California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley explained his bill that aims to stop mid-cycle congressional redistricting nationwide, and why Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s lines is “a truly outrageous scheme.” “California Republicans have 9 seats out of 52-that’s like 17% of the seats-even though we get over 40% of the vote in statewide elections. So even if Texas goes through with what they’re planning, when all is said and done there, the Democrats will still have better representation in Texas than California Republicans do right now,” Kiley told Andrew Walworth on Friday’s edition of the RealClearPolitics podcast. “And it has a purely partisan motivation-as Gavin Newsom has admitted. He said his whole goal, his entire purpose, is to pick up five or six Democrat seats. And he’s going to change everyone’s district in the process.” “We already see that they’ve proposed fraudulent ballot language to try to confuse voters. But I think, at the end of the day, we can stop this.” “Personally, I would like to see us, as a country, say this is not a road we’re going to continue to go down,” he said. “Because while California and Newsom have done this in a uniquely pernicious, harmful, undemocratic, and damaging way, there are other states that are talking about doing their own mid-decade redistricting now, and it could cascade across the country in a really chaotic manner.” He’s introduced a bill to restrict redistricting to only every ten years: “That’s actually what the Constitution says-you’re required to do it at the beginning of the decade, made after the census, to reflect population changes. And historically, that’s the only time it’s been done.” “I’m not super concerned, honestly, about my own seat,” he said. “There’s only so much they can do in the Sacramento region, so that’s not my foremost concern. I am concerned about California as a whole and the state of democracy in our state-certainly the Republican Party in our state.” “When all is said and done, it’s not clear there will be a huge gain from one party or the other. But really, that’s not how we want to win the House,” Kiley said. “All these games and gerrymandering are taking attention away from the issues that we can actually win the 2026 election on,” he said. “I think independent voters would probably look at that and say something is a little out of sorts when California has 52 seats and one party has 49 of them.”
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