HOUSTON \u2014 California Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s victory lap over passage of Proposition 50 reached Texas on Saturday, days after his state greenlit his plan to blunt Gov. Greg Abbott\u2019s redistricting effort to get more Texas Republicans in Congress.<\/p>\n
Before Newsom could start speaking during his brief stop at a rally in Houston, the crowd of around 800 Democrats took the chance to yell out \u201cthank you,\u201d and he returned the sentiment.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou woke us up,\u201d Newsom said, referring to Democrats\u2019 resistance to redistricting. \u201cYou didn’t just have your back here, you had our back in the state of California.\u201c<\/p>\n
After Abbott signed a new congressional map in August that was redrawn to maximize the state\u2019s Republican representation in Washington D.C., amid pressure from President Donald Trump, Newsom pitched an idea to voters to offset Texas\u2019 GOP gains with additional Democratic seats in California.<\/p>\n
California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50 on Tuesday, a plan Newsom crafted to directly target Texas\u2019 new congressional map. The ballot measure cleared the way for Newsom to allow the legislature to approve the Golden State\u2019s redrawn congressional districts to carve out five more Democratic seats. Abbott bypassed that step, putting it up to the state\u2019s lawmakers to decide on a new map without voter\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n
The California ballot measure passed with nearly 64% of the vote, and its decisive approval is a big win for Newsom, who is considering a presidential bid in 2028. If the new maps pass as planned, nearly all of California\u2019s congressional representatives will be Democrats. California currently has 43 Democratic House members and nine Republicans \u2014 the new maps would secure 48 blue seats. And Newsom took to Texas, the very state Prop 50 targets, to celebrate.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s crowd celebrated with him, including 18-year-old Ben Webb of Cypress, a northwest suburb of Houston.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did it with voter approval, which Greg Abbott didn’t do,\u201d said Webb, who recently became a registered voter. \u201cSo I would say that’s an even bigger political win.\u201d<\/p>\n
Webb\u2019s friend, Thomas Mitschke, who is also 18, echoed that sentiment.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe took it to the voters instead of just doing it like Greg Abbott and kind of just jamming it in without voter approval,\u201d Mitschke said. \u201cThat’s how democracy is supposed to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abbott\u2019s office has not responded to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Texas\u2019 new congressional district lines have the potential to boost the GOP\u2019s footing in Congress by squeezing more Democratic voters in Houston and Dallas into districts the minority party already controls \u2014 a strategy known as \u201cpacking.\u201d It also \u201ccracks\u201d left-leaning communities by splitting voters who supported Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 into Republican districts, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune.<\/p>\n
For example, the 9th Congressional District in Southwest Houston, represented by Congressman Al Green, went from voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 by 44 percentage points to one that Trump would have carried by a 20-point margin under the new lines. Much of the 9th District was merged into the 18th, where Green, who spoke at the rally, will now be seeking reelection. He would now face the winner of the upcoming special election runoff for the seat in the March primary.<\/p>\n
The maps, along with a list of other reasons, is why both Webb and Mitschke said they will be casting some of their first votes to replace Abbott with a Democratic governor. They also said if Newsom ran for president, he would have their vote.<\/p>\n
Texas\u2019 maps have been caught in a web of legal challenges since 2021 when the current districts were approved. Lawsuits claim that the mid-decade redistricting process was flawed from the start, and that effort came at the cost of Latino and Black communities, which have largely supported Democratic candidates.<\/p>\n
Newsom\u2019s rally drew a range of Democratic leaders across Harris County and the state, including Harris County Commissioners Adrian Garcia and Rodney Ellis, Congresswomen Lizzie Fletcher and Jasmine Crockett, and gubernatorial candidate and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa.<\/p>\n
Newsom\u2019s plan to blunt Abbott\u2019s effort was a long shot. Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant who leads the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, told the Guardian that Newsom took a big gamble on Prop 50 \u2014 and it paid off.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut more than that is the fact that he fought back \u2014 that he dared to do this, that people said it was dangerous for him, and he forged ahead with it anyway,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kathleen Davies, a reverend at a Presbyterian church in Southwest Houston who was born and raised in California, said Newsom\u2019s visit reminded her that despite being a Democrat in a deeply red state, she still has a voice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re a big state, and he’s in a big state, and I think it’s important for us to know that we still are all connected as Americans,\u201d said Davies, who moved to Texas about three decades ago. \u201cEven though there’s so much talk about, like, keep California out of Texas or whatever, I mean, we’re all Americans who want to be represented and the gerrymandering has got to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newsom isn\u2019t stopping with California. He\u2019s encouraging other governors in blue states, such as Illinois and New York, to follow his lead and push back against Trump\u2019s effort to hold onto a Republican-controlled Congress.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot rest,\u201d Newsom said on Saturday before heading to Brazil for a conference, \u201cuntil we take back the House of Representatives.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2014 California Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s victory lap over passage of Proposition 50 reached Texas on Saturday, days…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":369013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,7202,7203,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-369012","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-san-antonio","10":"tag-sanantonio","11":"tag-texas","12":"tag-tx","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-united-states-of-america","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}