Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
David Daley: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Daley: Here we go again, right? This is all of Donald Trump’s favorite lines about election fraud, about vote by mail, about how the 2020 election was stolen from him. And once again, all of these lines have no basis in reality. There is no truth to any of it. Whenever Republicans are asked to put up any proof whatsoever about voter fraud, they can’t do it. You can’t find actual examples of this. It is a technique to intimidate and to scare voters. I’m certain that we will see much more of it, but it comes from a place of weakness, of fear, and we have to stand up and fight this.
Daley: I expect Trump to argue exactly that: that this is a national security question, that this is about voter fraud, that there are non-Americans voting in elections, that there are dead people voting in elections, immigrants—all of which we know to be not true. You can’t actually find documented examples of this from American elections. It simply does not happen. What we are seeing though, I think, is going to be a real effort to militarize the nation ahead of the 2026 elections. This might be done in the name of purportedly stopping voter fraud, but really it will be done in the name of trying to intimidate Democratic voters and keep them away from the polls. We’re seeing what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C., with National Guard troops on the ground. We see red state governors sending National Guardsmen from their states. And if we think that this is going to stop in Washington, D.C., it’s not. And if we think that this is not likely to happen in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Atlanta, in Philadelphia, in all of the places that Donald Trump already blames for costing him the 2020 election.… I do expect that we will see ICE enforcement on the ground, National Guard troops in these cities, and that there will be a full-on effort to intimidate and suppress Democratic voters.
Daley: I expect that they will make some sort of argument along those lines, that there is a connection between voter fraud and national security. It’s laughable on its face, but I find that lots of things laughable on their face can be taken quite seriously in certain federal courts.
Daley: This is the game. He has never been quite so explicit before linking what they’re trying to do to Republicans holding power in the midterms. This is not an accident. This is an alarm. And if we don’t react seriously to all of the things that we are seeing and link them together and understand that this is the path that we are headed down, we are not going to be prepared to stop it next fall.
Daley: This is all the same story. This is an effort to change the very basic nature of American democracy. This is the institution of American authoritarianism, and it is happening right here in front of us. And if we don’t call it that, and if we don’t recognize that all of these things are tied together, we are going to be powerless to stop it. This is the moment in which we have to stand up to this and say no.
Daley: What we are watching is the latest chapter in a long Republican effort to use gerrymandering as a blunt force partisan weapon and a tool to lock in their own version of minority rule. Texas stands ready to pass a new mid-decade re-gerrymander—because the state was already gerrymandered back in 2021. They’re going to add five additional seats. It’s going to give them 30 of 38. If this goes according to plan, the Texas Democrats who walked out to deny a quorum are basically back now in Austin and this is going to proceed. They were never going to be able to stop this forever. California is getting ready this week to try to put a special election before voters there in November that would essentially suspend their independent commission and give lawmakers the ability to do a retaliatory gerrymander of California that would add five seats to the Democratic column there. That would make it a 48–4 map.
And if Democrats want to retaliate for those, they’re essentially out of targets. There’s nowhere left for them to go on the map. I don’t think you can get much more out of Illinois or Maryland. A governor of Oregon has said that they’re not going to do this. If Republicans decide to keep going and turn this into an all-out wildfire, they could lock in anywhere from an additional six to 12 seats in Congress, making it very, very difficult for Democrats to take back the House in the midterms.
Daley: I think Republicans are going to pick up multiple seats here. Ohio, this is less a mid-decade redraw than it is a mandated one. The current congressional map in Ohio was only a four-year map, so they are definitely going to go ahead and redraw there. DeSantis vowed to pick up four seats back in 2021 and did so. I take him seriously when he says they’re going to reopen the maps there. JD Vance has been to Indiana and encouraged those lawmakers. Missouri lawmakers have effectively said they’re going to come back into session and get rid of the seat held by Representative Cleaver in Kansas City. Do I think Republicans go too much further than that? No, I don’t think they’ll go to Kansas or Kentucky or Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire—but those are possibilities if they decide to. And the thing about the Democratic side is they don’t really have anywhere else to go.
Sargent: It’s a pretty terrible thought. Now, I want to go big picture. For a long time, Democrats have tried to stand for an ideal in which fair play in politics is a virtue. Yes, both parties have gerrymandered—but generally speaking, Democrats have actually tried to take that out of politics. They’ve implemented things like nonpartisan redistricting commissions to try to take politics out of map drawing. They’ve tried to make voting easier not just for Democratic voters [but] for Republican ones as well with things like automatic voter registration. These efforts, however, have been met with years of nonstop voter suppression by Republicans aimed expressly and deliberately at Democratic constituencies, by the GOP rallying behind an effort to steal an election outright, and now an explicit effort directed by the president himself to gerrymander ostentatiously for the express purpose of holding power in the 2026 midterms. And now that you got Democrats fighting back with the California gerrymander, the usual media voices are accusing them of hypocrisy. But Dems are just simply saying both parties should play by the same set of rules. How do you think about these broader set of dilemmas? Can you help us understand them?
So we can’t permanently try to use gerrymandering the same way as Republicans have. We are going to have to find a way to go into these states where there are still swing districts. And there’s two in Iowa, one in Minnesota, three in Pennsylvania, one in Virginia. There’s enough swing districts out there. It’s a very difficult strategy, and I know this is horribly unsatisfying at a time that Republicans are using executive orders and gerrymandering and voter suppression and calling out the National Guard to say, Well, we just have to go win a bunch of swing districts. Sounds like I’m a goody-goody. But nothing else is going to work.
Sargent: Just to close this out, to return to the fair play question for a second, ultimately, the real answer to Republican abuses of power and Republican gamesmanship and rigging of elections in every way that they possibly can is for Democrats to be willing to use their power when they have it nationally, when they have a trifecta, to impose reforms that really enforce a real standard of fair play on our elections once and for all. Is that the size of it?
Sargent: Well, if what we’re seeing now doesn’t finally persuade Democrats of that, then nothing will. Folks, if you enjoy this discussion, make sure to check out David’s latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far-Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. Dave, it was really good to have you on, man. Thanks so much.
Daley: Such a pleasure, Greg. Thanks for all your good work.
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