As Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) moves to redraw California’s congressional lines, a new poll shows that nearly two-thirds of California voters—including 61 percent of Democrats—favor keeping the state’s independent map-drawing commission, a clear rejection of Newsom’s gerrymandering push.
Sixty-four percent of California voters want to keep the Citizens Redistricting Commission, an independent panel that the state created in 2008 to determine its congressional maps, while just 36 percent say they “support returning congressional redistricting authority to state legislators,” according to a Politico-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll.
The Thursday poll found broad bipartisan support for keeping the independent commission, with 66 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats in favor. Independent voters are even more supportive, with 72 percent backing the panel’s control over redistricting.
Hours after the poll’s release, Newsom and other top California Democrats gathered at a rally to unveil what Newsom is calling the “Election Rigging Response Act,” a ballot measure that would give the Democratic-controlled legislature the power to bypass the commission and redraw the Golden State’s congressional boundaries to favor the party.
The event “telegraphed how thoroughly Democrats and their allies have coalesced behind a blue-state gerrymandering push,” Politico reported. It also could lead to an ethics headache for Newsom, who appears to have staged the rally using state resources, as shown through a livestream of the event offered through Newsom’s official government channels. A Republican in the state legislature, Katie Sanchez, filed a complaint against Newsom with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission for “using YOUR tax dollars to fund his ballot campaign.”
The ballot measure is being funded by House Democrats’ principal super PAC and Democratic megadonor Bill Bloomfield, according a website for the campaign, which directs visitors to sign up for Newsom’s fundraising texts. A logo for the campaign is a carbon copy of a logo Newsom used for a federal PAC he launched to propose a constitutional gun control amendment.
Newsom has framed his gerrymandering effort as a countermove against Texas Republicans’ plans to redraw their state’s districts and likely help the GOP secure a larger House majority ahead of the 2026 midterms. The governor said the ballot measure in California would only be “triggered” if Texas passes its redistricting plan, according to the Los Angeles Times.
But unlike Texas—where the Legislature can revise district lines anytime with no constraints—California and many other Democratic-led states have structural limits on when and how redistricting can occur. California’s laws, for example, require a ballot measure to change the redistricting method. In New York, “the earliest the lines could be redrawn would be 2028,” the New York Times reported.
“It’s not surprising, in the sense that California has voted twice for this independent review commission not all that long ago,” Jack Citrin, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and partner on the Thursday poll, told Politico. “And there’s a lot of mistrust and cynicism about politicians and the Legislature. That’s reflected here as well.”
Citrin warned that the poll is bad news for California Democrats, saying, “If this is the starting point, then they will have a struggle.”
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