Republicans won the redistricting competition. Don't tell that to this
California congressman
[August 17, 2026]
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
LINCOLN, Calif. (AP) — One thing Anne Smull, a retired feedstore owner,
was looking forward to on Election Day was voting for the man who
currently represents her in Congress, conservative Rep. Kevin Kiley. Now
she can't.
That's because California Democrats sliced Kiley's district six ways as
payback for Republican redistricting in Texas and elsewhere. The chunk
of the district that Smull, who identifies as a conservative, lives in
is now grafted onto an overwhelmingly Democratic seat based in the
state's wine country.
During a recent lunch at a cafe in Lincoln, a onetime agricultural town
that has morphed into a bedroom community on the edge of Sacramento's
exurban sprawl, Smull was heartbroken to hear she can no longer vote for
Kiley.
“He believes in the same things I do,” Smull said. “It feels sneaky and
underhanded.”
Republicans started the redistricting competition. Democrats might
finish it
Democratic voters in several other states know how Smull feels.
President Donald Trump last year told GOP-controlled states to redraw
their maps before this year's midterm elections to increase the number
of winnable seats for Republicans in order to help the party hold onto
the U.S. House. The effort was turbocharged by a U.S. Supreme Court
decision this spring that neutralized a key provision of the Voting
Rights Act and cleared the way for Republicans to redraw more seats
across the South that had elected Black Democrats.
Democratic-leaning and heavily minority communities from Texas to
Tennessee have been split into multiple congressional districts that
dilute the Democratic vote by stretching deep into conservative areas.
In the future, it is likely that more Republican voters in other states
will go through what Smull and other conservatives in Northern
California are facing. Democrats in Maryland, New York, Illinois and
other strongholds have pledged to retaliate in time for the 2028
elections and split Republican-leaning districts the way their
California counterparts did Kiley's.
Democrats have been hindered nationally by stricter rules against
partisan line-drawing in their states, but California showed a way
around that. California Democrats won voter approval last year to redraw
the state's congressional map, originally made by an independent
commission, and formed five new Democratic-leaning seats.
‘We have zero voice,’ says voter angry at the Democratic drive for a
new political map
Kiley's is one of them. The reworked political lines led the two-term
congressman to leave the Republican Party and run as an independent in
the slightly Democratic-leaning district that now includes his home.
He spoke out against partisan gerrymandering, even unsuccessfully trying
to force the Republican-led House to allow a vote on a bill to ban
mid-decade redistricting.
“We've seen partisan divisions really spin out of control in really
harmful ways, and I think exhibit number one is the redistricting wars,”
Kiley recently told a group of voters in the suburb of Citrus Heights.
Democrats contend Kiley's party switch is purely a political trick to
survive in a more liberal district. They note he still caucuses with
House Republicans, has voted for many of the GOP's priorities, including
Trump's sweeping budget and tax cut bill last year, and that political
organizations run by House Republicans are spending money to back his
reelection.
Even some of Kiley's supporters think the election was a factor in the
congressman's decision to become an independent.
“My original thinking was he did it because of redistricting — maybe
it'd help him get reelected,” said John Coburn, a 68-year-old retired
business owner, at the Citrus Heights event.
Coburn is furious at the Democrats’ redistricting and hopes Kiley wins.
Coburn does not care that they did it in retaliation for Texas, where
Republicans at Trump's directive revised that state's map to carve out
up to five new winnable conservative seats.
“I don't care about Texas, I live in California,” Coburn said, adding
that “40% of the state is Republican, and we have zero voice. Zero. It's
not how our Founding Fathers intended.”
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Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., a candidate for the California 6th
District seat in the House of Representatives in the Nov. 3,
election, appears at a campaign event in Citrus Heights, Calif.,
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
For Democrats in the district, a rare political opportunity
In an interview, Kiley said his switch to independent was no
political gambit. If he wanted to stay in the House, he argued, he
could have had an easier time staying in the GOP, moving to a more
conservative district that included parts of his old one and running
in a Republican primary there.
"I could have gone there and run and played the same game these
other politicians are playing,” he said.
Kiley said he is caucusing with Republicans to avoid losing his
seats on committees and that in the next Congress he will try to
change rules so independent members do not lose committee seats
because they do not caucus with one of the two major parties.
Among his backers, he noted, is onetime Democratic presidential
hopeful Andrew Yang, a former technology entrepreneur who co-founded
a centrist party for independents.
The Democrat running against Kiley, former state Sen. Richard Pan,
scoffs at his rival's newfound independent status.
“He was a MAGA champion when he first ran for Congress, and now he's
trying to say ‘I’m not,'” Pan told a crowd at a senior community in
Roseville, referring to Trump's “Make America Great Again” movement.
Earlier that day, Pan swung by the Placer County Democratic Party
office, tucked away on the second story of a brick shopping arcade
in Lincoln's compact downtown.
Placer is a Republican county that stretches from the Sacramento
suburbs to the northwestern shores of Lake Tahoe. The entire county
is in Kiley's current district, but it will be divided among three
districts in the new map.
Kathleen Crawford, chair of the county Democratic Party, was
enthusiastic about the county getting carved up.
“It's worth it, because we have an opportunity to get Democratic
representation, which has been missing from our county,” Crawford
said. “I've been here 15 years, and this is my first real
opportunity to elect a Democrat.”
A never-ending cycle that cuts out ‘the little people’
Lincoln's downtown is flanked by fruit, vegetable and flower farms,
as well as new subdivisions. The community and its neighboring
suburbs have become a destination for people fleeing the San
Francisco Bay Area's housing prices. That has helped change the once
solidly conservative area into a political battleground where
skilled mapmakers can draw winnable seats for Democrats.
Ed Church, a 61-year-old risk manager, was eating lunch at Simple
Pleasures cafe in Lincoln when he contemplated Kiley's shift. A
Democrat, Church has not been a Kiley fan and he was bemused by the
congressman's move.
“If that's how he'd been initially and not so MAGA, I probably could
have supported him,” Church said of Kiley's independent status. Now
Church, as a Lincoln resident, is in a purely Democratic district
and will not have a say in Kiley's fate in November. His main
criteria in the election will be “who's going to stand up to Trump?”
Across the street at a gun store, Wesley Johnson, 43, who considers
himself a conservative independent, said he was dispirited by the
state's redistricting.
“I feel Northern California is not represented fairly,” Johnson
said. “San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles control
everything.”
He acknowledged Republicans were doing the same thing in states they
controlled and said he did not know how it could stop.
“You're just cutting out the little people,” Johnson said.
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