Gavin Newsom’s $250M Redistricting Power Grab

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. California has been in the news recently because it’s going to have an unusual redistricting effort. That means we’re going to redraw the maps of our 52 congressional seats.

And we’re gonna do that, according to our governor, because Texas has been doing that. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for president in 2028, so he wants to show that he is on the cutting edge of Democratic opposition to Texas.

But there’s a problem. Texas doesn’t have an independent commission—not that they’re really independent, but in theory, they are. They just gerrymander. And Texas has an underrepresentation of Republicans in congressional seats.

What I mean by that, if you look at the aggregate vote in Texas for the president or for senators or for the state Legislature, and you get an aggregate Republican versus Democrat vote, and then you see how many seats they have and does that percentage represent it? The majority—no, it doesn’t in Texas.

In fact, most red states, if the 50 states are ranked 1 to 50, do the number of congressional seats in this state represent the Republican or Democratic aggregate overall vote, as adjudicated by either state legislature races or statewide races, or the presidency or the senators? You can use different formulas, but they’re pretty much the same, that red states do not—not that they don’t gerrymander, but they don’t gerrymander as effectively. So, that’s why Texas is taking this action, to get parity.

But what Gavin Newsom is doing is very strange. He is undermining an independent commission. It’s been dominated by the Left, but he doesn’t even trust it. He’s not calling it back into session, necessarily. He’s calling a special session with a predetermined map created by Democrats to redistrict.

And here’s the problem. California, like most blue states, such as Massachusetts or Illinois, New York, they are already heavily weighed toward Democrats. Here in California, depending on what formula we use, about 38% to 40% of the state typically vote for a Republican ticket—state or federal. And yet, if you look at their nine congressional seats, that’s about 17%. So, they’re 20% to 22% underrepresented.

So, what Gavin Newsom is saying—“I’m gonna spend $250 million. And I’m gonna rush through the Legislature—dominated with supermajorities from my party—a bill to turn a proposition over to the people so they will vote to suspend this already gerrymandered plan and get a hyper one so that we are going to go from 17% of our congressional districts, probably down to about 8%. And we will have 8%, even though the state votes 38% to 40% Republican.”

So, the problem is he’s, A, challenging an independent commission that he used to praise; B, he’s taken overrepresented Democratic congressional districts and he’s trying to, even more, overrepresent them.

And he’s trusting that the people will not mind spending a quarter of a billion dollars to have this rushed election before the next year’s November, and then they will vote for it, and this will show that he is a fighter and on the cusp. But the national mood is against him because, as I said, most of the red states are underrepresented through gerrymandering, and most of the blue states are overrepresented.

What Gavin wants to do is, he’s targeting Republican congresswomen and congressmen. And he thinks that he can redraw the districts and put two Republican incumbents in the same district. And then, one will either drop out or they’ll have to run against each other, and one will win, and they will be diminished by half. He doesn’t care about the 40% of his own state that won’t have any congressional representation. That’s not in his plan.

This is all the act of commission. But what is Gavin doing about the state? We’ve had 12 million people leave the state the last 10 years—12 million. These were people not on public assistance. These are the entrepreneurial upper-middle class. They’ve gone.

We have the highest electric rates in the country, over 35 cents a kilowatt-hour. We’re the highest except for Hawaii. We have the highest gas prices. And now we have this carbon fuel formula and this new inflation-adjusted gas tax. So, we’re gonna have the highest gas taxes and the highest actual price of gasoline. And together they’re going to go up to maybe $6 a gallon. But that’s not the end.

He has driven out—through hyper-regulation and bullying and berating oil refineries, we’re gonna drive two main ones out and we’re not gonna have very many left. And if that should happen, gas could go up to $7 or $8 a gallon.

Is he talking about Pacific Palisades? It essentially hasn’t been rebuilt, it’s completely in cinders. Why? Because of California regulations, environmental, social, equity, DEI—you name it. No zoning going on. A big fight that they want to take this beautiful Pacific Palisades historic neighborhood and have high-density, low-income housing in many areas, etc., etc.

Bottom line: Here is Gavin Newsom using four-letter words, expletives, boasting that he is going to attack President Donald Trump by spending a quarter-billion dollars to even make the notorious California congressional election map even more unfair as a reply to Texas, which is not—it’s not fair now. They may be doing something extraordinary, but they’re trying to get their congressional districts to reflect their party breakdown in their state.

And Gavin is doing this while he won’t address gas, he won’t address the flight of people, he won’t address the highest taxes in the nation, aggregate, he won’t address electricity prices.

And I just drove about 200 miles home today. I can tell you that if you get on the California freeways, such as they are, it’s taking your life in your own hands. They have been unchanged, essentially, since the 1970s, when the population was not 41 million, but about 17 million. So, the population has doubled and the infrastructure is the same.

And Gavin Newsom is doing what? He’s doing another performance art, wiggling his head, saying the F-word, the S-word, trying to dare Trump to stop him. All in performance art for his next presidential run.

Final observation: What he’s counting on is nobody looks at the price of electricity, the price of food, the price of housing, the price of gas, on the infrastructure, crime rate, etc. in California because he, more than any other Californian, as a Bay Area city council person, as a San Francisco mayor, as a lieutenant governor, and as a governor, has ruined the state. He took a natural paradise and he turned it into purgatory.

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