LINCOLN, Calif. – 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 café in Lincoln, a once-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 initiated the redistricting competition, and now Democrats are poised to finish it. Democratic voters in several other states can empathize with Smull’s plight.
In 2022, President Donald Trump encouraged GOP-controlled states to redraw their maps before the midterm elections to increase winnable seats for Republicans, hoping to help the party maintain control of the U.S. House. This effort gained momentum after a U.S. Supreme Court decision that undermined a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, allowing Republicans to redraw more seats across the South that had previously elected Black Democrats.
Democratic-leaning and heavily minority communities from Texas to Tennessee have been split into multiple congressional districts, diluting the Democratic vote by stretching deep into conservative areas.
Looking ahead, it is likely that more Republican voters in other states will experience what Smull and other conservatives in Northern California are currently facing. Democrats in Maryland, New York, Illinois, and other strongholds have pledged to retaliate ahead of the 2028 elections, aiming to split Republican-leaning districts in a similar fashion to how California Democrats reshaped Kiley’s district.
Democrats have faced challenges nationally due to stricter rules against partisan line-drawing, yet California demonstrated a way around that. In 2022, California Democrats won voter approval to redraw the congressional map, originally established by an independent commission, resulting in the creation of five new Democratic-leaning seats.
Kiley’s district is one such example. 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 has vocally opposed partisan gerrymandering, even attempting to mandate a vote on a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting in the Republican-led House. “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 stated to a group of voters in Citrus Heights.
Democrats argue that Kiley’s party switch is merely a tactical maneuver to survive in a more liberal district. They point out that he still caucuses with House Republicans and has voted for many GOP priorities, including Trump’s budget and tax cut bill. Political organizations linked to House Republicans are also supporting his reelection.
Even some of Kiley’s supporters believe the election played a role in his decision to become an independent. “My original thinking was he did it because of redistricting — maybe it would help him get reelected,” said John Coburn, a 68-year-old retired business owner, during a Citrus Heights event.
Coburn is furious about the Democrats’ redistricting and hopes Kiley prevails. He is unconcerned with the fact that Democrats are responding to GOP actions in Texas, where Republicans, at Trump’s prompting, revised the state’s map to create up to five new conservative seats.
“I don’t care about Texas, I live in California,” Coburn asserted, adding that “40% of the state is Republican, and we have zero voice. Zero. It’s not how our Founding Fathers intended.”
For Democrats in the district, this situation presents a rare political opportunity.
In an interview, Kiley contended that his switch to independent status was not a political gambit. He could have retained his seat more easily by shifting 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 explained.
Kiley stated that he is caucusing with Republicans to avoid losing committee seats and plans to advocate for changes that would allow independent members to retain committee positions without needing to caucus with either major party.
Among his supporters is former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, who co-founded a centrist party for independents.
The Democrat challenging Kiley, former state Sen. Richard Pan, is skeptical about Kiley’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 remarked to a crowd in Roseville.
Earlier that day, Pan visited the Placer County Democratic Party office, located in Lincoln’s compact downtown. Placer is a Republican county stretching from Sacramento’s suburbs to the northwestern shores of Lake Tahoe. While the entire county is currently in Kiley’s district, it will be divided among three districts in the new map.
Kathleen Crawford, chair of the county Democratic Party, expressed enthusiasm about the county’s division. “It’s worth it because we have an opportunity to get Democratic representation, which has been missing from our county,” she said. “I’ve been here 15 years, and this is my first real opportunity to elect a Democrat.”
Lincoln’s downtown is surrounded by fruit, vegetable, and flower farms, alongside new subdivisions. The community and its neighboring suburbs have become a haven for individuals fleeing high housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area, contributing to the transformation of a once-solidly conservative area into a political battleground where skilled mapmakers can craft winnable seats for Democrats.
Ed Church, a 61-year-old risk manager, was dining at Simple Pleasures café in Lincoln while contemplating Kiley’s shift. A Democrat, Church has not been a fan of Kiley and found the congressman’s move amusing.
“If that’s how he’d been initially and not so MAGA, I probably could have supported him,” Church remarked, noting that he is now in a purely Democratic district and will not have a say in Kiley’s future in November. His primary criterion for the election will be “who’s going to stand up to Trump?”
Across the street at a gun store, Wesley Johnson, 43, who identifies as a conservative independent, expressed disappointment with the state’s redistricting. “I feel Northern California is not represented fairly,” Johnson lamented. “San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles control everything.”
He acknowledged that Republicans are engaging in similar tactics in states they govern, leaving him uncertain about how to rectify the situation. “You’re just cutting out the little people,” Johnson added.
