Washington — When the U.S. Supreme Court sharply struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last week, Democrats in Washington got a message: The rules for redistricting have changed, and California — the nation’s largest blue bastion — may have another role to play.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Democrats should “play by the same set of rules” as Republicans. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) vowed to fight “in the Deep South and across the country.” And Alabama Democrat Representative Terri Sewell put it bluntly: “I’ll take 52 seats from California, I’m sure. And 17 seats from Illinois.”
As soon as Republican governors arrived, demands for action started coming. louisiana, alabama, mississippi And Tennessee The special legislative session was called to redraw congressional maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Florida also approved new maps that could give the GOP four more seats in the House, and President Trump has urged other Republican states to follow suit.
The Republican response has increased pressure on Democrats to act, including in California — where the ruling could overturn not only congressional maps, but legislative and local races as well.
Representative Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) said, “We cannot let this national gerrymandering effort by Republicans go unanswered.” “If Republicans go for it, I think we have to leave all options on the table.”
At this time, California’s response has not been decided.
Representative Sidney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) cautioned against “accelerating the race to the bottom.”
(J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)
The chair of the California Democratic Party said there are no current plans to redraw the maps — just months after voters approved a constitutional amendment authorizing mid-decade redistricting backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The Democratic consultant who drew the state’s current congressional district boundaries says an all-blue map, though possible to create, would likely hurt Democrats more than help them in the long run. And some congressional Democrats in the state are worried that the impulse to match Republican partisan efforts will be bad for American voters.
“Instead of accelerating a race to the bottom, the next step is to decelerate it because you can reach a point of no return,” said Representative Sidney Camlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), one of the state’s most prominent black lawmakers. “And that’s where we’re going.”
What decisions California makes – and when – will matter nationally. With 52 congressional seats, no state has more seats to give to Democrats in a redistricting battle. But experts, lawmakers and party officials say the path forward is more complicated than Washington is calling for.
48 out of 52 blue seats can be seen in California
That’s partly because California has already taken action. In 2025, voters approved Proposition 50, which created new congressional district lines designed to favor Democrats for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections. The new maps, which could yield 48 of 52 Democratic seats, are already in effect, and voters have begun receiving their mail-in ballots.
Going beyond this is not on the table – at least not yet.
California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks said, “We still have to win the entirety of the seats in the map drawn in 2025. It’s too far to say that we will go back to the drawing board and redraw the map.”
Hicks said that doesn’t mean the issue can’t be part of a future discussion, but he said Democrats in other states shouldn’t focus on what California has already done.
“We’re trying to pick up 48 of them. How much more do you want us to pick up? You want us to make it 52 blue? Okay, you all need to join the fight,” Hicks said. “You all should pick up some seats. Let’s do this together, because California can’t do it alone, it’s going to take the rest of the country.”
Others aren’t convinced the most aggressive option makes strategic sense in California.
Paul Mitchell, the Democratic redistricting consultant who drafted California’s Proposition 50 congressional maps, said the push for a 52-0 delegation reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how a partisan map would perform in the state over time.
“The 52-to-zero map would have the potential to backfire,” Mitchell said. “In 2026, we might win 52 seats. But then in 2028 or 2030 — a bad year for the Democrats, let’s say — the Democrats lose 11 of those seats. You’ve got these districts so monstrously drawn for Democratic gains in a good year that in a bad Democratic year, they don’t have the ability to mount a challenge.”
This decision could put the state’s voting rights law in danger.
The political debate over congressional maps has so far dominated conversations in Washington. But legal scholars and redistricting experts say the decision could also have implications for California’s city hall, school board and county supervisor races.
The justices’ ruling, decided by the court’s conservative majority, said states cannot consider race to create majority-minority electoral districts when they must take partisan interests into account.
“A purely partisan map is actually more defensible than a map drawn from racial considerations,” said Rick Hasson, an election law professor at UCLA. “It turns the world on its head.”
Hassan said the decision now jeopardizes any district at any level of government that had relied on the Voting Rights Act to justify its boundaries.
And in California, this uncertainty extends to the districts within State Voting Rights ActThat provides protections for minority voters beyond federal law, he said. The state law was not directly at issue in the Supreme Court’s decision, but Hasen argues that the Court’s reasoning could provide new legal grounds to challenge the state law as potentially unconstitutional.
Cities including Santa Monica and Palmdale have faced lawsuits alleging that their at-large city council elections diluted the Latino vote. Palmdale settled its case and agreed to switch to district-based elections; The Santa Monica case is ongoing. Hassan argued that the city, as well as other entities, such as school boards, could now return to court to challenge whether the district maps drawn as a result of the California Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional.
“It hasn’t been tested yet,” he said, but he fears the same arguments made to challenge the federal Voting Rights Act could be made against state law.
At the state level, Republican strategist Matt Rexrode believes the decision will also impact the California Legislature. He argues that the boundaries drawn for state Assembly and Senate districts are racial gerrymanders.
“I would argue that those legislative lines are unconstitutional,” Rexroad said. “And those lines will probably change by 2028.”
But Rexroad’s biggest concern goes beyond any one set of maps: It’s the future of California’s independent Redistricting Commission, the non-partisan body he has spent years defending.
Threat to free redistribution
Rexrod sees a scenario in which the national political environment gives California Democrats little incentive to return map-making power to the commission. If Republican states continue to aggressively redraw maps, Democrats will have another justification for keeping power in the hands of the Legislature, the same argument given for passing Proposition 50, he said.
“I don’t think the California Redistricting Commission has ever been in more danger than it is right now,” he said.
Historian J.J. Morgan Kousser said California’s commitment to the commission may depend on how aggressively Republicans act in state redistricting.
“If we go back to an all-white South in Congress, California can’t go back to the fairness standard,” Couser said. “It cannot disarm. It can rearmament.”
Mitchell, the redistricting consultant, said he expects California and other states to choose the path of disarmament and that there is national pressure for independent commissions in every state.
“It’s not good for anyone,” he said. “It was all basically a stupid war on lines that didn’t really improve any districts anywhere.”
