The Dictatorship

California voters approve new US House map to boost Democrats in 2026

Published

6 months ago

November 6, 2025

California voters approve new US House map to boost Democrats in 2026

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California voters approved new congressional district boundaries Tuesday, delivering a victory for Democrats in the state-by-state redistricting battle that will help determine which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026 and, with it, the power to thwart or advance President Donald Trump’s agenda.

The approval of Proposition 50 gives Democrats a shot at winning as many as five additional seats, just enough to blunt Texas Republicans’ move to redraw their own maps to pick up five GOP seats at Trump’s urging. Texas’ move and California’s response have kicked off a flurry of redistricting efforts around the country, with Republican states appearing to have an edge. Deeply blue California is Democrats’ best opportunity to make up seats.

Midterm elections typically punish the party in the White House, and Trump is fighting to maintain his party’s slim House majority. Republicans hold 219 seats to Democrats’ 213.

Tuesday’s results mark a political victory for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cast the measure as an essential tool to fight back against Trump and protect American democracy.

Speaking to reporters in Sacramento, Newsom cast the California vote as part of a broader national rejection of Trump’s policies that saw Democratic governors elevated in New Jersey and Virginia. But he warned the more consequential battle would come next year.

If Democrats win the House majority, they can “end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it,” Newsom said. “It is all on the line, a bright line, in 2026.”

Measure supported by Newsom and Obama

California’s Proposition 50 asked voters to suspend House maps drawn by an independent commission and replace them with rejiggered districts adopted by the Democratic-controlled Legislature. Those new districts would be in place for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections.

The recast districts aim to dilute Republican voters’ power, in one case by uniting rural, conservative-leaning parts of far northern California with Marin County, a famously liberal coastal stronghold across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

The measure was spearheaded by Newsom, who threw the weight of his political operation behind it in a major test of his mettle ahead of a potential 2028 presidential campaign. Former President Barack Obama urged voters to pass it as well.

Gov. Gavin Newsom arrives at a campaign event on Proposition 50 in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

“Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years,” Obama said in one ad. “You can stop Republicans in their tracks.”

Critics said two wrongs don’t make a right. They urged Californians to reject the measure, even if they have misgivings about Trump’s moves elsewhere.

Among the most prominent critics was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star and former Republican governor who pushed for the creation of the independent commission, which voters approved in 2008 and 2010. It makes no sense to fight Trump by becoming him, Schwarzenegger said in Septemberarguing that the proposal would “take the power away from the people.”

“I don’t want Newsom to have control,” said Rebecca Fleshman, a 63-year-old retired medical assistant from Southern California, who voted against the measure. “I don’t want the state to be blue. I want it to be red.”

A lopsided campaign foreshadowed the vote

After an early burst of TV advertising, opponents of the plan struggled to raise cash in a state with some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.

The campaign followed an unusual trajectory. A handful of Republican congressmen who will see their districts dramatically reshaped – and their jobs endangered — mostly stayed away from the campaign spotlight. With opponents short on cash, Newsom and his supporters dominated TV screens in the critical closing weeks.

Voters form a line at a polling station on the UCLA campus Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Total spending on broadcast and cable ads topped $100 million, with more than two-thirds of it coming from supporters. Newsom told people to stop donating in the race’s final weeks.

The GOP congressmen — Reps. Ken Calvert, Darrell Issa, Kevin Kiley, David Valadao and Doug LaMalfa — will see right-leaning voters reduced and left-leaning voters boosted in their respective districts in a shift that would make it likely a Democratic candidate would prevail in each race.

Issa issued a defiant statement, saying: “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll continue to represent the people of California regardless of their party or where they live.”

Calvert said Newsom engineered a “power grab” while housing costs, gas prices and taxes continue to strain family budgets. “I am determined to keep fighting for the families I represent,” he said in an email.

AP poll finds voters motivated by political reasons

Proposition 50 won a swift and decisive victory, as the AP declared a winner when polls closed statewide. Early returns were strongly in favor of the measure, as were preliminary results from the AP Voter Poll, an expansive survey of more than 4,000 voters in California.

Roughly 7 in 10 California voters said party control of Congress was “very important” to them, and those voters overwhelmingly supported the measure, according to the AP Voter Poll.

About 8 in 10 California voters who supported the ballot measure said it was necessary to counter the changes made by Republicans in other states, while only about 2 in 10 said they supported it because it was the best way to draw maps, AP Voter Poll found.

Trump, who overwhelmingly lost California in his three presidential campaigns, largely stayed out of the fray. A week before the election, he urged voters in a social media post not to vote early or by mail — messaging that conflicted with that of top Republicans in the state who urged people to get their ballots in as soon as possible.

In a post Tuesday on his social media platform, the president called the state’s voting process “RIGGED” and warned that it was “under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!” Secretary of State Shirley Weber called that “another baseless claim.”

The national House map is in flux

Congressional district boundaries are typically redrawn every 10 years to reflect population shifts documented in the census. Mid-decade redistricting is unusual, absent a court order finding fault with the maps in place.

Beyond Texas, Republicans expect to gain one seat each from new maps in Missouri and North Carolina, and potentially two more in Ohio. Five other GOP-led states are also considering new maps: Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana and Nebraska.

On the Democratic side, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Virginia have proposals to redraw maps, but major hurdles remain.

A court has ordered new boundaries be drawn in Utah, where all four House districts are represented by Republicans, but it remains to be seen if the state will approve a map that makes any of them winnable for Democrats.

Here’s what to know about Election Night 2025:

Down the ballot in some states, voters approved Democrat ballot measures, except in deep-red Texas: In Maine, voters rejected changes to voting that would have shortened the early voting period and required photo ID—something Trump called for in a social media post Tuesday night. Voters in the state also approved a red flag law gun control measure. In Colorado, voters opted to raise taxes on higher-earning households to pay for public school student meals. While Maine remains competitive for Republicans, Colorado has shifted left. In Texas, meanwhile, votes approved amendments to the state constitution that require U.S. citizenship to vote there and to affirm that parents are the primary decision-makers for their children.
Impact on national politics next year and beyond: The one conte st on Tuesday that may do the most to shape national politics going forward is a measure on the ballot in Californiawhere voters will decide whether to approve a new congressional map that could flip as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democratic control in the 2026 midterm elections. California’s Proposition 50 is a response to Trump’s gerrymandering push to keep the U.S. House under Republican control in the 2026 midterms.
How the AP calls races: The AP takes a careful and thorough analysis of the latest available vote tallies and a variety of other election datawith the goal of answering this question: Is there any circumstance in which the trailing candidate can catch up? If the answer is no, then the leading candidate has won. Read more here about how it is done.

Siddhartha Deb, 52, has lived in the U.S. since he was 7 years old but he just became a citizen Tuesday. Immediately afterward he registered to vote at San Francisco City Hall and cast his ballot in favor of Newsom’s measure.

“I don’t like the way the Republican Party is basically trying to rig elections by gerrymandering,” Deb said. “And this is the only way, to fight fire with fire.”

___

Cooper reported from Phoenix and Nguyen from Sacramento, California. Associated Press writers Amy Taxin in Norco, California, and Terry Chea in San Francisco contributed.

The Dictatorship

Tillis slams Hegseth for ‘impulsive decisions not grounded in reality’

Published

2 hours ago

May 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Tillis slams Hegseth for ‘impulsive decisions not grounded in reality’

May. 16, 2026, 4:26 PM EDT

Sen. Thom Tillis issued a harsh critique of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his “mediocre yes-men” on Saturday for what the North Carolina Republican called a “careless decision” to force out and downgrade U.S. general officers.

“Hegseth continues to surprise and disrespect our greatest allies and some of our best military professionals with impulsive decisions not grounded in reality or good judgment,” Tillis wrote in a post on X.

Tillis posted his comments in response to new reporting from NOTUS that the Pentagon is planning on downgrading the Army’s top command overseeing Europe and Africa, which the publication attributed to five people familiar with the decision. The Pentagon has not confirmed such plans and did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MS NOW regarding the NOTUS report and Tillis’s rebuke of Hegseth.

The move would come amid a larger restructuring of U.S. forces in Europe, including the halting of troop deployments to Germany and Poland, and reverse the merger of the Army’s European and African commands that was ordered during Trump’s first term.

Tillis also called out Hegseth for his planned replacement of Gen. Christopher Donahue, which was also first reported by NOTUS. The senator called the reported move to replace Donahue, a four-star general best known as the last U.S. servicemember to exit Afghanistan in 2021, “a step that is not in the best interests of our nation or our servicemembers.”

“If the rumors are true that Hegseth is trying to sideline Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of our nation’s finest warfighters, by downgrading U.S. Army Europe-Africa to a 3-star command, he is taking another step down a dangerous path,” Tillis said.

Last month, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — the Army’s top uniformed officer — and two other generals following a purge of other senior military leaders. Tillis said Donahue has “dedicated his entire career to upholding the high standards and warrior ethos that Hegseth claims he is restoring to our ranks.”

Since the North Carolinian announced he would retire from the Senate when his term is up in January, he has become the rare outspoken GOP critic of the Trump administration. He recently held up Kevin Warsh’s nomination to chair the Federal Reserve, only voting to confirm the former financier once the Department of Justice ended its investigation into outgoing Fed chair Jerome Powell.

Tillis was initially a holdout for Hegeth’s Senate confirmation but ultimately supported him, though he became a vocal critic of the defense secretary, telling BLN last summer that Hegseth appeared “out of his depth” atop the department.

“Hegseth would do well to surround himself with more patriots like General Donahue and to get his henchmen, who are not qualified to carry Donahue’s bag, out of the Pentagon,” Tillis said at the end of his post. “Keep your word, Mr. Secretary: choose meritocracy over your mediocre yes-men.”

Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C.

The Dictatorship

‘Clobbered’: Trump vows Cassidy will lose Louisiana’s Senate GOP primary

Published

2 hours ago

May 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

May. 16, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT

“Bill Cassidy is a sleazebag, a terrible guy, who is BAD FOR LOUISIANA.”

And so began President Donald Trump’s social media rant on Saturday, fresh off his trip to Chinaback in Washington and waging his revenge tour in full force on a day when fealty to the president is on the ballot in the Bayou State.

“Now he’s going to get CLOBBERED, hopefully, in today’s BIG election, by two great people!!!” the president continued in his Truth Social postasking GOP voters in Louisiana to cast their ballots for Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., the candidate Trump is backing to win the high-profile Senate GOP primary contest in a key test of his strength within the Republican Party as he seeks to punish Cassidy for his betrayal.

In his first Truth Social post aimed at Cassidy since returning to U.S. soil, Trump pointed to the two-term senator’s biggest sin: His 2021 vote to convict Trump on impeachment charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

“Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a disloyal disaster. His entire past campaign for the Senate was about ‘TRUMP,’ how he’s with me all the way, and then, after winning, he turned around and voted to IMPEACH me for something that has now proven to be total ‘bullshit!’” Trump wrote.

A third candidate, Louisiana state treasurer John Fleming is also seeking the GOP Senate nomination, and recent polling from Emerson College shows both challengers ahead of Cassidy.

Still, Cassidy has continued to reach out to MAGA voters, saying Friday that the race “is not me versus Donald Trump.”

“If somebody wants someone who can work with President Trump for the good of our country and the good of our state, I’m your candidate,” Cassidy told MS NOW. He did not comment on whether the Republican party has room for those that cross Trump. When asked for comment on the president’s criticism posted Saturday, Cassidy’s campaign responded with a video of Letlow referring to herself as a “progressive leader.”

Cassidy’s battle for political survival illustrates the stark divide within the Republican Party between the establishment and true believers in the MAGA movement.

Richard Logis, a former MAGA activist who defected from Trump’s movement, said Saturday that he believes the MAGA wing of the GOP, which prides itself on being a big-tent party, will continue to splinter as the president’s popularity sinks.

“I do believe that the cracks are there right now,” Logis said on MS NOW’s “The Weekend,” adding, “I think the schisms and the chasms are widening.”

Logis and members of his organization, called Leaving MAGA, are part of a small but vocal community of Republicans mounting an effort to redirect the future of the GOP away from the MAGA movement that Trump created, but their mission faces long odds.

According to polling by YouGov63% of Republicans today identify as MAGA, up from 53% in 2025 and 38% back in 2023, a year after Logis left the movement. However, MAGA identification among registered independent voters remains low in the latest polling data — just 12% — and overall, only one in four voters in the U.S. identifies as MAGA.

Trump has spent much of his second term punishing those within his party who broke with his agenda, including a handful of state senators in Indiana who rejected his push to redraw the state’s congressional map. Of the seven state senators who were challenged by Trump-backed candidates, five lost their reelection bids.

The ideological battle within the GOP came into focus early in Trump’s second term. Multiple Republican lawmakers, including onetime MAGA firebrand former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., either resigned or announced their retirement after breaking with the president.

Greene, who publicly fell out with the president over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, said in January that “MAGA purity tests and loyalty demands are going to cost the Republican Party votes.” She left Congress after Trump labeled her a “traitor” for criticizing his administration’s handling of the Epstein files and backed a GOP primary challenger in her district.

The president’s pattern of political retribution began in force following his departure from the White House in 2021, when he used his influence to oust prominent GOP incumbents who voted for his impeachment or conviction, including former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

On Saturday night in Louisiana after the polls have closed and the counting is done, Cassidy, one of three Republican senators remaining who voted to convict Trump, may find out whether he’s joining Cheney in early retirement.

Mychael Schnell and Syedah Asghar contributed to this report.

Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C.

The Dictatorship

Israel says it killed Hamas military leader in Gaza, architect of Oct. 7 attacks

Published

2 hours ago

May 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Israel says it killed Hamas military leader in Gaza, architect of Oct. 7 attacks

May. 16, 2026, 10:19 AM EDT

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — An Israeli airstrike in Gazakilled the leader of Hamas’ military wing who was one of the last surviving architects of the attacks that triggered the warin late 2023, the Israeli military said Saturday. Hamas confirmed the death.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad was killed on Friday, Israel’s army said, describing him as one of the senior Hamas military commanders who directed the planning and execution of the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw more than 250 taken hostage.

A Hamas spokesperson, Hazem Qassem, confirmed the killing on social media.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas remains fragile, and the top diplomat overseeing it says it has stalledbecause of the deadlock over disarming Hamas. Both sides have traded accusations of violations. Gaza has seen near-daily Israeli fire with more than 850 people killed in the Palestinian territory since the ceasefire went into effect in October, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The ministry is part of Gaza’s Hamas-run government, but staffed by medical professionals who maintain and publish detailed records viewed as generally reliable by the international community. The ministry overall says Israel’s retaliatory strikes in the war have devastated the Palestinian enclave and killed more than 72,700 people.

Israel said that al-Haddad had assumed the role of Hamas commander after his predecessor, Mohammed Sinwar, was killed. The army said that al-Haddad had surrounded himself with Israeli hostages during the war as a shield against an attack.

Al-Haddad’s family confirmed his death in Friday’s strike to The Associated Press. Six other people, including his wife and daughter, were also killed. His two sons were killed earlier in the war.

His body was wrapped in Hamas and Palestinian flags as it was carried by mourners at Saturday’s funeral in Gaza City.

Al-Haddad joined Hamas when it was established in the 1980s, and was a member of the Qassam Brigades’ Majd section tasked to go after collaborators with Israel. He was also a member of Hamas’ Military Council, the highest group of commanders that played a key role in the attacks that sparked the war.

Israel’s army chief of staff called his killing a significant operation, and said that Israel would continue pursuing its enemies to hold them accountable.

Palestinian man killed in West Bank

Violence flared Saturday in the occupied West Bankwhere Israeli troops shot and killed a 34-year-old Palestinian in the Jenin refugee camp, according to the Palestinian Health ministry.

Hassan Fayyad was fatally shot in a thigh, the Palestinian Red Crescent said. Israel’s military said that troops first fired warning shots at a person trying to infiltrate the camp and shot him when he didn’t comply. They provided him with medical treatment as he was transferred to a hospital, it said.

Israeli troops on Thursday shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in Eastern Lubban town in Nablus, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israel’s military said that it identified three people hurling rocks toward Israeli vehicles and “endangering lives,” and troops fired at them, killing one.

On Friday, settlers set fire to a mosque and vehicles in the village of Jibiya, northwest of Ramallah, Palestinian religious authorities said. Security camera footage showed people pouring flammable material on the mosque and at least two vehicles, said Sabir Shalash, the head of Jibiya’s municipal council. Spray-painted Hebrew slogans were found on the mosque’s walls, he said.

The Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs described the attack as “a cowardly terrorist act” and criticized the international community’s inaction over mounting Jewish settler attacks against Muslim and Christian sites in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Israeli military and police said that they were deployed to the area and didn’t locate any suspects, but were investigating. The army said that it “strongly condemns” attacks on religious institutions.