News Analysis: Newsom's decision to fight fire with fire could have profound political consequences

Los Angeles Times

6 hours ago

Deep in the badlands of defeat, Democrats have soul-searched about what went wrong last November, tinkered with a thousand-plus thinkpieces and desperately cast for a strategy to reboot their stalled-out party.
Amid the noise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently championed an unlikely game plan: Forget the high road, fight fire with fire and embrace the very tactics that virtue-minded Democrats have long decried.
Could the dark art of political gerrymandering be the thing that saves democracy from Trump's increasingly authoritarian impulses? That's essentially the pitch Newsom is making to California voters with his audacious new special election campaign.
As Texas Democrats dig in to block a Republican-led redistricting push and Trump muscles to consolidate power wherever he can, Newsom wants to redraw California's own congressional districts to favor Democrats.
His goal: counter Trump's drive for more GOP House seats with a power play of his own.
It's a boundary-pushing gamble that will undoubtedly supercharge Newsom's political star in the short-term. The long-game glory could be even grander, but only if he pulls it off. A ballot-box flop would be brutal for both Newsom and his party.
The charismatic California governor is termed out of office in 2026 and has made no secret of his 2028 presidential ambitions.
But the distinct scent of his home state will be hard to completely slough off in parts of the country where California is synonymous with loony lefties, business-killing regulation and an out-of-control homelessness crisis. To say nothing of Newsom's ill-fated dinner at an elite Napa restaurant in violation of COVID-19 protocols — a misstep that energized a failed recall attempt and still haunts the governor's national reputation.
The redistricting gambit is the kind of big play that could redefine how voters across the country see Newsom.
The strategy could be a boon for Newsom's 2028 ambitions during a moment when Democrats are hungry for leaders, said Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio. But it's also a massive roll of the dice for both Newsom and the state he leads.
'It's great politics for him if this passes,' Maviglio said. 'If it fails, he's dead in the water.'
The path forward — which could determine control of Congress in 2026 — is hardly a straight shot.
The 'Election Rigging Response Act,' as Newsom has named his ballot measure, would temporarily scrap the congressional districts enacted by the state's voter-approved independent redistricting commission.
Under the proposal, Democrats could pick up five seats currently held by Republicans while bolstering vulnerable Democratic incumbent Reps. Adam Gray, Josh Harder, George Whitesides, Derek Tran and Dave Min, which would save the party millions of dollars in costly reelection fights.
But first the Democratic-led state Legislature must vote to place the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot and then it must be approved by voters.
If passed, the initiative would have a 'trigger,' meaning the redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas or another GOP-led state moved forward with its own gerrymandering effort.
'I think what Governor Newsom and other Democrats are doing here is exactly the right thing we need to do,' Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said Thursday.
'We're not bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We're going to bring a bazooka to a knife fight, right? This is not your grandfather's Democratic Party,' Martin said, adding that they shouldn't be the only ones playing by a set of rules that no longer exist.
For Democrats like Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who appeared alongside Newsom to kick off the effort, there is 'some heartbreak' to temporarily shelving their commitment to independent redistricting. But she and others were clear-eyed about the need to stop a president 'willing to rig the election midstream,' she said.
Friedman said she was hearing overwhelmingly positive reactions to the proposal from all kinds of Democratic groups on the ground.
'The response that I get is, 'Finally, we're fighting. We have a way to fight back that's tangible,'' Friedman recounted.
Still, despite the state's Democratic voter registration advantage, victory for the ballot measure will hardly be assured. California voters have twice rallied for independent redistricting at the ballot box in the last two decades and many may struggle to abandon those beliefs.
A POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll found that voters prefer keeping an independent panel in place to draw district lines by a nearly two-to-one margin, and that independent redistricting is broadly popular in the state.
(Newsom's press office argued that the poll was poorly worded, since it asked about getting rid of the independent commission altogether and permanently returning line-drawing power to the legislators, rather than just temporarily scrapping their work for several cycles until the independent commission next draws new lines.)
California voters should not expect to see a special election campaign focused on the minutia of reconfiguring the state's congressional districts, however.
While many opponents will likely attack the change as undercutting the will of California voters, who overwhelmingly supported weeding politics out of the redistricting process, bank on Newsom casting the campaign as a referendum on Trump and his devious effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress.
Newsom employed a similar strategy when he demolished the Republican-led recall campaign against him in 2021, which the governor portrayed as a 'life and death' battle against 'Trumpism' and far-right anti-vaccine and antiabortion activists. Among California's Democratic-heavy electorate, that message proved to be extremely effective.
'Wake up, America,' Newsom said Thursday at a Los Angeles rally launching the campaign for the redistricting measure. 'Wake up to what Donald Trump is doing. Wake up to his assault. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people.'
Kevin Liao, a Democratic strategist who has worked on national and statewide campaigns, said his D.C. and California-based political group chats had been blowing up in recent days with texts about the moment Newsom was creating for himself.
Much of Liao's group chat fodder has involved the output of Newsom's digital team, which has elevated trolling to an art form on its official @GovPressOffice account on the social media site X.
The missives have largely mimicked the president's own social media patois, with hyperbole, petty insults and a heavy reliance on the 'caps lock' key.
'DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER 'HOT.' FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS 'STEP,' ' one of the posts read last week, dutifully reposted by the governor himself.
Some messages have also ended with Newsom's initials (a riff on Trump's signature 'DJT' signoff) and sprinkled in key Trumpian callbacks, like the phrase 'Liberation Day,' or a doctored Time Magazine cover with Newsom's smiling mien. The account has garnered 150,000 new followers since the beginning of the month.
Shortly after Trump took office in January, Newsom walked a fine line between criticizing the president and his policies and being more diplomatic, especially after the California wildfires — in hopes of appealing to any semblance of compassion and presidential responsibility Trump possessed.
Newsom had spent the first months of the new administration trying to reshape the California-vs.-Trump narrative that dominated the president's first term and move away from his party's prior 'resistance' brand.
Those conciliatory overtures coincided with Newsom's embrace of a more ecumenical posture, hosting MAGA leaders on his podcast and taking a position on transgender athletes' participation in women's sports that contradicted the Democratic orthodoxy.
Newsom insisted that he engaged in those conversations to better understand political views that diverged from his own, especially after Trump's victory in November. However, there was the unmistakable whiff of an ambitious politician trying to broaden his national appeal by inching away from his reputation as a West Coast liberal.
Newsom's reluctance to readopt the Trump resistance mantle ended after the president sent California National Guard troops into Los Angeles amid immigration sweeps and ensuing protests in June. Those actions revealed Trump's unchecked vindictiveness and abject lack of morals and honor, Newsom said.
Of late, Newsom has defended the juvenile tone of his press aides' posts mocking Trump's own all-caps screeds, and questioned why critics would excoriate his parody and not the president's own unhinged social media utterances.
'If you've got issues with what I'm putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president,' Newsom said last week. 'So to the extent it's gotten some attention, I'm pleased.'
In an attention-deficit economy where standing out is half the battle, the posts sparkle with unapologetic swagger. And they make clear that Newsom is in on the joke.
'To a certain set of folks who operated under the old rules, this could be seen as, 'Wow, this is really outlandish.' But I think they are making the calculation that Democrats want folks that are going to play under this new set of rules that Trump has established,' Liao said.
At a moment when the Democratic party is still occupied with post-defeat recriminations and what's-next vision boarding, Newsom has emerged from the bog with something resembling a plan.
And he's betting the house on his deep-blue state's willingness to fight fire with fire.
Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Laura Nelson contributed to this report.