California Democrats Pass Map in Six Days
as Texas GOP Spends Six Weeks on Effort
Capitol Inside August 22, 2025
California seized the lead in the congressional redistricting arms race on Thursday night when Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of legislation that will give the voters there the final call on a map that's designed for Democrats to pick up five seats and neutralize the Texas Republican effort.
Newsom beat Texas Governor Greg Abbott to the punch when he added his signature to the California plan the day after the Republicans in the state House here approved a U.S. House map with a handful of districts that are currently represented by Democrats drawn to favor candidates for the GOP at the polls in 2026.
Abbott will be able to sign the map in House Bill 4 into law with a rubber-stamp from the Republicans in the Texas Senate. But Senate Democrats were making the majority party's members work harder than they'd envisioned with intense grillings of State Senator Phil King of Weatherford as the HB 4 sponsor throughout the afternoon on Friday and a filibuster by Democratic State Senator Carol Alvardo in the works.
The top Texas leader's signature would put the Republicans back in front in an arms race they started under orders from President Donald Trump - with the California Democrats' plan facing a final hurdle on the November ballot in a statewide vote there. But polls in the past few days have shown a majority of the voters in the Golden State on board with the redistricting proposal that Newsom and California Democrats crafted for the nullification of the gains that Abbott and the Republicans envision with their new map.
The competition between Texas and California would be a wash if the dueling efforts culminate in five additional seats in Congress for the majority party in both places. The Republicans in Texas would be the losers under such a scenario after picking the fight and failing to anticipate its repercussions. GOP leaders and lawmakers in the Lone Star State could feel vindicated, however, if their party successfully protects a slim U.S. House majority in the 2026 general election despite the California counter punch.
It took the Texas Republicans six weeks to pass the plan in HB 4. The Senate gave the redistricting proposal tentative approval on a party line vote of 18-11 late this afternoon after seven hours of grueling debate with King as the map's only vocal defender in the face of piercing questions from Democrats on the use of race in its drawing. A final vote may not come until sometime Saturday morning or afternoon if Alvarado hopes to talk against the plan as long as she managed to do in 2021 in a filibuster on an elections security bill.
Newsom and the California Democrats needed less than a week to conceive a map, pass it through both houses of the Assembly and send it to the electorate with Gavin's signature. Fifty-five Texas House Democrats bought critical time for the Democrats in California with a walkout that spanned 18 days in a move that left the Republicans paralyzed in a special session that they ended early in a passive admission of a tentative defeat. The Republicans in the California Assembly didn't put up much of a fight there.
Newsom has surged in the polling on the presidential election in 2028 thanks in large part to his performance in the tug-of-war on congressional districts with Abbott and the Republicans here. Abbott, who's been frequently mentioned as a potential White House contender for the GOP, has received little or no attention from pollsters as a possible candidate.
The Texas Republicans will be depending from this point on for other major red states like Florida and Ohio reconfigure maps to counter the California counter-attack. The numbers would favor the GOP on paper if every major state passed maps to give majority parties more clout in Congress.
The relatively slow pace of the Texas effort has come at the expense of emergency disaster legislation in the wake of deadly flooding on the Guadalupe River in the Hill Country on July 4th. GOP lawmakers blame the House Democrats' holdout on the map for the delay on the flood-related measures. But the Republicans had relegated disaster and flood relief to a lower-tier priority before the Democrats disappeared for two weeks from the House to block a quorum for a vote on redistricting.
more to come ...
California will be the first state to allow the people to democratically choose their maps — and Trump’s failed policies are what got us here. pic.twitter.com/UWk01IijGf
