Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re talking this over with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, the great reporter on voting rights. Ari, good to have you on.
Sargent: So in Virginia, Democrats had succeeded in passing a redistricting referendum that added an additional four congressional seats to the Democratic column. The state Supreme Court struck that down. But instead of talking about the ruling, which is unfortunate, let’s look forward. Ari, Democrats will probably still win one or two of those four seats in Virginia. Meanwhile, Republicans are redistricting in several southern states where they might get, I don’t know, five seats extra. What’s the overall math right now? Can you just boil it down in really simple terms?
Sargent: What looked like a wash is going to be a small Republican advantage. Five seats—that’s unfair, it shouldn’t have happened, but that’s surmountable for Democrats, right?
Sargent: Let’s talk about what Donald Trump tweeted about the Virginia ruling. He said this:
Ari, Donald Trump has literally commanded numerous Republican states to gerrymander to the maximum extent possible. He’s sponsored many primary challengers to Republicans who refuse to go along with that. And here he is celebrating the fact that Republicans get to gerrymander and Democrats don’t. His explicit position is that elections should be rigged in the GOP’s favor. Your thoughts on that?
I think what the Virginia Supreme Court ruling showed and why it made people so angry is it feels like there’s two sets of rules. It feels like Republicans are passing all of these gerrymandered maps that, A, are not approved by voters, and B, are then upheld in court. And Democrats introduce a map that is approved by voters and then is struck down in court.
Sargent: I want to underscore the double standard here a little further. Democrats in numerous states now have gone to the voters and put the referendum before them on whether they want to redraw maps in the middle of the decade. That is a hard thing to do, but they respected the voters enough to go ahead and do that. There you really have this incredibly glaring difference that I don’t see how we can continue to avoid talking about.
Take the fact that Louisiana just suspended an election altogether. Forty-two thousand people had already voted and they suspended the election so they can eliminate possibly one or two majority-Black districts. So the process has been completely different in all of these red states. They have not only not been approved by voters, but they have broken so many different norms in terms of how they’ve gone about this process.
I think that would have been the sound interpretation of the Constitution, but also the sound way of looking at the national environment, which is one party is doing everything they can to rig the system and the other party has a hand tied behind its back in the effort to try to counteract it. And I just don’t think that’s fair.
Now in fairness, the polling averages, averaging all the polls together, only have Democrats up five points in the generic ballot. So Marist may be an outlier, but it could also be an early indicator. And plus 10 is a bit more consistent with these lopsided Democratic wins we’ve been seeing in special elections. What’s your reading of the House battle right now and on that front?
Texas, for example—it was based on Trump’s numbers in 2024. Trump has regressed a lot from 2024, particularly among some core supporters like Latinos. So I think there’s sort of two separate discussions here. One is, can Democrats still win the House? And I think the answer is yes. And then the second thing—are we going to have an optimally fair election in November? And the answer is no, because right now we have a situation where so many things that would have previously been illegal are now legal.
I just really worry about how far they’re going to take that in this kind of environment and what it’s going to mean for representation more broadly. I mean, you can have a situation where, yes, Democrats win the midterms, but at the same time, the midterms were a lot less free and fair than they should have been.
I reported recently on a new analysis from Fair Fight Action which found that Democrats can net an additional 10 to 22 seats on top of the current map for themselves if they redistrict aggressively in numerous states. Twenty-two may seem like a lot and a lot depends on how many state legislative races and state legislative chambers Democrats flip in these elections. But generally speaking, that’s what’s going to have to happen, right? Because the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling is going to open the door to even more gerrymandering by Republicans next cycle, and Democrats will have to respond in kind, right?
Democrats are bound by things like independent commissions when Republicans can just gerrymander as much as they want. And that is leading to unfair outcomes. It is leading to an unfair race for the U.S. House. And so I believe that Democrats have to maximize their power by whatever means necessary. And they particularly have to look to the state level, because that’s where all of these battles are being fought.
And I think about Wisconsin, for example, which you wrote about. Wisconsin was a place in the early to mid-2010s where it seemed impossible that Democrats would ever have any power. They were shut out of the governor’s race. The state Supreme Court had a huge conservative majority. The legislature was super gerrymandered. It was one-party rule, right?
Sargent: And let’s just be really clear about what the Democratic position actually is, because they constantly get accused—absurdly—of hypocrisy for wanting to gerrymander despite opposing it themselves. Here’s the Democratic position: neither side should gerrymander because it’s bad. It disrespects the opposition’s voters and allows lawmakers to protect themselves from accountability. But even though gerrymandering is bad, if Republicans insist on maximizing it, Democrats have to do the same. Otherwise, they are acquiescing to a system in which one party is playing by a different set of rules.
Berman: Yeah. I mean, the only way reform works is if it’s on a national level and applies equally in all states. It can’t be a situation where only blue states do it and it’s essentially unilateral disarmament. We tried that. It didn’t work. It didn’t lead to more fairness. It led to one side being given a blank check and the other side having one arm behind their back.
So at the very least, I believe that this gerrymandering arms race, while incredibly destructive for American democracy, has woken Democrats up to the need to be as aggressive as Republicans in trying to maximize power, and also realizing they can’t wait on the courts to save them. The U.S. Supreme Court’s not going to save them, and even state Supreme Courts are often major impediments. In Virginia, they controlled the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but they didn’t control the courts. And we saw the impact of that. That’s why state Supreme Courts are so important.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring up something that Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, tweeted in response to the Virginia ruling. He said this: “I’m old enough to remember when Republicans in Ohio just ignored court rulings repeatedly and did it anyway.”
Berman: Well, but I think it makes sense because Republicans are not bound by any kind of norms in this fight. They have not respected any kind of procedural process to stop them. When there was a primary in their way, they just canceled the primary, right? When there are laws that prohibited mid-decade gerrymandering, they just repealed them. When there were state constitutions they didn’t like, they just said, let’s just say this is unconstitutional. That’s what they’ve done in all of these places. So I don’t get why Democrats are just going to say to the Virginia state Supreme Court, we’re going to allow you to nullify a vote that was held by three million people.
Sargent: In California, where Democrats were able to add five seats, they also went to the voters. So they keep going to the voters. Republicans don’t do that. Let’s close on the comic relief—or maybe it’s not all that funny. The SAVE Act is a really disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. Trump and other Republicans have openly and explicitly said they have to pass the SAVE Act in order to hold power at a time when Trump is really, really unpopular. Listen to GOP Congressman Roger Williams’s answer about the SAVE Act.
Sargent: So isn’t that something? He said, “we want the right people voting.” Again, Ari, unintentionally revealing. Your response to that?
Sargent: Yeah. And just to close this out, look, a lot of people will point to these results and say, okay, well, Democrats need to win more than a majority to win the House, so they just have to moderate or they just have to adopt more popular positions, et cetera, et cetera, that type of thing. You know, okay.
Berman: Yeah, I mean, winning elections aren’t enough if elections themselves aren’t fair. And so I think whatever they can do to level the playing field and make it so that both sides are playing by the same set of rules—to me, that has to be the guiding light of the Democratic Party going forward.
Berman: Great to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.
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