In a big win for Democrats, a federal court panel on Wednesday upheld a new voter-approved congressional map in California that was designed to give Democrats five new seats in the U.S. House, offsetting the mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer.
Republicans challenged the map after voters overwhelmingly approved it last November, arguing that it was a racial gerrymander intended to benefit Hispanic voters. But Judge Josephine Staton, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of President Joe Biden, disagreed, finding that “the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming.” They cited a 2019 opinion from the US Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering claims could not be challenged in federal court and concluded in this case that California “voters intended to adopt the Proposition 50 Map as a partisan counterweight to Texas’s redistricting.”
Judge Kenneth Lee, an appointee of President Donald Trump on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a dissenting opinion, saying he would block the map because Democrats allegedly bolstered Hispanic voting strength in one district in the Central Valley, “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.”
Republicans will surely appeal to the Supreme Court, but may not have better luck there. When the Court upheld Texas’s congressional map in November after a lower court found that is discriminated against minority voters, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion maintaining that it was “indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Though the Roberts Court has frequently sided with Republicans in election cases, it would be the height of hypocrisy for the Court to uphold Texas’s map, then strike down California’s.
The California map is a major reason why Democrats have unexpectedly pulled close to even with Republicans in the gerrymandering arms race started by Trump. But the Supreme Court could still give Republicans another way to massively rig the midterms if it invalidates the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act in a redistricting case pending from Louisiana, which could shift up to 19 House seats in the GOP’s favor, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to retake the House in 2026.
