Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Heather Williams: Thank you. I’m glad to be here with you.
Williams: Yeah, Texas is it’s where it started, right? And this is where the president called on Republicans in a strategy that does not seem like it was well thought out. And so the process moved through the courts as one would expect here. And now we are sitting at a ruling that is not good for Republicans that creates a question mark of whether or not this map, the first one that Republicans gerrymandered in this mid-cycle process, is actually going to stand.
Williams: It’s an interesting question. I think it’s so new, and what this court does is… I feel like it’s always uncertain. But what I do know is going to happen while we wait for the process to play out in Texas is Republicans started this fight, as we were just talking about, and we are not going to sit by the sidelines and wait for this to happen.
Sargent: Well, just to do the overview again, now that you subtract Texas’s five seats, Republicans got one each in North Carolina and Missouri and two in Ohio. That’s a total of four that they’ve got in the bank, as it were. But with Democrats adding five in California and in a surprise picking up one in Utah, Democrats are actually at a place where they’ve suddenly added more than Republicans. Isn’t that right?
Sargent: It certainly is a surprise twist. Let’s talk about Indiana now. Republicans appear to lack the votes in the state Senate to pass a redistricting there. This prompted an outburst on Truth Social from Trump, who attacked the Senate leader, Rodric Bray this way: “soon he will have a primary problem as will any other politician who supports him in this stupidity.” Trump also slammed him as “weak and pathetic.” But it sure looks like Trump feels that this whole thing is getting away from him and slipping away in a big way. What do you expect to happen in Indiana?
Sargent: So Heather, if they do succeed in Indiana, which as you say is pretty dicey, how many could they add there? Not many, right?
Sargent: It sure looks that way. Although I got to think the pressure is going to be much more intense now that the Texas thing fell apart. I will say though, it looks like the big unknown right now is Florida. Republicans there seem poised to move ahead sometime soon. It’s a huge state. Now that we know this, it’s even more likely that Democrats will respond with the redistricting of their own in Virginia, which is another very populous state, but not nearly as populous as Florida. What’s going on with that in Virginia? What can Democrats reasonably expect there?
The question on Virginia, the question on Florida, the question in so many of these places is how fast does the process move and how… what is the impact of how they bump up against deadlines? And that, I think, is going to be the thing that we’re going to continue to look out for and hear more about—what is the implication of the next step in the 2026 elections: candidate-filing deadlines, primaries that will have an impact on when maps can be changed in order to have the 2026 elections?
Williams: Yeah. So Virginia, it looks like maybe a two to four seat are in play in this process. They are again in a constitutional process, so it has to pass the legislature. again, and then it has to go to the people. So there’s some steps involved and again, some deadlines that they’re working through. I think the other thing that is happening that is [a] complimentary and less processed piece is that Democrats are honing in on what this electorate wants. And the takeaway from Virginia that I think is actually applicable in this context in 2026 is that we won in Trump districts. So the idea that all of these gerrymanders are unreachable for Democrats or that there is not a path to the majority is just fundamentally not true. So while the process takes place on mid-cycle redistricting, there is also efforts, of course, around the campaign side to ensure that we’re maximizing opportunities in this electorate and reaching voters where they are.
Williams: Yeah, I think Governor Newsom said a version of what people are looking for is strong and wrong and not weak and right. And I think that the big picture here is that voters are looking for someone to stand up for them and fight for them. They’re not looking for UFC-style fighting. They’re looking for someone to be on their side, to create a better future.
And the redistricting process is not going to solve all of those problems for Republicans. So we sit at this place where there is absolutely an ask to their elected officials and candidates to be strong, to be bold, to stand up for something, right? And to fight for it, while also recognizing that hearing people when they say this economy is not good for them is really meaningful.
Can you talk about that big picture? This has always been a thing for democratic operatives such as yourself, the reluctance to take state legislative contests seriously enough.
The president obviously has called on legislatures, which has put an enormous spotlight on the impact legislatures have—not just on the normal policy issues that you would expect them to for their constituents within their state borders, but also the deep implications that they have on the rest of the ballot and our ability as Democrats, or frankly their ability as Republicans, to have a congressional map across the country that is representative or favorable or whatever adjective one wants to use, that sits with state legislatures.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about what it’s going to look like at the end of the day here. So if Republicans have added four seats, not including Texas—let’s just say maybe Texas doesn’t come through for them in the end—but they do get a bunch out of Florida, they could still kind of end up ahead of Democrats, right? But only marginally.
Williams: What I expect at the end of the day, honestly, is that we have campaigns up and down the ballot that are fighting for a different future for voters. And they are telling that story. And the reason why I say that is because the electorate in 2025 did not look the same as the electorate in 2024. The midterm electorate in 2026 is also not going to look the same. And if we are able to continue the momentum that we have seen in 2025, those coalitions of voters that these maps—these Republican maps—are predicated on are called into question, right?
So I don’t want to undervalue the impact of the mid-cycle redistricting conversation that is happening and the need for Democrats to continue to evaluate opportunities and seize them where they can. That remains important. Whether the Republican strategy is falling apart or not does not matter. They started this. We cannot let up.
Sargent: Right. It seems like at the end of the day, you could see something close to a wash in the redistricting wars. And in addition to that, Democrats maybe are able to put more seats in play on the House level than expected because in order to redistrict, Republicans have to spread around the Republican vote a little more and they’re taking their safe seat Republicans and making them a little more vulnerable. After seeing what happened in these elections just this year, you got to think that there’s at least a decent chance that in 2026, there’s something close to a blue wave and it goes and gets some of those seats that are now more vulnerable as a result of this scheme. So in some sense, it could backfire on them even even more brutally than we expect. Correct?
And that’s where certainly Democrats come in, right, with a strong message building off of a united front in 2025, where the issues were rooted in classic kitchen-table political issues. And we’re going to carry that. And that means that there are a lot of seats in play up and down the ballot. There’s a lot of opportunities for Democrats.
Sargent: It’s certainly getting very interesting. Heather Williams, thanks so much for giving us that overview.
Williams: Thank you so much.
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