The national battle over redistricting fueled by Texas Republicans’ effort to draw new congressional maps has created an odd dynamic for California Republicans. They are trying to save California’s system for drawing political districts, while President Donald Trump is trashing it.

“California’s gerrymandered,” the president said last week. “We should have many more seats in Congress in California.” The week before, Vice President JD Vance wrote on X that “the gerrymander in California is outrageous.”

Political scientists who study redistricting say that the state’s system for drawing maps, which is overseen by a bipartisan independent commission, gives Democrats a slight statistical edge. Even so, Republican officials in California say that the commission is considerably better than the alternative: letting the Democrat-dominated legislature draw the lines.

“I would argue that independent redistricting benefits Republicans in California,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican political consultant and redistricting expert.

The commission is receiving more scrutiny as a fierce tit-for-tat over redistricting ricochets across the country. At Trump’s request, Texas lawmakers have drafted new maps to help Republicans win five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has vowed to respond in kind, by redrawing congressional districts in his state to create more seats that Democrats are likely to win.

Newsom’s plan would toss the independent commission’s maps through 2030 and replace them with intentionally partisan districts created by Democratic lawmakers. That has California Republicans working to preserve the maps Trump criticized as they try to block Newsom’s attempt at a Democratic gerrymander.

“The California Republican Party will fight it in the courts, at the ballot box and in every community,” Corrin Rankin, the party chairwoman, said in a statement.

She added that Democrats are “trying to claw back power” that voters took from them when they created the commission.Advertisement

The Citizens Redistricting Commission is made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four independents. They apply for their positions through a process run by the state auditor that screens out people who have run for office, made political donations or work for elected officials. After whittling down the pool of applicants from each party, the state auditor randomly draws names of the first eight commissioners, who then select the final six. Commissioners are not allowed to consider voters’ parties or where incumbents live when determining district boundaries.

Arizona, Colorado and Michigan use a similar system. A few other states have commissions that are appointed by politicians. In most states, though, the party that controls the legislature has the power to draw political maps.

Research shows that states with maps drawn by independent commissions or through court intervention are more representative than those in states where politicians control the process. But that does not mean they always wind up being perfectly balanced.

An analysis by Planscore, a consortium of redistricting experts affiliated with the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, found that California’s system gives Democrats a slight advantage. The model rates maps based on four different measurements, two of which show that California’s plan is balanced and two that show it skews in Democrats’ favor.

Some Republicans, including Vance, have criticized California’s system because the share of seats Republicans hold in the House (17 percent) is less than the share of votes Trump won in California last year (38 percent). Steve Hilton, a Republican running for governor of California, said that Newsom’s proposal would take California “from a ‘rigged’ to an ‘ultra-rigged’ electoral system.”

But such discrepancies between the share of seats one party holds and the share of votes it receives are not uncommon, experts said, even in states that are not gerrymandered. And the numbers alone do not prove that a system is intentionally biased.

“Partisan advantage is separate from intent,” said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, who worked on the Planscore analysis.

“It’s not clear that there is purposeful bias in the California system,” he said.

He pointed out that California’s maps were approved by a unanimous vote of the redistricting commission, including the Republican members, and that commissioners drew the boundaries without looking at data on voters’ party affiliation.

A different analysis by the Gerrymandering Project, a research group at Princeton University, gave California a grade of B, saying its redistricting plan is “better than average, with some bias.”

The California electorate is heavily Democratic, with registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans by nearly 2 to 1. So giving both parties equal representation on the redistricting commission technically gives Republicans outsize influence, said Matt Barreto, a Democrat, who directs the Voting Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Commissioners are laypeople, not political operatives, and they serve for one round of map-drawing at the start of each decade. They take input from the public in drawing boundaries, and must consider keeping communities together based on their shared interests, such as economic ties or languages spoken.

From the perspective of Rexroad, a veteran Republican redistricting expert, California’s system has actually been good for his party. Before voters approved the independent commission in 2008, California’s maps were drawn by the legislature, with the process dominated by partisanship and politicians’ desires to protect their own seats.

Still, Rexroad has some quibbles with the way California’s commission operated during the 2021 map-drawing process. He said the commissioners seemed unfamiliar with certain regions of the state, and that some of them didn’t actively participate in public meetings. Some critical decisions were left to the last minute, he said, creating a rushed process for drawing some districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor who was a commissioner during the 2021 cycle, said the group did the best it could to execute a complex task and that the members were driven only by their passion for democracy.

“It’s a perfectly imperfect system,” Ms. Sadhwani said. “Anytime you have a panel of citizens who are not experts taking on some major role, there is of course going to be an enormous learning curve, and that was the case for us.”

On the plus side, she said, the commission reflects a broad cross-section of Californians. The panel in 2021 included a health care administrator, a detective and a retired pastor.

And despite its flaws, Rexroad said, that’s better than putting politicians in charge.

California’s commission created several congressional seats that Republicans won that would likely not exist if the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature drew the maps, Rexroad said. Many of them will probably vanish if California enacts Newsom’s proposal to counter Texas’s Republican gerrymander with a similar move to help Democrats.

The plan calls for a ballot measure asking voters to amend the state Constitution to allow the partisan mid-decade redistricting. Lawmakers are scheduled to consider Newsom’s proposal the week of Aug. 18. If they approve it, the measure will likely go before voters in a Nov. 4 special election. Newsom has said he wants the state to return to independent redistricting after the 2030 census.

The governor gathered Democratic lawmakers for a news conference in Sacramento on Friday to demonstrate their solidarity in favor the plan. On Saturday, he appealed for donations that could be used to fund the redistricting campaign.

Meanwhile, the California Republican Party is sending emails requesting donations to fight what it says is Newsom’s latest corrupt scheme. Charles Munger, a Republican donor whose father was a billionaire investor, funded campaigns for the 2008 and 2010 ballot measures that created California’s independent redistricting system and has said he will back efforts to maintain it on the ballot and in court.

Kevin Kiley, a U.S. representative from the Sacramento suburbs, is one of the Republicans who could find re-election impossible under the maps Democrats have discussed. He has introduced legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting in every state, effectively maintaining the maps drawn by California’s independent commission.

“I don’t think it’s perfect, and it’s hard to come up with any system that works perfectly,” Kiley said in an interview.

But ultimately, he said, that process is better than the Democrats’ plan that might be in place by the next election.

Laurel Rosenhall is reporter covering California politics and government for The New York Times. Copyright 2025, The New York Times.