California "bluffed" its way into flipping the script on Republicans and Donald Trump, according to a new report.
Politico on Saturday published a story called, How California bluffed its way into a redistricting war with Trump, in which the outlet quotes "nearly 50 people involved with the effort" who "shared details with POLITICO about the tightly guarded process."
California is currently in the process of potentially altering its district maps in response to Texas' redistricting. But it started off as a "bluff," according to reporters.
"When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?" according to the weekend report. "Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so."
The piece quotes Lofgren as saying, “It seemed to me worth a bluff... If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”
She then added, “But they didn’t stop... They just doubled down.”
However, the bluff soon met reality.
"So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency," according to the outlet.
Summing up, the reporters wrote, "In the end, 87 of 90 Democrats voted to put the maps on the ballot — a display of consensus that [Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas] said was made possible by the California-under-siege mentality that had been building up ever since Trump re-took the White House."
“It’s Whac-a-mole. We’ve been trying to play defense,” Rivas reportedly added. “But we finally just threw up our hands and said, ‘We’ve got to flip the script.’”