Republicans won the redistricting competition. Don't tell that to this California congressman

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.”

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 California Democrats won voter approval last year to redraw the state's congressional map, originally made by an independent commission, and formed five new Democratic-leaning seats.

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.”

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.”

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.

Richard Pan, the Democratic candidate for the California 6th District seat in the House of Representatives in the Nov. 3 election, greets people at a campaign event, in Roseville, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Victoria Fochetti-Murray, left, discusses the 2022 murder of her 17-year-old son,Tony Rocha, with Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., a candidate for the California 6th District seat in the House of Representatives, at a campaign event in Citrus Height Calif.,Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Richard Pan, the Democratic candidate for the California 6th District seat in the House of Representatives in the Nov. 3 election, appears at a campaign event, in Roseville, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

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)

RUTENG, Indonesia (AP) — Rescue teams in eastern Indonesia recovered six more bodies Sunday, a day after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake, raising the death toll to 53, authorities said, as thousands of displaced people spent the night outdoors in fear of aftershocks.

Rescuers dug through debris looking for anyone buried beneath landslides triggered by the quake across six regencies on Flores, a predominantly Catholic island in the Muslim-majority country. They focused on three regencies that remained inaccessible: hardest-hit Manggarai, East Manggarai and Nagekeo.

“We have cleared most landslides and reopened roads to previously isolated villages, although communication disruptions and power outages continue to hamper search efforts,” said Fathur Rahman, head of the search-and-rescue office in Maumere, the capital of Sikka regency.

The agency said more than 900 homes were destroyed and 450 more damaged in East Nusa Tenggara province, forcing about 5,000 people into temporary shelters. At least 241 homes were damaged in the Flores region alone, Muhari said.

The quake occurred at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles) shortly before 6 a.m. Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Residents fled in panic as tsunami warnings were issued and later lifted.

Authorities have since recorded at least 995 aftershocks, but only 46 were felt by residents, said Abdul Muhari, the National Disaster Management Agency’s chief for disaster prevention, adding that 135 people were injured.

Many residents at Labuan Bajo, the gateway to Komodo National Park, one of Indonesia’s best-known tourist destinations, spent the night outside because of the aftershocks.

“The shaking was terrifying, so intense that my house nearly collapsed,” said Anastasia Imad, a farmer, speaking from a makeshift green tent beside her damaged home. “We feared the aftershocks would bring it down on us while we slept.”

Landslides blocked sections of the Trans-Flores Highway, a roughly 700-kilometer (435-mile) road linking communities across the mountainous island.

Meanwhile, relief workers distributed rice, ready-to-eat meals, drinking water, blankets and medicine, while emergency shelters were set up for displaced residents. Authorities said restoring electricity and communications, as well as delivering aid to remote villages isolated by landslides, were among the biggest challenges.

Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because of its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped arc of seismic faults and volcanoes.

Flores has experienced some of the country’s deadliest disasters. A powerful earthquake and tsunami in 1992 killed about 2,500 people on the island.

In 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake triggered a tsunami on the island of Sulawesi that killed more than 4,400 people. In 2004, a magnitude 9.1 quake off Sumatra unleashed a tsunami that killed about 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

Associated Press writers Niniek Karmini and Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

A worker removes a broken furniture inside a room at the local government office which was damaged during an earthquake in Ruteng, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

Saverinus Serli, left, inspects his earthquake-damaged house in Lelak, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

A woman sits inside a tent amid fear of aftershocks following an earthquake, in Reok, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Aquila Handayani Abbas)

A woman holds a cross she recovered from the rubble of her earthquake-damaged house in Mbeliling, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

A man checks his phone near a building collapsed due to an earthquake, in Reok, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Aquila Handayani Abbas)

Patients are treated in the hallway of a hospital following an earthquake in Labuan Bajo, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Saturday, Aug. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

Stefanus Sailon, right, and his wife Sisilia Ilus inspect their house which was damaged during an earthquake in Mbeliling, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

A man stands inside his earthquake-damaged house in Mbeliling, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

Maria Imakulata Ndue, right, and her son Yohanes Defrianus Ratu stand outside their earthquake-damaged house in Lembor, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

In this photo released by the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS), rescuers search for victims at a damaged building following an earthquake in Maumere, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, Saturday, Aug. 15, 2026. (BASARNAS via AP)