|
Texas GOP Remap Sets Stage for Loss
of Republican Seats in Rural California
New York Times on Prop 50 Effect
Capitol Inside
December 27, 2025
Hundreds of thousands of rural residents in California are on the verge of losing their Republican representation in Congress as a consequence of a war on redistricting that GOP leaders and lawmakers in Austin started during the summer at President Donald Trump's command.
It's conceivable that the people who live outside the cities in the nation's largest state could decide at some point that they're better off with Democrats as their representatives in Washington D.C. But that would come as no consolation to a handful of congressional Republicans who are tentative victims of the gerrymandering effort that President Donald Trump ordered Texas Governor Greg Abbott to initiate this year.
The districts that Republican U.S. Reps. Doug LaMalfa, Kevin Kiley, Josh Harder, Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa currently represent were targeted for conversions from red to blue in Proposition 50 - the measure that Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom hatched to counter the map that Texas Republicans approved in special session in August.
Abbott and the Republicans in Texas Legislature refused to give the voters here the final say on the mid-decade redistricting effort that they had no plans to undertake on their own until they had the marching orders from the president in hand. But Texas GOP leaders and lawmakers failed to anticipate the wages of the partisan power grab outside their own state - and the loss of Republican representatives in rural California is a big part of the collateral damage that the members of the ruling party here did not envision or take into account when they bowed to Trump's demand for a new map.
The Texas redistricting effort will have been a failure in hindsight if the Republicans pick up fewer U.S. House seats here at the polls in 2026 than the number that California Democrats flip with the Prop 50 map in effect. Abbott and his GOP allies at the Texas Capitol made the mistake of basing their projected gains on the new map on the share of the vote that Trump received last year in individual districts. Trump's numbers from a year ago are not a credible gauge of what to expect a year from now as a result of approval ratings that have sunk to record lows near the end of the first year of his second term after peaking last fall.
The Texas Republicans could end up flipping two or three seats in Congress at the most in the 2026 general election as a result of the flawed projections that they employed during the whirlwind mapmaking push. Newsom and the Democrats in the Golden State are confident that the five seats they targeted in Prop 50 will all be blue after next year's vote. Abbott and GOP lawmakers in Texas will be in position to catch the brunt of the blame under such a scenario if Democrats seize the majority in the U.S. House as a product of Proposition 50, which would not have been conceived if Republicans here hadn't struck first.
Republican U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa - a rice farmer who's represented California's 1st Congressional District for nearly 13 years - expressed outrage in a New York Times piece on Friday over the new map that would put Bay Area Democrats in the driver's seat there if its survives a court challenge. LaMalfa says his constituents will be big losers with Prop 50 in effect.
"Their voice is being silenced on how they feel about the issues here, because Newsom and the three-to-one ratio of Democrats wanted to see if they could steal five seats," LaMalfa said. "I'm furious because I've had my people kidnapped from me."
LaMalta is saying exactly what Democrats in the Texas House and Senate said about the Republican map-making exercise during two special sessions during the summer this year. The minority parties in the nation's two largest states are accusing their partisan rivals of piracy with redistricting as their weapon in greedy power grabs. LaMalta is hurling the same exact allegations now with the roles reversed.
Trump won CD 1 in California by 25 percentage points in 2024 with the current boundaries in place. Democrat Kamala Harris beat Trump by 12 points in LaMalfa's district in the Prop 50 map. Harris defeated Trump by 9 points last fall in California's CD 3 that Kiley represents. But Harris beat Trump by 6 points in CD 3 on the new map.
Trump won the districts that Calvert, Issa and Harder represent by 6 points, 15 points and 2 points respectively in the general election last year. But Harris defeated Trump by 14 points in Calvert's Congressional District 41, 3 points in Issa's Congressional District 48 and a dozen points in the new version of Congressional District 9 where Harder is the representative.
more to come ...
| 
