I'm With Newsom

Susan Estrich on Aug 23, 2025

I don't always say that. Sometimes the California governor and would-be 2028 contender drives me slightly crazy with his transparent stunts to get attention.

But this is not a stunt. The redistricting bill that the California legislature passed and Newsom signed aims to counter what Texas is doing with its mid-census redistricting plans. They're drawing districts to unfairly pad the Texas delegation with more Republicans. Democrats (with voter approval) are ready to do the same and add more Democrats.

This is an act of war. For once, the Democrats aren't bringing a butter knife to a knife fight. Ours is sharpened, too.

Is this how districting should be done? Of course not.

The most famous man from my hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts, is former Massachusetts Gov. and U.S. Vice President Elbridge Gerry, who signed into law a redistricting plan in 1812 supported by his Republican Party that had one Massachusetts district that looked, according to the local Federalist newspaper, like nothing so much as a salamander. Thus, for all of our history, the practice of drawing odd-shaped districts to suit political purposes has been known as "gerrymandering." It's ironic because, according to his son-in-law, Gerry himself was unhappy about the extent to which the district lines were drawn solely for partisan purposes.

In an ideal world of good government types, redistricting would be done by some kind of bipartisan or non-partisan commission that would take into account natural factors like where neighborhood and political lines are in creating equally sized districts that are based around defined communities -- not by political whiz kids running mathematical models about how to maximize the value of each individual voter on their side and waste as many votes (a district that is 90-plus percent of one party is wasting almost half of its votes), even if it means drawing district lines that cut a neighborhood in half.

The problem isn't an easy one. How do you take the politics out of what is inherently a political job? And how much politics is too much?

In my youth, I was an advocate of reform, of commissions, of efforts to "professionalize" the fine art of deciding who would get a safe district and who would face competition, and how to balance the reality of representation with the abstract theory. Yes, it's one person-one vote, but votes in overly safe districts -- districts created to be "too" safe -- aren't worth anything, and the people drawing those districts know that and are doing it on purpose. That's why majority-minority districts have always prompted some unease on the Democratic side among those who worried that they had taken the place of more conservative districts that white Democrats might win, although no study I know of has ever borne this out.

So I fought for reform and argued that courts should police the excess of partisanship, even though no one has really come up with satisfactory lines. But I'm not fighting for reform now. Now is no time for Democrats to be focused on how redistricting should work in a democracy we don't have.

On Tuesday night in Martha's Vineyard, former President Barack Obama said as much as a fundraiser. Although traditionally an opponent of partisan redistricting, he isn't anymore. If Democrats "don't respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy. ... I wanted just a fair fight between Republicans and Democrats based on who's got better ideas, and take it to the voters and see what happens ... but we cannot unilaterally allow one of the two major parties to rig the game. And California is one of the states that has the capacity to offset a large state like Texas."

The Republicans are trying to rig the game. The Democrats need to stop them. It is as simple as that.

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