House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that California’s effort to redraw House lines will not only succeed, but other Democratic states will pursue similar redistricting efforts ahead of next year’s midterms.
“We are not going to let Republicans successfully rig the midterm elections,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol. “California is just the first Democratic state to respond. It will not be the last.”
He did not specify which other Democratic states might launch a redistricting effort, but party leaders in Illinois, New York and Maryland have all expressed some degree of interest in doing so.
California voters are set to vote next month on Proposition 50, a referendum empowering the Democrats who control the state government to redraw the House map. The unusual mid-decade effort is in direct response to the move by Texas Republicans, at the urging of President Trump, to reconfigure their House lines to flip as many as five seats from the Democrats to the GOP in next year’s elections.
Trump, who is hoping to prevent a Democratic House to act as a check on his administration in the final two years of his second term, has not stopped there. He’s also urging allies in several other GOP-led states — including Ohio and Indiana — to redraw their lines to pad the Republicans’ slim House majority in 2027.
North Carolina is the latest state to heed his call. Although Republicans in the Tar Heel state had just adopted new lines to the GOP’s advantage ahead of the 2024 elections, they’re now ready to do so again in an effort to pick off one more Democrat: Rep. Don Davis.
North Carolina is split almost evenly between the parties — Republicans control the Legislature, but Democrats won the office of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general last year — and in the last Congress, the delegation reflected that even divide: Seven Republicans and seven Democrats.
That changed after the new lines took effect in 2024, which knocked off three Democrats and gave Republicans a lopsided 10-4 advantage in the current Congress. Bumping off Davis, if Republicans are successful, would make it 11-3.
Democrats have hammered the GOP’s gerrymandering as an overt power grab, noting Republicans would not control the House now if not for the North Carolina redistricting — a criticism Jeffries amplified Tuesday.
“They didn’t even legitimately win [the House] in an election where everything at the top of the ticket was breaking for them. … They had to rely on stealing three seats from the people of North Carolina to artificially create their majority,” Jeffries said. “This is why you can’t take these people seriously in terms of any policy high-ground in the House that they may claim to have. It’s non-existent.”
