Trump, Abbott vs. Newsom: Mad dash to redo congressional maps in California, Texas

The high-stakes battle between Republicans and Democrats over congressional redistricting ahead of next year’s midterm elections resumes on Monday in California and Texas, the nation’s two most populous states.

In Austin, Texas, state lawmakers gather for a second straight special session called by conservative Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

At the top of their to-do list is passing a GOP-crafted redistricting map that would create up to five Republican-leaning congressional districts at the expense of currently Democrat-controlled seats. 

The Republican push in Texas, which comes at President Donald Trump’s urging, is part of a broader effort by the GOP across the country to pad their razor-thin House majority to keep control of the chamber in the 2026 midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

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Trump and his political team are aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House, when Democrats stormed back to grab the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections.

Republicans in red state Texas enjoy a supermajority in the legislature and the state Senate passed the new congressional maps.

Dozens of Texas Democrats had fled the state to prevent a quorum in the Texas legislature, effectively preventing Abbott and Republicans from moving forward with new maps. 

But Democratic leaders announced on Monday that they would return for the second special session following California’s plan to redraw its maps to soften the blow from the Lone Star State, the Associated Press reported. 

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The fleeing Democrats, who set up camp in the blue states of Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, late last week signaled that they would return to Texas after the adjournment of the first special session, and after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top California Democrats unveiled their playbook to counter the push by Trump and Republicans to enact rare – but not unheard of – mid-decade congressional redistricting.

The end of the walkout by the Democrats will lead to the passage of the new maps, but Texas Democrats vow they’ll fight the new state maps in court and say the moves by California are allowing them to pass “the baton.”

“Now, as Democrats across the nation join our fight to cause these maps to fail their political purpose, we’re prepared to bring this battle back to Texas under the right conditions and to take this fight to the courts,” Texas state House Democratic leader Rep. Gene Wu said on Thursday.

Abbott, who’s running next year for a fourth four-year term steering Texas, pledged to “continue to call special session after special session until we get this Texas first agenda passed.”

And the governor, in a statement on Friday, charged that “delinquent House Democrats ran away from their responsibility to pass crucial legislation to benefit the lives of Texans.”

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows on Friday vowed that runaway Democrats who tried to return home over the weekend would not have a “peaceful weekend” and instead would be arrested and “compelled to this chamber.”

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Burrows also said at the start of the second special session on Friday that he expected to reach a quorum on Monday, with the likely return of the fleeing Democrats.

Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton have been pushing to remove from office some of the Democratic state lawmakers who fled, and all the lawmakers who walked out and left the state face fines of up to $500 per day for their absence. 

While the Republican push in Texas to upend the current congressional maps doesn’t face constitutional constraints, Newsom’s path in California is much more complicated.

The governor is moving to hold a special election this year, to obtain voter approval to undo the constitutional amendments that created the non-partisan redistricting commission. A two-thirds majority vote in the Democrat-dominated California legislature would be needed to hold the referendum.

The legislature is back in session in Sacramento on Monday, and Democrats in both chambers are expected to approve the maps – which would create up to five more left-leaning congressional districts at the expense of the Republican minority – by the end of this week.

Democratic Party leaders are confident they’ll have the votes to push the constitutional amendment and the new proposed congressional maps through the legislature. The proposal was submitted to the state legislature by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is the re-election arm of House Democrats.

“Here we are in open and plain sight before one vote is cast in the 2026 midterm election and here [Trump] is once again trying to rig the system,” Newsom charged on Thursday.

Last week’s appearance by Newsom, who is considered a likely contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, also served as a fundraising kickoff to raise massive amounts of campaign cash needed to sell the redistricting push statewide in California. 

The non-partisan redistricting commission, created over 15 years ago, remains popular with most Californians, according to public opinion polling.

That’s why Newsom and California Democratic lawmakers are promising not to scrap the commission entirely, but rather replace it temporarily by the legislature for the next three election cycles.

But Republican former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who represented a congressional district in California’s Central Valley for 17 years, argued in an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that “when you think about how they drew these lines, there wasn’t one hearing. There is no debate. There’s no input. Even the legislature in California doesn’t have input. The DCCC is just ending it. That is why we need to stop Newsom’s power grab. 

McCarthy, who is helping to lead the GOP fundraising effort to counter Newsom and California Democrats leading up to the likely referendum this autumn, said that “November 4th will be the election that people could actually have a say,” as he pointed to polls showing strong support for the current non-partisan redistricting commission.

The push to temporarily replace the commission is also being opposed by other high-profile Republicans. Among the most visible is former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last Republican elected governor in Democrat-dominated California.

The longtime Hollywood action star, the last Republican governor in Democrat-dominated California, says he’s mobilizing to oppose the push by Newsom to temporarily scrap the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission.

“I’m getting ready for the gerrymandering battle,” Schwarzenegger wrote in a social media post Friday, which included a photo of the former professional bodybuilding champion lifting weights.

Schwarzenegger, who rose to worldwide fame as the star of the film “The Terminator” four decades ago, wore a T-shirt in the photo that said “terminate gerrymandering.”

Schwarzenegger spokesperson Daniel Ketchell told Politico earlier this month that “he calls gerrymandering evil, and he means that. He thinks it’s truly evil for politicians to take power from people.”

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“He’s opposed to what Texas is doing, and he’s opposed to the idea that California would race to the bottom to do the same thing,” Ketchell added.

Schwarzenegger, during his tenure as governor, had a starring role in the passage of constitutional amendments in California in 2008 and 2010 that took the power to draw state legislative and congressional districts away from politicians and placed it in the hands of an independent commission.