more House seats, Democrats stripped the so-called “trigger” language from the amendment — meaning that if voters approve the measure, the new lines would take effect no matter what.

“They fired the first shot, Texas,” Newsom said before signing the bills Thursday. “We wouldn’t be here if Texas had not done what they just did, if Donald Trump didn’t do what he just did.”

The ballot measure language, which asks California voters to override the power of the independent redistricting commission, was approved by most Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate, where they hold supermajorities.

Lawmakers have the power to place constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot without the approval of the governor. Newsom later signed two bills that fund the special election and spell out the lines for the new congressional districts.

Town Halls 2025

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Maya C. Miller at CalMatters:

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, the Republican who represents much of California’s rural north, had barely begun his prepared remarks at a town hall in Chico early Monday when a chorus of boos and jeers overpowered him.

The raucous interjections didn’t relent for nearly 90 minutes.

The crowd of more than 650 people at the local Elks Lodge peppered him with obscenity-laden comments and slammed him for his vote for President Donald Trump’s budget bill, which cuts more than $1.1 trillion in federal spending for Medicaid, Medicare and plans under the Affordable Care Act over the next decade. The crowd excoriated LaMalfa for supporting legislation they said will “devastate” rural hospitals and hurt vulnerable people with disabilities and poor families.

But LaMalfa claimed the legislation makes “no cuts to the people themselves” in California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, and instead only targets “waste, fraud and abuse” – a common and misleading line that House Republicans across the country have employed to defend the legislation.

...

The in-person, open mic town hall has gradually become a relic in the age of social media, as fewer elected officials are willing to prostrate themselves in today’s hyperpartisan era. House Republicans even discouraged their members from hosting face-to-face forums after a wave of negative headlines out of viral town hall confrontations – including with their own GOP supporters – earlier this year.

Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay and Mia McCarthy at Politico:

Such scenes of angry constituents confronting lawmakers are nothing new. They were commonplace in 2009 as Democrats pressed forward with a health care overhaul and in 2017 when Republicans sought to undo it.


This time around, there is a fierce debate underway about whether the town hall explosions are part of a genuine backlash to GOP governance in Washington — one that could presage another wave election as seen in 2010 and 2018 — or just another reflection of America’s political polarization.

Many Republicans are dismissing the outbursts, concluding they have been choreographed by Democrats and groups aligned with them and do not reflect genuine voter sentiment. Some — including Trump — have claimed without evidence that paid protesters are responsible.

“I think Democrats have been organized to actually act out in town halls, and I think if you’re going to have a town hall where you’re inviting people to come in with the intent of protesting, that’s what you’re going to get,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said Tuesday.

But left-of-center activists say the GOP dismisses voters’ outrage at their peril. Groups might be helping to publicize and organize protests around lawmakers’ events, they say, but that is merely harnessing a real grass-roots backlash to what Republicans are pursuing in Washington.

Robo-Gerrymander

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Bruce Mehlman:

Researchers were using high-performance computing and big data to discover new materials and analyze proteins before AI… but AI massively accelerated & improved such data-intensive efforts. Gerrymandering dates to 1812 in the U.S. Party strategists have been leveraging voter data and computing to draw advantageous maps for decades. AI promises gerrymandering on steroids — weapons of mass division in the 2025 redistricting wars — with powerful AI models able to (1) precisely-sift unprecedented amounts and unprecedentedly-personal data, (2) compare unlimited potential maps to optimize outcomes. But while AI-enabled cramming could reduce the paltry 20% of seats that are currently competitive, AI-drawn maps might also create more competitive seats by shifting voters out of safer seats (where risk-averse incumbent politicians often prefer them).