Legislative voting districts typically are redrawn based on census data after the start of each decade. But an unusual spate of mid-decade redistricting broke out after President Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans last year to reshape U.S. House districts to give the party an edge in the midterm elections. Democrats in California countered with their own political gerrymandering. More states followed.

Eight states have already adopted new House maps, and several more are considering it. So far, Republicans believe they could win up to 13 additional seats from new districts in Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Democrats, meanwhile, think they could gain up to 10 seats from new districts in California, Utah and Virginia.

But those tallies presume past voting patterns hold in November. Historically, the president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms. Democrats need to gain just a few seats in November to wrest control of the House from Republicans, which would give them greater power to oppose Trump.

Where new House districts are proposed

Lawmakers in at least three states are meeting to consider plans for new U.S. House maps.

Louisiana

Current map: two Democrats, four Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Jeff Landry has postponed the May 16 congressional primary to allow lawmakers to revise U.S. House districts in response to an April 29 Supreme Court ruling striking down a majority Black congressional district.

Challenges: Several lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court asserting that Landry lacked authority to suspend the primary elections.

Alabama

Current map: two Democrats, five Republicans

New map: Republican state officials hope to revert to a U.S. House map passed in 2023 — but not previously used — that could help Republicans win an additional seat.

Challenges: The current map was imposed under a court order and is supposed to be used until after the 2030 census. State officials have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside that order in light of its ruling in the Louisiana redistricting case.

Tennessee

Current map: one Democrat, eight Republicans

New Map: Republican Gov. Bill Lee has called lawmakers into special session to consider a new U.S. House map that could carve up a Black-majority district in Memphis and improve Republican chances of winning an additional seat.

Challenges: The candidate qualifying period already has ended for the primaries, which are scheduled for Aug. 6.

Where new House districts were approved

New U.S. House districts have passed in eight states since last summer. Six took up redistricting voluntarily, one was required to by its state constitution and another did so under court order.

Texas

Current map: 13 Democrats, 25 Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a revised House map into law last August that could help Republicans win five additional seats.

Challenges: The U.S. Supreme Court in December cleared the way for the new districts to be used in this year’s elections. It has since overturned a lower-court ruling that blocked the new map because it was “racially gerrymandered.”

California

Current map: 43 Democrats, nine Republicans

New map: Voters in November approved revised House districts drawn by the Democratic-led Legislature that could help Democrats win five additional seats.

Challenges: The U.S. Supreme Court in February allowed the new districts to be used in this year’s elections. It denied an appeal from Republicans and the Department of Justice, which claimed the districts impermissibly favor Hispanic voters.

Missouri

Current map: two Democrats, six Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a revised House map into law last September that could help Republicans win an additional seat.

Challenges: A Cole County judge ruled the new map is in effect as election officials work to determine whether a referendum petition seeking a statewide vote complies with constitutional criteria and contains enough valid petition signatures. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming mid-decade redistricting is illegal. It’s scheduled to hear arguments in May on claims the new districts violate compactness requirements and should be placed on hold pending the potential referendum.

North Carolina

Current map: four Democrats, 10 Republicans

New map: The Republican-led General Assembly gave final approval in October to revised districts that could help Republicans win an additional seat.

Challenges: A federal court panel in November denied a request to block the revised districts from being used in the midterm elections.

Ohio

Current map: five Democrats, 10 Republicans

New map: A bipartisan panel composed primarily of Republicans voted in October to approve revised House districts that improve Republicans’ chances of winning two additional seats.

Challenges: None. The state constitution required new districts before the 2026 election, because Republicans had approved the prior map without sufficient Democratic support after the last census.

Utah

Current map: no Democrats, four Republicans

New map: A judge in November imposed revised House districts that could help Democrats win a seat. The court ruled that lawmakers had circumvented anti-gerrymandering standards passed by voters when adopting the prior map.

Challenges: A federal court panel and the state Supreme Court, in February, each rejected Republican challenges to the judicial map selection.

Virginia

Current map: six Democrats, five Republicans

New map: Voters approved a constitutional amendment on April 21 authorizing new U.S. House districts backed by Democrats that could help the party win up to four additional seats.

Challenges: The state Supreme Court allowed the referendum to proceed, but it has yet to rule whether the effort is legal. The court is considering an appeal of a Tazewell County judge’s ruling that the amendment is invalid because lawmakers violated procedural requirements.

Florida

Current map: eight Democrats, 20 Republicans

New map: Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on May 4 that he had signed revised U.S. House districts that improve the GOP’s chances of winning four additional seats.

Challenges: A court challenge contends the new map violates a state constitution provision prohibiting districts from being drawn with intent to favor or disfavor a political party.

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But that evaporated in 2022, when Calvert was nearly toppled by a fresh-faced Democratic insurgent.

Will Rollins’ candidacy in California’s 41st District was made viable by redistricting changes the year prior that swapped Republican havens like Temecula and Murrieta for a swath of the Coachella Valley that included overwhelmingly liberal Palm Springs, home to one of the largest concentrations of LGBTQ+ voters in the country.

The 2022 race didn’t draw much attention at first. That quickly changed in the months prior to the election when the former federal prosecutor, now 39, showed he might have an actual shot at unseating the entrenched Republican stalwart. Rollins was briefly ahead on election night, though Calvert ultimately bested him by more than 11,000 votes.

Two years later, Rollins and Calvert are set for a 2024 rematch in what is now one of the most closely-watched races in the country.

The seat will likely play a crucial role in deciding which party dominates the U.S. House of Representatives next year, with partisan control of the House set to be determined by a handful of competitive seats in New York and California.

One story line drew particular attention during the last election, particularly in national media.

In a twist that one advocate described as “poetic justice,” Rollins was a young gay candidate battling an older Republican who had voted against LGBTQ rights in the past in a district that now included Palm Springs, the first city in the nation to elect an all-LGBTQ city council. (Calvert has said his views have since evolved, and the congressman voted in favor of a 2022 bill that affirmed same-sex marriage.)

All of those dynamics remain at play, and the addition of the Coachella Valley is precisely what made the district competitive.

But the Inland Empire suburbs still account for the vast majority of its voters, and it’s there, in the bedroom communities and increasingly diverse cul-de-sacs, that the battle for Calvert’s seat is really being fought.

Both sides say this year’s race will likely be dominated by kitchen-table issues including the daily cost of living, crime and housing, rather than the divisive culture wars that permeate the national political narrative, and that results will come down to what happens in the western Riverside suburbs.

“Corona, Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Eastvale, Canyon Lake, Norco — those are the cities that are going to decide the outcome of this election,” Rollins said, sitting at an oversize table in a Corona fire station. The local firefighters he’d been meeting with had just rushed out on an emergency call and the smell of their chorizo and eggs lingered, along with several hastily abandoned breakfast plates.

Those western Riverside enclaves are also the cities where Rollins is least well-known and Calvert — the son of a former Corona mayor — has long been a fixture.

“That’s why I’m here today in Corona,” Rollins said, noting that he’d been at the Corona Chamber of Commerce earlier that morning and tries to be in his Corona field office five days a week, about an hour-and-a-half commute from his Palm Springs home.

Though he is slightly graying at the temples, the 39-year-old candidate looks disarmingly boyish and could pass at first glance for an eager college student volunteer. Like Calvert, Rollins and his campaign team underscore the importance of turnout in the western part of the district, which has historically been far lower than in the Palm Springs area.

Those familiar with it describe the district as having two distinct hubs: a corner of the Inland Empire, which includes suburbs like Corona and Menifee and accounts for nearly 80% of voters, and a portion of the Coachella Valley, which includes communities like Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert, along with Palm Springs.

“I know this district inside and out, I was born here. I went to school here. I did business here, and have been representing this district,” Calvert said by phone on a recent Friday from his Corona real estate office in a Spanish-style building a stone’s throw from the 91 Freeway.

About 50 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles at the western edge of the Inland Empire, Corona is the biggest city in the district and Calvert’s hometown.

Once dubbed “the lemon capital of the world,” it was a town dominated — and perfumed by — citrus for the better part of a century.

But orchards eventually gave way to new homes, neighborhoods and industry, and the Sunkist plant shut down in the early 1980s — the same decade the Riverside County city’s population began to explode, with aspiring suburbanites from Los Angeles and Orange counties driven inland for their slice of the American dream.

Amid a seemingly intractable state housing crisis, Corona and other inland cities in the district, such as Menifee and Lake Elsinore, have continued to boom. Spacious single-family homes can still be had for a fraction of what they would cost in coastal cities, though emigres to the Inland Empire often face lengthy commutes.

The families who arrived during the first waves of Corona’s population boom leaned more conservative, said Wes Speake, a Corona City Council member and president of the Corona Historic Preservation Society. Registered Democrats now slightly outnumber Republicans in the city, though folks still tend to be more fiscally conservative regardless of party affiliation, Speake said.

Speake — a Republican who has endorsed Calvert — attributes Corona’s shift to the center-left to a number of factors, including an “exponential” increase in diversity over the last two decades, younger and more liberal arrivals from Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Republicans changing their registration to no party preference.

More broadly speaking, the 41st District stands out as a rare piece of truly purple topography in a national landscape dominated by red and blue congressional districts.

Former President Trump won the district by just 1% in 2020, down five points from 2016, according to data from California Target Book. As of late May, Republicans held a razor-thin registration advantage, overtaking registered Democrats by a few thousand voters. But that advantage has see-sawed in the past, with Democrats holding an equally narrow upper hand during the 2022 election. Independents account for roughly 1 in 5 voters.

Trump endorsed Calvert in 2022, and the congressman has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Rollins, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, has blasted Calvert for his continued support of Trump, even after Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes last month, with Rollins saying on the social media site X that the district deserves “a representative who cares more about the 750,000 of us in Riverside County than one convicted felon in New York.”

It remains unclear how Trump’s guilty verdict might affect Republicans congressional candidates in competitive districts like Calvert’s, or whether the conviction could nudge swing voters away from supporters of the former president.

“Riverside of 2024 is not Riverside of 1994,” said Sky Allen, executive director of Inland Empire United, a progressive political group that has endorsed Rollins. “The community looks different, our needs are different. And also, there’s a lot of people in our community that were never really represented by someone that holds conservative values.“

Allen cited the increased racial and ethnic diversity, more LGBTQ+ and immigrant families and more organizing from nonprofits like hers as factors shaping the district. In coordination with the super PAC Battleground California, Allen’s organization will be administering an independent expenditure in support of Rollins, with the bulk of its efforts concentrated on canvassing in the district.

Calvert and Rollins diverge on a number of pivotal issues. Calvert has said decisions on abortion should be left to the states and has an A+ rating on SBA Pro-Life America’s “National Pro-Life Scorecard,” whereas Rollins has been outspoken on protecting abortion rights and is backed by Planned Parenthood California’s political action committee. Rollins has advocated more gun-safety restrictions, whereas Calvert has voted against more stringent restrictions and received high marks from the National Rifle Assn.

Both candidates have criticized the country’s broken immigration system and advocated securing the country’s borders, but Rollins’ positioning also focuses on creating a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other “qualified immigrants.”

Rollins’ unexpectedly narrow loss in 2022 left some prognosticators wondering whether more Democratic Party involvement in 2022 could have flipped the seat blue. Those what-ifs won’t be a question in 2024, regardless of what happens in November.

The Democratic establishment is putting its full backing behind Rollins. He’s one of the top candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red to blue” list, a program that provides organizational and fundraising support, and he has also been the beneficiary of high-profile fundraising efforts, with Orange County Rep. Katie Porter blasting emails to her supporters on his behalf and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries swinging through Southern California to headline a fundraiser.

The Republican party is putting similar institutional might behind Calvert, with significant investments in the district ranging from field support to TV.

Calvert retains the advantages of incumbency and ample name recognition, but Rollins has been a particularly prolific fundraiser. The Democratic challenger had roughly $500,000 more in his war chest than Calvert as of the end of March, according to federal filings. Money will be critical to either candidate getting their message out, especially with the western portion of the district overlapping with the extremely expensive Los Angeles media market.

“If you’re looking at the trend line, this new district is definitely moving toward Democrats after redistricting,” said Erin Covey, a House analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, citing the addition of Palm Springs and the fact that parts of the historically conservative Inland Empire have also shifted slightly to the left.

Calvert benefited from a newly-drawn Inland Empire district in 1992 when he was first elected to Congress, squeaking by just a few hundred votes. His fate now likely hinges on a narrow margin once again.

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The board’s initial public hearing set the stage for at least two additional hearings before the supervisors in December debate the proposed maps that emerge from constituents’ opinions, staff analyses and board discussions.

The target date to finalize and approve redraws is Dec. 7, though Dec. 15 is the deadline.

Among the speakers during the hearing at the County Administrative Center was Chani Beeman with the League of Women Voters, who expressed concern about the current boundaries separating the First and Second districts in the southeastern corner of Riverside.

“Social and economic interests should be kept whole,” Beeman told the board. “This requires a more holistic approach to programming.” She asked the board to consider amending boundaries to re-unify the section of the city encompassing Canyon Crest and the Woods Streets of downtown.

Bob Halili of Jurupa Valley said the area in which he resides, within District 2, should be left alone.

“Living in the community is a positive experience,” he told the board. “We’re a diverse community, but we respect each other’s ethnic backgrounds. Keep my community together.”

Maribel Nunez with the Brown & Black Redistricting Alliance imparted the same sentiments with regard to the area tying pockets of Riverside, Highgrove and Jurupa Valley together near the Santa Ana River.

“We would like it to stay together,” she said.

Supervisor Chuck Washington acceded that it would be “frowned upon to split cities.”

“We’d like to keep them whole,” he said. “My district includes Hemet and San Jacinto. They don’t always get along, like siblings. But drawing lines that separate them would be counterproductive.”

The redistricting process was delayed five months because of the coronavirus public health lockdowns that hampered the publication of 2020 Census data by federal officials.

According to census figures, the county grew 10.4% over the last decade, with the population increasing from 2,189,641 in 2010 to 2,418,185 by 2020, a net change of 228,544.

Under the county’s balancing policy, the benchmark goal is for each supervisorial district to be as close as possible to a population of 483,637. Variances are expected, officials said.

According to the census estimates, three districts — 1, 2 and 4 — are in a deficit, while Districts 3 and 5 have surpluses.

Supervisor Kevin Jeffries represents District 1, Supervisor Karen Spiegel District 2 and Supervisor Manuel Perez District 4. District 3 is represented by Washington, and District 5 by Supervisor Jeff Hewitt.

Washington’s district has 20,744 over the benchmark, and Hewitt’s district has 34,087 more.

State and federal law require that the districts remain contiguous, meaning no gerrymandering or broken lines to fit cities and unincorporated census-designated communities into slices of one district or another.

The public will be able to weigh in again as to how mergers take place during meetings on Oct. 19 and Nov. 9.

District 4 has the largest deficit at 26,173, while District 1 has the smallest at 11,079. Spiegel’s District 2 is down 17,579, according to the county Executive Office.

If the supervisors cannot reach a majority vote on new boundaries, the issue would be put before a Superior Court judge for arbitration.

“It’s important to have as many people providing input as possible,” Spiegel said. “We will never get to a point where we make everybody happy.”

The U.S. Constitution requires a decennial Census, and in addition to local political boundaries being redrawn, federal ones are also modified, impacting congressional representation. However, that job will be left to a statewide committee.

Municipalities will decide for themselves how to divvy up wards.

In 2011, the issue of redrawing district boundaries because of population shifts resulted in multiple hearings after the 2010 Census, which showed the number of residents countywide increasing by 42% — 644,000 people — over the previous decade.

The hearings culminated in testy debates, mostly between then- Supervisors John Tavaglione, representing District 2, and Bob Buster, representing District 1. The pair argued over division of segments of the city of Riverside, concentrated in the Casa Blanca, Eastside and University neighborhoods.

The objective was to abide by apportionment targets. Two then- supervisors, Marion Ashley and Jeff Stone, surrendered whole cities as part of the redistricting. To break an impasse, Tavaglione ultimately relented to Buster’s proposal to envelope several neighborhoods that had historically belonged to the Second District.

Buster was defeated for re-election the following year. Tavaglione retired in 2018.

More information on the county’s redistricting plans, including where to email comments and concerns, can be found at http://www.rivco.org/about- county/county-boards-committees-and-commissions/county-redistricting-efforts.

CNS | Contributed

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Such an issue is before us now and is very crucial to our democratic process and the future well-being of the San Jacinto Valley. Redistricting of State Assembly and State Senate Districts, based on the new census data, is a matter that will affect so many aspects of how our city will develop over the next ten years.

When you stop to think about the many aspects that must be considered to plan a thriving and diverse community such as geography, indigenous populations, water supply, transportation, healthcare, homelessness, communications, education, and others, it may be seen that these issues have the likelihood of affecting every one of us.

As a case in point, a few members of our club have testified to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. We have recognized that our small area, the San Jacinto Valley, is divided into three assembly districts and two state senate districts. Our ability to make a case about any of the above aspects before so many different representatives is deeply diluted because of this situation. Better to address community input before just 1 of each type of representative.

When we divided up topics among the group to present to the Redistricting Commission, I ended up with transportation. And glad that I did, since there is really a lot being planned for the near future within our valley. There is the realignment of SR 79 through Winchester and to Lamb’s Canyon, the Mid-County Parkway (MCP) is a proposed 16-mile transportation corridor that will relieve traffic congestion for east-west travel in western Riverside County between Perris and the San Jacinto Valley, a Metrolink spur that will expand rail service from Perris to the San Jacinto Valley, and the possible expansion of the Hemet-Ryan airport. How can we contribute input when these projects are in different assembly districts and only small portions of our community are eligible to speak up?

I began with the notion that I should have done more for, well, really my country. Ultimately, the interests that I pursue are a benefit to me but, hopefully, are also a benefit to the greatest number of us at any one time. Within the near future, redistricting is such an issue that will remain in effect until the next census of our population.

A guide to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission can be accessed through the website https://www.wedrawthelinesca.org/

Chris Hofeditz | Democrats of Hemet-San Jacinto

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