SB Protest: Saturday Rally to Back California Clapback to Trump's Texas Power Grab
With Texas gerrymander, Dear Leader moves to head off Democrats taking back the House in 2026. Golden State Dems have a controversial plan for fighting back.
On Saturday, Santa Barbara pro-democracy organizers plan a street protest against the Trump regime’s power grab to keep MAGA in control of Congress in the 2026 mid-term elections.
From 10 a.m. to noon, anti-Trump protesters are invited to demonstrate on both sides of State Street between Hitchcock Way and Hope Avenue, the latest anti-Trump mass rally organized by Indivisible Santa Barbara.
This time, the focus is on supporting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s impromptu effort for a special election to authorize the emergency remapping of California’s congressional districts — in response to the effort by Trump and right-wing Republican allies to rig the mid-terms via an ad hoc partisan gerrymander of House seats in Texas.
“Texas, Texas, Texas,” said Ian Paige, speaking for Indivisible, when asked to explain why California should abandon its long-established, non-partisan, reapportionment map-making in favor of a hurry-up redistricting plan that, unabashedly and undisguised, is a bid to increase the Democratic portion of California House seats.
(See below for a full explanation of the background to the reapportionment dispute, by political scientist and redistricting expert Eric McGhee).
“We have to rebut and respond to Trump’s gerrymander in Texas,” Paige said.“He’s running scared because he knows he’s at risk of losing total control in Washington, and will have to face accountability if Democrats win back the House.”
On Thursday in Los Angeles, Newsom and a battalion of supporters rolled out the “Election Rigging Response Act,” a plan to be taken up immediately by the Democratic-dominated Legislature that calls for a special election on Nov. 4.
Voters are to be asked to suspend state Constitutional guidelines, approved in the Nov. 2008 and 2010 elections, which took power over the redrawing of district lines away from legislators and the governor and handed it to an independent commission.
Now, voters in an overwhelmingly Democratic state will be asked to approve a new set of lines, specifically for the 2026 mid-term congressional election, and explicitly responding to the Republican-driven gerrymander in Texas; if Texas reverses its current course, the congressional maps in California would revert to the status quo.
“Trump’s election rigging comes to an end now,” Newsom wrote in a Twitter announcement. “California won’t stand by and watch Trump burn it all down — we are calling a special election to redraw our Congressional maps and defend fair representation.
“This is a five alarm fire for Democracy,” he said. “Vote YES November 4.”
In Santa Barbara, Saturday’s protest is aimed at focusing attention on the boiling national political battle over redistricting. Indivisible’s Paige said that organizers also selected the State Street site for the rally because it adjoins Whole Foods, the grocery chain owned by Amazon, founded by billionaire oligarch and Trump crony Jeff Bezos.
At the start of Trump’s term, when fellow plutocrat Elon Musk was playing a prominent role in the dismantling of the federal government and constitutional norms, Indivisible led weekly rallies at the local Tesla dealership, a few blocks away, to protest the actions of the founder of the electric auto company.
Amid similar protests around the globe, Tesla’s stock declined significantly in value, fluctuating as Musk’s personal and political relationship with Trump has see-sawed.
“The protests against Tesla had worldwide impact,” Paige said. “Now we’re moving up a few blocks. There are a lot of people who don’t know Bezos, a Trump enabler who was up on stage with him at the inauguration, owns Whole Foods.”
Saturday’s local protest is one of hundreds that are planned as part of a “National Day of Protest” across the U.S. More information is here. For more on Indivisible Santa Barbara, see their website here.
California Background to the National Redistricting Fight
By Eric McGhee Public Policy Institute of California
The arcane subject of congressional redistricting has become a major story in recent days. Republicans in Texas have begun redrawing their congressional lines to get a map more favorable to their party, which has prompted Democrats in California and other states to consider doing the same.
How might the state go about redrawing its congressional map—and what is the broader context of redistricting in California?
Redistricting is the process of redrawing the lines of representational districts—in this case for the US House of Representatives.
It is usually conducted only at the beginning of each decade, as new decennial census numbers require changes to reflect shifts in population. But the US Supreme Court has explicitly allowed mid-decade redistricting (in a case involving Texas), and the Texas governor and legislature are considering a mid-decade plan that would likely net Republicans five more seats than the current districting plan.
California governor Gavin Newsom has responded with a threat to counter whatever Texas produces with a redraw in California.
Newsom’s threat runs head-on into the state’s method for drawing districts: the Citizens Redistricting Commission (CRC).
CRC members are selected through a complex process designed to field a group of average Californians who are independent from the political establishment. The CRC must comprise a mix of Democrats (5 members), Republicans (5 members), and other party registrants (4 members).
The districts it draws must meet federal standards for equal district populations and representation for voters of color under the Voting Rights Act. Where possible, the districts must also be compact (looking more like squares or circles than strange shapes with squiggly boundaries) and keep cities, counties, and communities with common interests bound together.
And the CRC has always interpreted a prohibition on favoring incumbents or parties to mean that it cannot know where incumbents live or review any partisan data.
A mid-decade redraw would replace the CRC’s lines with ones drawn by the legislature.
The most commonly discussed approach would be to put a new map before voters in a special election this fall. The new map would still be subject to legal challenges based on equal population and Voting Rights Act requirements.
And if the map were to be enacted through a statutory and not a constitutional change, it could face challenges under multiple provisions that were added to the constitution at the creation of the CRC (since the constitution trumps statutes).
The CRC emerged from decades of redistricting conflict.
In the 1970s and 1990s, stalemates between the Democratic legislature and Republican governor threw matters to the courts. In the 1980s, a Democratic legislature and governor drew an aggressive partisan gerrymander (with districts so contorted that legendary Democratic politician Phil Burton described the map as his “contribution to modern art”).
This plan was struck down by voters in a referendum and used in only one election. Democrats also controlled the process in 2001, but fear of another referendum led them to strike a deal with Republicans that protected all sitting incumbents instead of maximizing Democratic seats.
The result was a congressional plan so uncompetitive that only one seat was flipped over the next decade. This led to the adoption of the CRC, first in a 2008 constitutional amendment that covered state legislative districts, and then in a 2010 constitutional amendment that added U.S. House seats to the process.
Voters passed the first measure narrowly (50.8%); the second measure passed comfortably (61.2%). The CRC has been used for both sets of districts ever since.
The creation of the CRC was not the first effort to adopt a redistricting commission in California. A largely Republican coalition had tried four times before at the ballot box—most recently in 2005—losing by clear margins each time.
By contrast, the coalition behind the CRC was much broader and more bipartisan, reflecting widespread anger over the incumbent-protection gerrymander. This pattern is not limited to California: redistricting reforms across the country have been much more successful when crafted with bipartisan coalitions, rather than with one-sided partisan support.
The first plan drawn by the CRC was better on virtually every dimension than the one that had been drawn to protect incumbents: it was more compact, split fewer cities and counties, facilitated greater representation for voters of color, and spurred more competitive outcomes.
It did lean Democratic, but not to a significant extent. Instead, increased competitiveness allowed Democrats to pick up seats that the previous plan had prevented them from claiming as voters had shifted Democratic over the previous decade.
The second CRC map, adopted in 2022, continued this theme, with reasonably compact districts, intact cities and counties, and competitive outcomes, and still more representation for voters of color. But it did lean more strongly Democratic, a point that has become contentious in the context of the current debate.
This extra advantage emerged in the final maps, as a result of adjustments aimed at improving representation for voters of color. Because these adjustments were made without consulting partisan data, the commission did not anticipate the partisan consequences.
Nothing is certain yet. Newsom has pledged not to push for redistricting except in response to Texas, and Texas has not yet passed a new plan. If both states move forward, others may as well, leading to a much wider cascade of changes. PPIC will continue to monitor the situation and produce analysis to inform the process.
Eric McGhee is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and policy director for the Understanding California’s Future research initiative tasked with exploring key trends and challenges facing the state.
Image: Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are leading the campaign to gerrymander Texas (Vox).