Both Obama and California Voters Back Newsom’s Redistricting Fight

By Jacob Weindling | August 21, 2025 | 11:32am

Photo by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Congress Gerrymandering

Both Obama and California Voters Back Newsom’s Redistricting Fight

The handwringing brigade in the Democratic Party who looks at every conflict and sees an inevitable loss has been “feeling angst” over California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to “fight fire with fire” and send a proposal to California voters on whether to counter Texas’ cynical redistricting move by squeezing some extra Democratic Congressional seats out of California. The classic brave anonymous Democratic consultant told Politico in July that this anti-democratic ploy to counter another anti-democratic ploy is “a crazy hill to die on.” Not only is, per usual, this Democratic consultant on the opposite side of Democratic voter opinion polling, but they also now find themselves on the opposing side of the most popular figure in the party.

“Over the long term, we shouldn’t have political gerrymandering in America,” wrote former President Barack Obama on the MechaHitler site and not his Bluesky account. The brave anonymous Democratic consultant no doubt nodded their head along, believing yet again that their own narrow Beltway worldview is emblematic of everyone else’s in a country of 330 million people. “But since Texas is taking direction from a partisan White House and gerrymandering in the middle of a decade to try and maintain the House despite their unpopular policies, I have tremendous respect for how Governor Newsom has approached this,” continued the former president to the consternation of cowardly consultants everywhere. “He’s put forward a smart, measured approach in California, designed to address a very particular problem at a very particular moment in time.”

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These remarks initially came at a fundraiser, and they are a classic cagey Obama statement. He does the thing where he talks about the thing we’re all thinking about, making us think he’s saying the thing, without ever fully committing to totally saying the thing, leaving us to fill in the gaps he leaves with our own desires. He calls Newsom’s approach to send this option to the voters “responsible,” but I’m not sure this rises to the level of a full-throated endorsement due to its lack of specifics about the plan itself and its reliance on complimenting Newsom’s “approach,” hence why I used the word “back” to describe Obama’s much clearer support for doing something over doing nothing.

Internal Newsom polling from his longtime pollster also conveniently leaked to Axios yesterday, claiming that this “bid to redraw California’s congressional seats to create more Democrat-friendly districts has a 22-point advantage in support among the state’s voters.” Brad Lander’s characterization of the Democratic Party splitting along “fighters versus folders” where ideology takes a backseat to doing something over doing nothing is becoming truer by the day. This redistricting mess has aligned Gavin Newsom, a lefty EIC of Splinter whose Joker origin story is being a dismayed and formerly enthusiastic Obama voter, Barack Obama, and a website created by famed cheerleader of the war that Obama got elected opposing, Bill Kristol. We, along with a +22 majority of California voters, are all fighting on the same team against the brave anonymous Democrat leaking to Make Democrats Mad Magazines about how Very Serious and Very Concerned they are.

Did anyone really think that Gavin Newsom was going to fight for a 50-50 issue? The professional hairpiece who married a Fox News personality? Did the brave anonymous Democratic consultant think that Newsom was floating a proposal that his pollster didn’t see +20 support for? Do you know who this guy is? This is what he’s doing with his braindead attacks on trans folks thanks to the bleak polling on trans people in sports (but like Trump’s immigration polling and its subsequent collapse, the topline figures do not usually match the more detailed questions about how these revanchist policies would actually be implemented). Gavin Newsom is one of the worst people California knows, and he’s making great points in this redistricting battle, but he wouldn’t be doing it if he wasn’t following the path of least resistance. He is one of America’s preeminent weathervanes.

As I wrote last week, this is a good gambit by a bad person showing real leadership. Gavin Newsom is not your friend, just your temporary ally of convenience until his interests align in such a way that makes him work against you, like the trans and unhoused communities could tell you all about. His biggest redeeming quality is that unlike Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the cowardly New York machine choking the life out of Congressional Democrats, Newsom understands he has immense power at his fingertips. California is the globe’s fourth-largest economy, and it has room to throw its weight around. The man running the sweatiest 2028 presidential campaign to date clearly wants to take one of the world’s largest governments out for one last spin before he becomes term limited in 2026, and his 2028 campaign begins in earnest.

Barack Obama, such an institutionalist that he neutered his platform to pass Mitt Romney’s health care plan to genuflect to aging Democrats forever stuck in the 1990s, is firmly in the fighters wing of the party now, even if his ultimate desires are, as always, cloudy to a degree. Gavin freaking Newsom, is even in the fighters wing of the party, at least until his inevitable heel turn. Unilateral disarmament is not an option in Trump’s America, and the only way this nation will be saved from fascism is if a new generation of Democrats pick up the constitutional tools at our disposal to aggressively build the country we say we are. The path the folders want to take us on is no different from Trump’s, even Gavin Newsom can see this, and according to his pollster, so do most California voters.