Is Gavin Newsom Coming After OC's Only Republican Congressional Seat?

Good morning, and thanks for opening the latest edition of the OC Conservative Brief!

A quick request to my dear readers … if you like what you read, please forward the newsletter along to two or three friends and encourage them to sign up here. We grow by word-of-mouth!

Today we’re diving into Gavin Newsom’s threat to blow up California’s congressional maps to erase Republican seats. We’re also looking at Young Kim’s re-election race amid Democrats’ attacks on her vote for the Big Beautiful Bill and a growing lawsuit hampering ICE raids (for now) in Orange County.

Now let’s dive in…

REDISTRICTING RED ALERT… Governor Gavin Newsom is threatening to redraw California’s congressional maps to create more Democrat-friendly districts. It’s Newsom’s chest-thumping response to Texas’ Trump-backed scheme to add more Republican seats, and part of a broader redistricting war brewing as both parties cynically look to gain an advantage in the 2026 midterms.

The politics aside, could Newsom actually do this? How would it impact Orange County? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, some background: 

• Texas started its redistricting plan at the urging of President Trump; Ohio, another state where Republicans could gain, is required to redraw its maps by law (long story). National Democrats are looking at counterpunching in blue states like New York, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Washington state.
  

• Redistricting normally happens every ten years after states have to take into account population shifts from the U.S. Census (i.e. after the 2020 Census, California lost a congressional seat and had to redraw its maps). Redrawing maps in the middle of the decade like this and for overtly partisan purposes is highly unusual.
  

• 👨‍🎓 FUN FACT: Redistricting to favor one political party is known as “gerrymandering,” a portmanteau of “salamander” and former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 approved an insanely partisan district that was mocked for being shaped like a salamander.

👉 It’s worth pointing out that Democrats have absolutely already gerrymandered seats in their favor in states that they control, like Maryland and Illinois, as the New York Times honestly points out below, noting that “squeezing more Democratic seats out of those states would be a challenge.”

As the OC GOP said this morning, while Democrats make up 45% of California’s registered voters, they hold 83% of California’s congressional seats.

“If Newsom wants to escalate this to increase his national brand, then we have a clear message for Republicans in other states: call his bluff,” the OC GOP wrote on X.

🤔 So, could Gavin Newsom actually carry out his threat to redraw the maps and blow up California’s few remaining Republican congressional districts?

Not quite. While many states give state legislatures the power to redraw and approve maps, in California that authority is given to the independent “Citizens Redistricting Commission,” which was approved by voters twenty years and enshrined into the state constitution. The constitution is also specific about this process only happening at the beginning of each decade.

That means Newsom would either have to:

1. Ask the Democrat-controlled state legislature in a special session to override the constitutional Citizens Commission and draw new maps mid-decade, which would face a barrage of constitutional court challenges, or;
   

2. Ask voters to override the constitution and approve new maps via a state-wide ballot referendum, which would be an arduous task with no guarantee of victory.

Aside from the legal hurdles, some California Democrats are anxious about the optics of stepping all over the good government redistricting process that was overwhelmingly approved by voters. Moreover, redistricting is a zero-sum game: making one district less Republican inherently means making another more Republican, giving some Democrat incumbents who would be a little less safe some heart-burn.

• 👨‍🎓 Keep in mind that Newsom, who is building his national profile ahead of an expected presidential bid, is looking for ways to build his bona fides with the Democrat base, meaning this could all just be talk and bluster.

Even if Democrats somehow succeeded with their redistricting scheme, it’s hard to see how it could net-hurt Republicans in Orange County, where they currently only hold one seat (Rep. Young Kim in the 40th District).

Why? There are no clearly “Republican” seats in Orange County. The 45th District (Dave Min), 45th (Derek Tran), and 49th (Mike Levin) are all swing districts currently held by Democrats. Kim’s 40th District is the most Republican-leaning, but any attempt to make one district in Orange County more Democrat risks making another more Republican.

• Another hurdle: the 46th District, covering Santa Ana and Anaheim, is heavily Democrat, but also majority-Hispanic, which would complicate efforts to draw Democrat voters out of it under the Voting Rights Act.

The Orange County congressional maps are a delicate balancing act, and one that currently seems to favor Democrats. From their perspective, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. As one high-ranking OC Republican put it to me this week, “good luck carving up OC to screw us more.”

Both OC Democrat Reps. Dave Min and Derek Tran have come out in favor of Newsom’s plans, despite the fact that either of their seats could be sacrificed for a broader redistricting cause:

• “I think all of us want to see a fair process,” Min said, “but if Republicans are going to try to cheat and redistrict, I think Democratic states are going to consider all options.”

🐘 ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: One thing Democrats have absolutely no power over: California is widely expected to lose up to four seats in Congress after the 2030 census due to population shifts away from the Golden State.

The challenge for Democrats is that the urban areas losing population are heavily Democrat, while those growing fastest - like the Central Valley and the Inland Empire - are trending red, meaning that Republicans are likely to benefit from the 2030 redraw.

Redrawing the maps now to benefit Democrats in the short term would just make their crash in 2032 that much more painful.

THEY’RE COMING AFTER KIM… Rep. Young Kim (CA-40), Orange County’s lone Republican member of Congress, voted for the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ earlier this month, and national Democrats are already putting a target on her back for it, accusing her of “ripping health care” away from her constituents.

Earlier this month, the California Nurses Association organized a protest outside Kim’s office in Anaheim, where protesters railed against the Medicaid changes and offered a (familiar) preview of the (same old) attacks to come.

• 👏 ROUND OF APPLAUSE: Just a quick side thank you to Young Kim for having a backbone and voting for this bill despite the barrage of attacks she has faced and will continue to receive.

Kim had been clear since the beginning that she had two priorities for the final bill before it could get her vote: protecting “vital Medicaid services” and increasing the SALT tax deduction. The bill increases the SALT tax deduction - a big deal for her Orange County district - from $10,000 to $40,000, and the cuts and reforms to Medicaid, like enforcing work requirements, hardly dent the program’s core constituents and services.

• To be clear, the BBB does not arbitrarily “cut” Medicaid. The savings (the “cuts”) come from new work requirements for Medicaid recipients, closing a funding loophole abused by states like California, requiring states to pay more for the services they provide through their state-run Medicaid programs, and cracking down on fraud.
  

• Earlier this year, Kim had signed a letter from a group of swing district House Republicans warning that they wouldn’t support the final bill if the changes to Medicaid resulted in vulnerable populations losing coverage. All of them ended up voting for the final bill.

WHAT SHE’S SAYING ➡️ Kim penned an op-ed last week in the Orange County Register touting the bill’s tax cuts and fighting back against “misinformation” about Medicaid, writing “this bill protects and strengthens Medicaid services for the most vulnerable American citizens who really need it” promoting “common sense accountability measures” like work requirements.

Big Beautiful Bill or not, Young Kim is a top target for Democrats in 2026. But they have a tall wall to scale if they hope to take her down. Kim, who comfortably won re-election last year by ten points, raised a whopping $2 million in Q3 of 2025. That’s a lot. She’s now sitting on nearly $4 million in cash. Republicans hold a five-point voter registration edge in her district.

Nevertheless, she’s attracted a swarm of Democrat challengers. Art gallery owner Esther Kim Varet is, on paper at least, the front-runner; she raised a little over $600,000 in Q3 with $1.3 million cash-on-hand. Christina Gagnier, a former school board member, raised $200,000.

The latest entrant is 26-year-old labor organizer and Democrat activist Perry Meade, who jumped into the race just this week and is apparently trying to capture the edgy enraged liberal demo by dropping an F-bomb in his launch video. Meade’s already notched over a dozen endorsements from elected Orange County Democrats.

As if on queue, the Washington Reporter, a GOP favorite on the Hill, published a story Thursday night exploring Meade’s “long-standing ties” to an operative with connections to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

ICE, ICE BABY… The Anaheim city council voted this week to formally join a federal lawsuit based in Southern California and backed by the ACLU and other groups challenging what it alleges are “unconstitutional” immigration raids that racially profile, use excessive force, and lack warrants.

Earlier this month, a federal district judge sided with the plaintiffs in that lawsuit and issued a temporary restraining order barring ICE from conducting detention stops unless they have “reasonable suspicion” the person is in “violation of U.S. immigration law.”

• Notably, the judge only applied that order to her court’s jurisdiction, which covers seven counties across southern California. Seems like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling reining in rogue judges from issuing nation-wide orders is starting to sink in.

The Trump Administration is already asking an appeals court to overthrow that temporary restraining order, arguing, “it is untenable for a district judge to single-handedly ‘restructure the operations’ of federal immigration enforcement.”

WHAT THE OTHER SIDE IS SAYING: Per the Los Angeles Times, “The plaintiffs argued in their complaint that immigration agents cornered brown-skinned people in Home Depot parking lots, at car washes and at bus stops across Southern California in a show of force without establishing reasonable suspicion that they had violated immigration laws.”

The case will likely be fully heard later this year and will be yet another national story around how much power ICE has to enforce immigration law.

WAIT, THERE'S MORE...

🍔 California icon In-N-Out announced it is shutting down its headquarters in Irvine amid plans to expand into Tennessee. “Raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” owner and president Lynsi Snyder said in a recent podcast.

🎭 The Orange city council decided to shelve a resolution demanding ICE agents remove face coverings while conducting raids, doubting it would have any impact.

⚕️ Orange County’s Medicaid program CalOptima is sitting on $1.2 billion in the bank while other states and counties grapple with budget concerns. Auditors are urging them to spend the money, while officials say they are preparing themselves for shortfalls.