In a major victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic party, a federal court ruled Wednesday that California can use its newly configured boundaries for congressional districts for the 2026 midterm elections, increasing Democrats’ odds of winning five additional U.S. House seats in the state next year and seizing control of the chamber.
The GOP asked a federal court in Los Angeles to temporarily block California’s new map of congressional districts, which Democrats engineered to favor their party’s candidates and counter similar partisan gerrymandering from Texas and other GOP-led states.
Attorneys for the GOP argued that the new district maps, placed on the ballot by the Democratic-led state Legislature, were unconstitutional because they illegally favor Latino voters
An overwhelming majority of California voters approved the new district boundaries during the Nov. 4 special election when they passed Proposition 50.
Newsom pitched the redistricting plan as a way to boost Democrats’ prospects of flipping the House in the midterms after President Trump pressed Texas to redraw maps to prop up the GOP’s narrow House majority.
Using the new California map in next year’s election would not only give Democrats a better chance of shifting the balance of power in Congress and blocking Trump’s agenda during the second half of his term. It also could elevate Newsom’s status among Democrats, allowing him to pitch himself as the nation’s most effective challenger to Trump as he weighs a 2028 White House run.
The judges’ decision likely will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the California Republican Party and the Trump’ administration’s Department of Justice.
Legal experts say the odds are against Republicans getting the Supreme Court to block California’s new congressional districts. Earlier this month the high court allowed Texas to temporarily keep its newly drawn congressional map, which could give Republicans up to five extra seats.
A federal court previously blocked Texas’ map, finding racial considerations probably made it unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court indicated it viewed the redrawing of the Texas district lines as motivated primarily by partisan politics, not race. In its ruling, it explicitly drew a connection between Texas and California, noting that several states have redrawn their congressional map “in ways that are predicted to favor the State’s dominant political party.”
As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued in a concurrence: “The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California), was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Even before the Supreme Court’s Texas decision, legal experts said they thought Republicans faced an uphill battle in blocking California’s maps.
“This was a long shot of a claim from the beginning,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount. “It’s a claim that, under current law, just isn’t supported by the facts… — and the Supreme Court just turned a dramatically uphill case into Everest.”
One of the quirks of the legal battle over gerrymandering in California and Texas is that it is not possible to challenge the new maps on the grounds that they are drawn to give one political party an advantage. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court. That left the GOP in California challenging the new maps on racial grounds.
As attorneys presented their closing arguments Wednesday in a Los Angeles courtroom, District Court Judge Jeanette Staton reminded prosecutors that the burden was on the challengers of the map to prove racial intent.
But legal experts note that thinking about race when drawing district lines is not, in itself, illegal
“Under the law at present, what matters is not whether you think about race,” Levitt said. “What matters is whether you think about race so much that you subordinated every other criterion to race in deciding where to put people.”
The GOP’s legal team tried to demonstrate racial intent by bringing to the stand RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende, who said the new 13th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley had an “appendage” that snaked northward into Stockton. Such contorted offshoots, he said, are “usually indicative of racial gerrymandering.”
Attorneys for the GOP also tried to prove racial intent by focusing on public comments made by Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who drew up the new California map for the California Legislature. Ahead of Nov. 4, they said, he told Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, a Latino advocacy group, that the “number one thing” he started thinking about was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles.”
During Wednesday’s hearing Staton suggested that GOP attorneys focused too much of their closing arguments on the intent of Mitchell and Democratic legislators and not of the voters who ultimately approved Proposition 50.
“Why would we not be looking at their intent?” Staton asked Michael Columbo, an attorney for California Republicans. “If the relative intent is the voters, you have nothing.”
Another U.S. District Judge, Wesley Hsu, took issue with the GOP attorneys’ narrow focus on the 13th Congressional District, arguing he engaged in a “strawman” attempt to pick out one district to make the case that there was a broader racially motivated effort to flip five seats Democratic.
Still, another member of the three-judge panel, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Lee, reserved most of his criticism for the state’s legal team.
Lee questioned the idea, offered by an attorney for the state, that Mitchell’s statement about wanting to create a Latino district in Los Angeles was just “talking to interested groups” and “he did not communicate that intent to legislators.”
Lee also said Mitchell’s closeness to Democratic interest groups was an important factor. He questioned why Mitchell did not testify at the hearing and invoked legislative privilege dozens of times during a deposition ahead of the hearing.
Times Staff Writer Christopher Buchanan contributed to this report.
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