President Barack Obama on Wednesday praised California’s redistricting efforts, arguing that the state’s move is necessary to combat “partisan” gerrymandering in Texas.
Texas launched an effort earlier this year backed by President Donald Trump to redraw district lines to boost the number of seats Republicans hold in the House by five. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) swiftly led Democratic-led states in announcing retaliatory efforts designed to similarly boost the party’s power in Congress, leading national leaders such as Obama to endorse the effort.
“Over the long term, we shouldn’t have political gerrymandering in America, just a fair fight between Republicans and Democrats based on who’s got better ideas,” Obama said this week.
“But since Texas is taking direction from a partisan White House and gerrymandering in the middle of a decade to try and maintain the House despite their unpopular policies, I have tremendous respect for how Governor Newsom has approached this,” the former president continued in a post to X. “He’s put forward a smart, measured approach in California, designed to address a very particular problem at a very particular moment in time.”
Newsom’s “smart, measured” approach, as characterized by Obama, constitutes an effort to put redistricting efforts before voters on the state’s ballot in a special November election, a move that would bypass an independent California commission that typically oversees redistricting efforts.
Obama’s statement of support for the effort on Wednesday marks a departure from the typically hands-off approach to politics espoused by his predecessors in the Oval Office.
And it follows previous pledges from Obama to back Democratic redistricting efforts due to his warnings that such actions are warranted to prevent Republicans’ “systematic assault on democracy.”
“The problem that we’ve been seeing, not just recently, but this goes back a while, is that the Republicans increasingly recognize their ideas won’t sell, so we’ve got to fix the game a little bit, and by drawing maps that splinter Democratic voting blocs, by packing in Democrats into one district so that they don’t have influence in other districts,” Obama said during a recent video call with Texas House Democrats and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “My hope is that rather than have a race to the bottom where every district is predetermined based on how it’s drawn, that over time, the American people, ideally with the help of the courts, realize that there’s a better way.”
During remarks at a Tuesday fundraiser in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, that raised $2 million for the NDRC and its affiliates, Obama continued his attack on Republicans for eyeing redistricting efforts favoring the GOP in Texas and elsewhere.
“I believe that Gov. Newsom’s approach is a responsible approach. He said this is going to be responsible. We’re not going to try to completely maximize it,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “We’re only going to do it if and when Texas and/or other Republican states begin to pull these maneuvers. Otherwise, this doesn’t go into effect.”
NEWSOM TO CALL NOVEMBER SPECIAL ELECTIONS TO APPROVE NEW CONGRESSIONAL MAPS
Obama’s active involvement in the redistricting effort this month comes as Texas Republicans continue to advance measures to boost House margins in their favor.
The Texas House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a redrawn congressional map that creates up to five new winnable GOP seats in Congress
