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Less than a year after 10 million Californians voted to lengthen prison sentences and crack down on retail theft and fentanyl dealing, Governor Gavin Newsom is shutting down yet another state prison.

Gerrymandering wasn’t invented by Trump. It predates most states in the union. It’s named after Elbridge Gerry, who sliced up Massachusetts in 1812 to help his party, leaving behind a district so distorted it looked like a salamander.

It is a classic political threat. Take one more step, and I will act. But this time, even though the target is Texas Republicans, it could easily turn out that California Democrats wind up taking the fall.

Responding to pressure from President Trump, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature are moving forward with a plan to redraw their district lines in advance of the 2026 midterms. Democrats are contemplating how to fight back and blunt any gains the GOP makes in Texas by conducting their own gerrymanders in New York, Illinois, and California.  

It seems we can’t even have a $100 million benefit concert without inviting partisan bickering. What began as an urgent and well-intentioned philanthropic effort to help victims of two catastrophic fires has turned into another political fight between the two major political parties.

Texas Republicans have threatened to redraw their maps to protect their party’s majority in Congress. California Democrats have, in turn, threatened to respond with their own mid-decade redistricting to “fight fire with fire.”

Louisiana is making the switch to closed partisan primaries for some elections in 2026, using a system that will no doubt confuse many of the state’s registered No Party voters, who are about to add approximately 151,000 people to their numbers. 

On July 17, a California state parole agent became the first CDCR officer killed in the line of duty since 2018 when he was shot inside a state parole office by a man who had been released just months earlier after serving only four years for randomly stabbing a stranger in the neck.

Voter IDs are a requirement in almost every democracy in the world from Europe to Mexico. But legitimate concerns over voter suppression efforts in the American south led to a different ethic inside Democratic Party circles. Over time, Voter ID plans have been presumptively conflated with claims of “voter suppression” without much analysis of the actual impact of proposals.

California’s nonpartisan top-two primary and independent redistricting commission are widely viewed as two of the most voter-centric reforms in modern American politics. Yet new polling in the field suggests a push to roll both reforms back, and the strategy behind that effort is telling.