For background reading on the topic of today’s episode, see this piece arguing that the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering ruling will unleash a massive redistricting arms race.
Last week, the Supreme Court gutted a key protection against racial gerrymandering, and Donald Trump is already urging Republicans to capitalize on it. In a Truth Social rant, Trump called on GOP states to gerrymander their congressional maps to the max in time for this fall’s elections. That means eliminating as many seats represented by African Americans as possible. By expressly putting this in the context of the midterms, Trump in essence openly admitted that this new gerrymandering push is all about keeping power in the face of his nose-diving approval, which just hit yet another new low. All of which will simply require Democrats to act in response.
Max Flugrath: Greg, thanks so much for having me.
Now, Max, the idea that Republicans can get 20 House seats in time for the midterms is pure bullshit, and we’ll get to that. But for now, note how Trump doesn’t even disguise that this is about preventing the loss of the House of Representatives. Your thoughts on that?
Sargent: They certainly aren’t. Well, let’s recap the current situation. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, just signed a new map potentially flipping four Democratic seats into the GOP camp. Up until now, the redistricting arms race had been mostly a wash, particularly after Virginia redrew and added up to four Democratic seats. So now maybe with Florida, the ledger tips a little bit toward the GOP. A lot depends on what happens in court with both the Florida and Virginia cases, but maybe it ends up being a wash. Can you sum up where we are?
And now we’re seeing what’s going to happen in Florida. They have an actual constitutional amendment there, which was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2010 to restrict and outlaw partisan gerrymandering. So it’s unclear the fate of those maps. I think DeSantis and others involved have talked about them in a pretty partisan way. So they may have shot themselves in the foot. Of course, the result remains to be seen.
Due to the high court ruling, several GOP states are going to try to redraw in time for the midterms this fall. Meanwhile, some other GOP states will try to wait and redraw in time for the 2028 election. Just to break this down, let’s start with the first batch. As of now, GOP legislatures in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are going to try to redraw in time for this fall. Max, can you walk us through what that entails? I know there’s some doubt about South Carolina, but what’s the general picture?
In Alabama, they might have to do some sort of special primary situation, which could even mean they have to vacate results of the regular primary. Tennessee, they’re going to have to amend their own laws to allow them to do mid-decade redistricting in the first place. And in Louisiana, the governor there is calling them for a special session to redraw that map. Mississippi had already been called for a special session to redraw state Supreme Court maps, but the governor can amend that call to include other maps.
Sargent: And there will be lawsuits all over the place and it’s a little hard to know exactly how this shakes out, but it’s possible Republicans get a few extra seats out of this.
Sargent: Okay, so now let’s go a little further out to the out years. A bunch of other GOP states will try to redraw next year in time for the 2028 elections. What could that look like and how many seats overall could Republicans pull into their column in time for those elections in 2028?
Sargent: Right. Nineteen extra seats for Republicans is basically armageddon. There could be a number of scenarios which fall well short of that but are still bad, right? There could be like 10 or 12. Right?
Sargent: Right. So we don’t know, but no matter how this shakes out, it’s bad for Democrats. And the sheer naked corruption of all this simply requires Democrats to act in time for 2028.
Flugrath: Yeah. So we looked at seven states. Four of them, Democrats have trifecta control—they control the governor and both chambers of the legislature. Those are the states where the path is the easiest. And those states total up to 10 additional seats that we found. It’s New York, Colorado, Maryland, and Oregon.
Sargent: And you’d have to flip both legislative chambers in Wisconsin to make it happen.
Sargent: Right. And so the key to this is that there are Democratic governors in those three states. And so if you get Democratic control of the legislatures in this fall’s elections, then there’s a trifecta in place to redistrict by these Democratic state legislatures and governors in time for 2028, then you get to a scenario where you could get as many as 22 seats.
Sargent: Right, no question about that. In fact, Democrats have modeled an alternate approach in a lot of these states as well. They’ve passed independent redistricting commissions. That’s a better way to do this—by far, it’s fair. Each party treats the other party’s voters with respect instead of with disrespect, which is what gerrymandering does. But Republicans won’t have any of it. They just want to redistrict and gerrymander to their heart’s content because they think it benefits them. They don’t care what it does to the system itself.
Flugrath: Yes, absolutely correct. So there’s going to be an outsized importance in these state legislative races. And you know, luckily I think that’s beneficial for Democrats widely. We saw a bunch of special elections for state legislative seats across the country last year. Democrats won all of them.
Sargent: Well, speaking of that, not coincidentally, Trump is hitting record lows in polling. Let’s listen to this from CNN polling analyst Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about the new Washington Post/ABC poll, which finds Trump’s approval at 37 percent and his disapproval at 62 percent. Listen.
Sargent: And on top of that, CNN’s average of polls has Trump at a record high disapproval of 64 percent. Absolutely abysmal numbers.
He is begging Republicans in these states to redraw their maps in order to prevent the voters from having their verdict, from stating their verdict on this disastrous presidency. It’s that simple.
Sargent: Well, the way they absolutely scampered in, rushed in—the second the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the way they rushed in to say, we’re now going to gerrymander absolutely wherever we possibly can, without the slightest hint of shame—really underscores your point.
Flugrath: Yeah. And I mean, Republicans have also locked themselves into this sort of—if you remember, famously, after they lost the 2012 election, they did the sort of RNC autopsy report. And the conclusion was they needed to broaden their base of supporters by reaching out to minorities, to Black voters, to Hispanic voters.
Sargent: It certainly is. Donald Trump is historically underwater. As Trump might say, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But I want to conclude on an essential point here, which is Democrats are going to be tempted to say something like, look, we really hate gerrymandering—for good reason again—what we should be doing is trying to pass reform on the federal level that bars it. So maybe we shouldn’t really gerrymander ourselves.
If Republicans don’t like the fact that Democrats are gerrymandering in response to what they’re doing, let’s end it together. Awesome. Let’s do that. But meanwhile, if they’re not going to end it, if Republicans won’t agree to that, Democrats have to forge ahead in these states. In fact, that makes it more likely and not less that Republicans ultimately end up agreeing to some kind of peace, some kind of détente. They’ll never agree to any kind of détente if Democrats roll over and take it. Can you talk about that?
Sargent: A hundred percent. Okay. So to wrap this up, what do you think is the most likely scenario kind of in this fall’s elections and then in the out years?
If Republicans take up this aggressive map-redrawing, map-rigging approach across the country, they may see Democrats overperforming. I think people see this for what it is, which is a blatant partisan power grab. In Florida, a majority of voters opposed redrawing the maps. And so when you combine this rigging the game with everything people are seeing and living through—whether it’s higher prices, higher gas prices, the chaos and death of the Iran war, ICE harming people all over the country—I think they’re going to vote for the people who aren’t doing those things and who want to stop doing those things. So I think Democrats can overperform.
Sargent: But even if they do take back Congress, they cannot relax, because again, next year, Republicans in some of these states could start gerrymandering pretty aggressively. And before you know it, the House map is all lopsided again, and in the 2028 elections, Republicans would be dramatically favored. So we’ve got to avoid that.
They need to do Supreme Court reform, enact ethics rules, transparency measures, term limits. And the last thing they need to do is sort of shine a light on the real impact that these rigged maps have—by holding committee hearings, you can really point to the human effects. Like what happened in Flint, Michigan—the whole Flint, Michigan water crisis happened because of really gerrymandered maps that allowed a governor and a state legislature to install people there who were not accountable and could do whatever they wanted effectively.
Flugrath: Absolutely, Greg. Anytime.
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