California’s Redistricting Case Lacks Snarls That Caught Texas

California’s new congressional map favoring Democrats is unlikely to be hamstrung in the same way as Texas’ map, redrawn to benefit Republicans, was this week.

The Golden State will defend its mid-decade redistricting on Dec. 3 to a three-judge panel as a strictly political reaction to Texas’ decision to create a new map. That map was thrown out by another federal judge panel earlier this week, and the Lone Star State will be heading to the Supreme Court to try to save its redistricting.

Two of three deeply-divided judges found that race—not just partisanship, which Texas argued is allowed—played a large role in Texas’ mid-decade redistricting. The judges that granted a preliminary injunction halting the map focused on a July letter from the Justice Department that targeted only majority-non-White districts in Texas.

The DOJ letter gave the panel in Texas a reason to believe race was a factor. A similar paper trail doesn’t exist in the California case.

Rather, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) explicitly pitched the redistricting plan to voters—who overwhelmingly passed it earlier this month—as necessary to offset Texas’ redistricting gains in Congress, further bolstering the state’s argument that its redistricting ahead of 2026 midterms was predominantly driven by politics.

“The Texas case involves the same general subject matter, but it’s so fact-specific, and it doesn’t really break new ground,” said Loyola Law Professor Justin Levitt. “I don’t think it’s going to affect California’s case at all.”

The exception would be if US Supreme Court justices find that the candidate filing deadline is too soon and federal courts are precluded by doctrine from getting involved in the election, UCLA Law Professor Richard Hasen said.

“That would have a very big implication for the preliminary injunction,” Hasen said. “Not the ultimate merits, but what would happen for 2026.”

US District Judges Josephine Staton and Wesley Hsu and US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee will hear the case in the California’s Central District.

Motivations

Texas Republicans should be able to argue that the US Supreme Court should uphold the state’s map, Hasen said, without undermining the position of their counterparts in California, who want the California map thrown out on the basis that they were drawn to boost the state’s Latino voters.

“Every case on race and gerrymandering turns on what the predominant motive or factor was in drawing a particular state’s districts,” he said. “It’s perfectly logically consistent to say that one of the states had a predominant racial motive, and the other did not.”

Hasen said he sees more evidence of a racial intent in Texas than in the Golden State, “but there might not be enough intent in either case.”

California Republicans’ case focuses on comments made by redistricting consultant Paul Mitchell before state lawmakers, saying he was adding a “Latino District” and shifting another’s lines to become a “Latino-influenced district.” However, voters—not legislators—ultimately passed the plan.

Newsom and state lawmakers at first conditioned their plan on the existence of a new map in Texas. During the legislative process they removed that language, so the California map, if blessed by a court, would stand regardless of the outcome of litigation in Texas.

Reasoning provided by Judge Jerry Smith of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in a scorching Wednesday dissent may guide both Texas attorneys in their appeal and California attorneys before their district judge panel.

Smith bashed his two counterparts on the panel, US District Judge Jerry Brown and Senior US District Judge David Guaderrama, saying Brown published the majority opinion without giving him enough time to write his dissent. He said the Texas map was clearly motivated by partisan interests.

“Judge Smith is kind of setting off a warning shot that the court should be careful about finding racial predominance in cases that are primarily about politics,” Hasen said. “That could actually work in the Democrats’ favor in California.”

Pending Case

The justices may strike Tuesday’s Texas decision and prevent the district court from engaging with the map until they’ve ruled in a pending case that may significantly change the law around the use of race in redistricting.

Last month’s arguments in Louisiana v. Callais suggested they will curtail the creation of majority-Black or Hispanic voting districts, as allowed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to curb rampant discrimination against Black voters in the South.

The Supreme Court could release an opinion as late as June—likely too late to impact 2026 midterms—or as early as January, UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Emily Rong Zhang said.

“They could say we don’t want you to halt any maps until you have the full benefit of our new guidance on this issue,” Zhang said.

Zhang said she doesn’t expect the Texas map fight to significantly impact proceedings in California—or for the Texas district court’s ruling to stick there.

“I worry that people are getting too invested in this decision from Texas,” she said. “It’s just an outcome along the way. And it doesn’t seem obvious to me that just because there’s a decision from a three-judge panel here, there’s any expectation that the Texas map is going to get struck down.”

The case is Tangipa v. Newsom, C.D. Cal., No. 2:25-cv-10616.