California Governor Gavin Newsom is betting everything on his biblical, eye-for-an-eye campaign to offset Texas’s proposed congressional redistricting with an equally gerrymandered map of his own—his presidential ambitions, the potential future of the party, and a whole lot of money. The statewide ballot initiative is expected to cost at least $200 million, according to multiple political operatives. “The cost of the initiative will be exponentially greater than the cost if all sides played in those districts in 2026,” said a Republican who works on House races, citing the high number of expensive media markets that blanket the state. “You’re going to see cycle-wide spending on an initiative one year before the actual election cycle.”

Naturally, the feeding frenzy has attracted the attention of two of the state’s most practiced fundraisers, Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy. Both former House speakers built their political power bases in California, which sends the largest number of representatives to Congress. And, of course, nearly every sitting California member came up through the political machines built by Pelosi or McCarthy, both of whom helped redefine fundraising in the super PAC era. Now, it’s their shared neighborhood at war, as California Democrats seek to neutralize Trump’s plan to gain five seats in Texas—the first shot in what seems likely to become a national redistricting arms race.

Pelosi, in particular, is a generational fundraiser within her party, and she intends to unleash that firepower once again, a source close to her confirmed. “She definitely wants to be involved in any way she can,” this person said. Sure, Pelosi has gone out of her way, in her post-speakership, to portray herself as just another rank-and-file member. (Hakeem Jeffries is running the show now, people…) And yes, California Reps. Zoe Lofgren, the delegation chair, and Pete Aguilar, the third-ranking Democrat in House leadership, have spearheaded the mapmaking process. But as demonstrated by the calculated way in which Pelosi orchestrated the end of Biden’s reelection campaign, she can be just as powerful behind the scenes.

In some ways, Pelosi has been here before. During her first tour as the top House Democrat, in 2004, she flipped five seats—a striking achievement in a sour cycle that featured John Kerry losing at the top of the ticket. But the Texas G.O.P. also flipped five seats that same year, on the strength of a fresh congressional map. Moreover, Pelosi has been fixated on Democrats’ redistricting strategy for years, even though most politicians don’t worry about it until late in any given decade. In her first term as speaker emerita, she donated $1.5 million to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former Attorney General Eric Holder, and the associated National Redistricting Action Fund—which advocate for independent redistricting commissions and work to “combat gerrymandering.”

That positioning is somewhat ironic now, given Pelosi’s current support for precisely such a gerrymander in her home state. But, like Newsom, she has framed the California effort as necessary to counter Texas. Both politicians are also in lockstep in describing the ballot initiative as conditional on Texas passing its maps. The current proposed language also states that California’s gerrymander would be temporary, and that the independent mapmaking commission would be restored in 2030. The California Democratic political class, if not their voters, are largely united by the notion that, while they didn’t ask for this war, they would be fools to “unilaterally disarm,” in Pelosi’s words.

It’s all reminiscent of the party’s rhetoric in 2010, when Democrats reluctantly changed their tune on super PACs after losing the House. “It would be political malpractice for House Democrats to unilaterally disarm against secretive Republican special interests,” Pelosi’s then-political director, Jennifer Crider, told Politico in 2011. These days, we have Newsom declaring, “It’s not good enough to just hold hands and have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. … We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we’ve got to fight fire with fire.” 

Of course, threading that needle in the TikTok soundbite era will require putting a lot of money behind the message. And Democrats will be up against McCarthy, something of a fundraising powerhouse himself. McCarthy’s tenure as speaker lasted only nine months, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that he was essentially the financial nexus of the California G.O.P. for 15 years, until he resigned from Congress in 2023. Democrats may scoff at his reentry into politics, given the unceremonious end of his Capitol Hill career. But McCarthy promised to raise $100 million to fight the ballot initiative almost as soon as Democrats released their proposed maps, according to Politico, and his top California lieutenants are joining the fight.

Also, it’s personal for McCarthy, who helped recruit and elect the very Republican members that the California gerrymander would likely eliminate. “He has personal relationships with a lot of these guys that span before their time in the House, and in a lot of instances, he was the one who recruited them to run for the House,” said a California Republican who’s involved in the redistricting fight. “All of these guys are his ride-or-dies.” Take Republican Doug LaMalfa, whose 1st district would get mauled under the new maps. The Northern California stalwart was fiercely loyal to McCarthy even until the very end of his speakership, when he issued a statement chastising the “splinter group” of Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz, who ousted McCarthy on what LaMalfa called “one of the most frustrating and self-destructive days” he’d seen in Congress. “On a personal note,” he wrote, “Kevin McCarthy is a good friend who did not deserve to be betrayed this way.”

But McCarthy may not be the biggest-name Republican in the fight. Trump will likely get involved, and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, still a brand-name force in California politics, is a longtime foe of gerrymandering (his spokesman has quoted him as calling it “evil”). Though he’s kept a low profile, it’s hard to see Schwarzenegger staying on the sidelines, given that independent redistricting reform beyond California is his political legacy. In a post on X last week, Schwarzenegger wrote that he was “getting ready for the gerrymandering battle.” He attached a photo of himself pumping weights while wearing a shirt that read, “F*** the Politicians. Terminate Gerrymandering.”

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