The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is pictured on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
States led by Democrats should resist the temptation to conduct their own mid-decade redistricting in response to Republicans in the Texas Legislature moving to redraw U.S. House lines before the 2026 elections, officials with the nonpartisan election integrity group Common Cause said on a press call Tuesday.
While blasting Texas Republicans’ effort to remake congressional districts in the middle of a decade — instead of after the decennial census, as is typical — the officials said the creation of nonpartisan redistricting commissions that take the job out of politicians’ hands was a better policy than joining a redistricting arms race.
Common Cause, a national organization with several state chapters, is often aligned with progressive causes, but advocates for fair redistricting regardless of party.
Emily Eby French, the policy director for Common Cause Texas, said election infrastructure should be neutral, arguing against the suggestion from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats that blue states pursue mid-decade redistricting for partisan advantage.
“Our election infrastructure is not supposed to have a thumb on the scale for either side,” French said.
“In Texas, conservatives press their thumbs so hard on the scale that it feels impossible to overcome,” she continued. “Maybe a quick fix would be to have Democrats press their thumbs on their own scales. But then it’s just rigged elections across America. The real solution is for Democrats to help us lift the Republican thumb off of the Texas scale and every other scale in America until we reach free and fair elections for everyone.”
Russia Chavis Cardenas, the deputy director for Common Cause California, added that Newsom should not “fight fire with fire.” Partisan redistricting processes inherently disadvantage communities of color, she said.
California’s independent redistricting commission, made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four nonpartisan members, is the “gold standard … (an) independent and community-led process,” Dan Vicuna, senior policy director for voting and fair representation at Common Cause’s national office, said.
The state should not sacrifice that model for short-term political gain, he said.
Texas redistricting
Republicans held a 220-215 advantage in the U.S. House following the 2024 elections. Those elections happened on district maps drawn after the 2020 census.
The GOP House majority was helped in part by Texas’ 2020 district map, which produced Republican wins in nearly two-thirds of the state’s districts.
Civil rights groups sued over the new lines, claiming that some districts discriminated against Black and Latino voters.
Texas Republicans resisted calls to redraw the lines, but the U.S. Justice Department this month sent a letter urging state leaders to reconsider.
The letter “was sloppily and transparently creating a pretext for Texas legislators to redraw the state’s gerrymandered congressional map and somehow gerrymander it even more in favor of Republicans,” Vicuna said Tuesday.
President Donald Trump quickly dissolved that pretext, putting the issue in nakedly political terms on a call with Texas Republicans. Trump said the state’s lines should be redrawn to create five additional U.S. House seats, the Texas Tribune reported. A president’s party typically loses congressional seats during midterm elections.
Following the letter, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called a special session to address redistricting, among other things.
Dem states respond
In addition to Newsom, leaders in the Democratic strongholds of New York and Illinois are considering retaliating by initiating their own mid-decade redistricting processes, according to a New York Times report.
Other prominent national Democrats are calling for the party to be more aggressive in redistricting.
U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego wrote on X last week that Democrats should break some heavily Democratic majority-minority districts to help win more seats.
In follow-up posts responding to replies, Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, wrote that Democrats should gerrymander districts in their favor.
“It’s bad when everyone does it,” the first-term senator and former House member wrote about gerrymandering. “But Dems should not unilaterally disarm till GOP does.”
Gallego’s post was retweeted by Jessica Post, a campaign strategist who previously led Democrats’ state legislative campaign arm. But the party’s current establishment is largely not commenting.
A July 23 memo to Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee contributors from Heather Williams, who succeeded Post as the group’s president, mentioned the Texas redistricting, but said it only raised the stakes for statehouse races in the next three election cycles in advance of 2030 redistricting.
“Today, as Donald Trump and his allies in the states are openly pushing to draw new, gerrymandered seats in Texas to protect the GOP’s meager House majority leading up to 2026, it’s clear this is just a preview of what’s to come,” Williams wrote. “The 2030 redistricting fight has already begun.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm for House Democrats, did not respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday.
Vicuna, with Common Cause, urged reporters not to see redistricting not as a partisan conflict, but as an issue of voter representation.
“This familiar framing that makes redistricting entirely about a political fight between parties is also kind of the problem,” he said. “This is ultimately about fair representation for communities, getting to have a say, being at the table when decisions are made about whether they can have fair representation. And I think that’s what we’re really talking about here, not just the food fight between the parties.”
This post was originally authored and published by Jacob Fischler from Washington State Standard via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
