SCOTUS Ruling on Texas Gerrymander Could Be Good News for California’s New Map

In a surprising twist, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to let Texas use its mid-decade gerrymander for the 2026 midterm elections may end up strengthening California’s defense of its voter-approved map.

While the SCOTUS ruling remains a devastating setback for minority voters in Texas, the court’s reasoning — and how it characterized California’s map — could make it far harder for the GOP and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to block California’s response map for 2026.

The Texas ruling triggered immediate online fallout regarding the California case. 

After DOJ Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the Texas stay, declaring that “federal courts have no right to interfere with a State’s decision to redraw legislative maps for partisan reasons,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) press office fired back.

“So you gonna drop your lawsuit against us right, Pam?” the office asked in reply to Bondi.

The DOJ signaled it has no intention of backing off the California case. 

“Not a chance, Gavin — we will stop your DEI districts for 2026,” the department posted.

The exchange highlights the deep contradictions now facing the DOJ. The agency defended Texas’ map as partisan while attacking California’s map as a racial, “DEI” gerrymander — even though the Supreme Court has now publicly declared both maps as purely partisan. 

After voters overwhelmingly approved California’s new congressional redistricting plan, Republicans and later the DOJ asked a federal court to strike down the new map as an illegal racial gerrymander. 

But less than 24 hours after the Supreme Court reinstated Texas’ gerrymander, Democrats and voting rights groups in the California case argued the ruling effectively undercuts the entire theory behind the GOP’s lawsuit.

The Supreme Court discussed California while ruling on Texas — and what it said could reshape the California challenge. 

The majority explicitly noted that California’s map was created as a direct, partisan response to Texas’ mid-cycle redraw.

“Texas adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done,” the court wrote. “The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

This majority’s statements alone are likely a major blow to the plaintiffs in California, who rely on the claim that California’s redraw was motivated primarily by race. The Supreme Court just framed it as openly and indisputably partisan — and under precedent, partisan gerrymandering is not something federal courts can review.

Within hours of the Texas ruling, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) filed a supplemental brief in the California lawsuit, asserting that the Supreme Court has now made plaintiffs’ racial gerrymandering claims almost impossible to win.

“As the Stay Order explains, ‘California responded [to Texas’s redistricting] with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done,” the brief states. “According to the Court, Texas and California both undertook these actions in order ‘to favor the State’s dominant political party.’”

They emphasized that the Supreme Court’s findings in the Texas case apply with even greater force in California, where the record is far weaker.

“If the bar for racial gerrymandering claims has become so high that even the expressly racialized process in Texas could not clear it, there is no world in which California’s expressly partisan response to “counteract what Texas had done”’ could be legally vulnerable,” the filing argues. “It has all but foreclosed Movants’ paper-thin claims of racial gerrymandering here.”

The committee also highlighted the Supreme Court’s new emphasis on the presumption of legislative good faith, which makes it even harder to prove a state’s racial motive. According to their brief, the Court’s primary reason for granting the stay application was because it determined that the lower district court “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith.”

If that standard compromised Texas’ challengers — who had far stronger evidence — it could be fatal for the GOP’s case against California.

“In sum, the Supreme Court’s order — and even Justice Kagan’s dissenting view — confirms that Movants here cannot possibly succeed on their claims, let alone satisfy their burden for extraordinary preliminary injunctive relief,” the committee concluded. 

California’s case is still moving through a three-judge federal court, with decisions expected early next year. 

But the Supreme Court’s framing of California’s map in the Texas ruling has dramatically shifted the landscape, placing an even greater burden on the GOP and DOJ’s already thin and circumstantial case.