The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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 of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action has been thinking a lot about the roadmap ahead for Democrats. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Max, good to have you on.
Max Flugrath: Greg, thanks so much for having me.
Sargent: So as you all know, the Supreme Court’s ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act yet again, removing a check on racial gerrymandering. On Truth Social, Donald Trump urged GOP legislatures to act on the ruling by redrawing their congressional district maps aggressively, saying, “Republicans will receive more than 20 House seats in the upcoming midterms.”
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?
Flugrath: It’s a shameless paragraph, you know, plain and simple. And it’s something that his advisors have actually been talking to donors about for some time. In December, Axios reported that Chris LaSivita and Fabrizio—Trump’s pollster—were at an RNC donor retreat telling them that this case, Louisiana v. Callais, would boost their prospects in 2026 and it would transform the Republican Party’s ability to win elections for years to come. They’re not being coy about it at all.
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?
Flugrath: So yeah, this all started in Texas after Trump demanded they rig their maps. After that, we saw Republicans add more seats to their column in Ohio, in Missouri, and North Carolina. Of course, California responded right after—that was sort of a gut punch in response—and they put it to the voters, which is not what Republican states have been doing at all. Virginia was next in this sort of redistricting war saga that Trump kicked off. And, you know, like you mentioned, I think that’s sort of under review, strangely. Republicans are looking for a court to vacate the will of the voters due to some technical BS in my opinion.
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.
Sargent: Right. So California and Virginia, just to clarify, added seats into the Democratic column, more or less making this a wash. But again, a lot turns on what happens in court with Virginia and Florida. Here it gets a bit complicated.
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?
Flugrath: Yeah, I mean, look, they’re going to try to ram these maps through and, it’ll probably add a couple of seats in the Republican column, leaning it in their favor. But there’ll be a lot of procedural hurdles they’ll have to clear in order to get there.
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.
So all those prospects are on the table and they seem to be rushing to do it.
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.
Flugrath: Yeah, I think that’s definitely fair to say.
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?
Flugrath: Well, we released a report in 2025 and we looked at all these states across the South and what would happen if this exact ruling were to come to pass. And we found that Republicans could draw 19 new safe Republican seats. So, I think the number is pretty staggering. It seems high, but it all adds up sort of if they go state by state and sort of maximize the amount of seats they can squeeze out of the maps.
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?
Flugrath: Yeah, I think up to 19 is a good way to characterize it.
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.
Your group, Fair Fight Action, had another analysis—which I reported on at NewRepublic.com—finding that Democrats can themselves add anywhere from 10 seats to 22 seats by aggressively redistricting in blue states. Can you walk us through that set of calculations?
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.
And then our sort of second tier could essentially net up to 12 seats, but it’s three states and we need to flip one legislative chamber in order to do it. So it’s Pennsylvania, it’s Wisconsin, and it’s Minnesota.
Sargent: And you’d have to flip both legislative chambers in Wisconsin to make it happen.
Flugrath: Correct, yes.
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.
Flugrath: Yep. And it could effectively nullify the up to 19 seats that our 2025 analysis found could be added for Republicans. I think you also mentioned that Democrats have been sort of forced into this position. It’s a long-held position in the Democratic Party widely that we don’t like gerrymandering, we want to ban it. They introduced legislation in 2021 to do just that—they passed it through the House. But Republicans are sort of forcing this gerrymandering war upon the American people.
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.
I want to underscore this point though. It’s the state legislative elections this year that have the impact on what Democrats can do next year. And that’s really essential for people to get. State legislative elections suddenly got much more consequential—people really have to get out and vote in these things because flipping state legislatures now makes it possible to negate the Republican advantage later, right?
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.
So we’re entering an environment where Democrats are poised to win because people widely—you know, whether or not they are Democrats or they support Democrats—are usually very fed up with what’s happening here. And it’s being driven by Trump and the Republicans in Washington. And that’s, you know, that’s why we’re seeing this effort to rig the maps. They don’t want to face the voters in a fair election.
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.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Trump’s numbers have fallen to a new record low according to the Washington Post/ABC News poll. He is now 25 points underwater on the net approval rating—that is the lowest ever.
Sargent: And on top of that, CNN’s average of polls has Trump at a record high disapproval of 64 percent. Absolutely abysmal numbers.
So here you can see why the desperation is mounting from Trump to get Republicans to gerrymander as many extra GOP seats as possible in time for the midterms. Trump knows a Democratic House will impeach him and investigate him in every way.
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.
Flugrath: It is that simple. It brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is political parties try to compete and earn your vote. Authoritarian movements try to steal it. And we’re not really in a time now when there is a Republican Party. It’s become sort of an authoritarian cult that just supports the leader.
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.
This is not a party that’s functioning as an actor in a democracy any longer. And this is tricky, as you pointed out for Democrats. They don’t like gerrymandering for good reason. Again, gerrymandering’s bad. The future that Trump and Republicans want is one where they play by a different set of rules, and Democrats can’t let that happen.
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.
Then Donald Trump came in and took them in the opposite direction. And although they did get higher levels of support from those types of voters in the 2024 election, it seems to have been an aberration because now voters are seeing the reality of what happens when you elect Donald Trump.
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.
But the point is they don’t have to choose between one or the other. They should adopt a two-track approach here. One track is perpetually, always offer the option of ending gerrymandering for both parties with federal legislation. If Republicans want to join in doing that, great, let’s do it. Right?
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?
Flugrath: Republicans have forced Democrats into this position because they have brought a new weapon to this fight—unmitigated, blatant gerrymandering. And even though Democrats are against it ideologically, if we don’t respond in kind, we’re sort of abdicating our responsibility to the voters to protect their rights, protect their freedoms, and make sure that we have a fair representative system of democracy here. You can’t win a fight by intentionally choosing not to use stronger weapons that your opponent is using.
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?
Flugrath: So I think Republicans are running a big risk. If you look at the recent special elections in Florida, Democrats dramatically overperformed. And although I’m a Floridian and I want to believe it’s a purple state, most people consider it a red state, but Democrats overperformed there. They had some really great wins.
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.
I think they could take back Congress. And once they do that, I think they have a real center of federal power to obstruct, slow down, and mitigate all the harms that are being done to our country.
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.
Flugrath: Yeah. So if they take back power, I think they have to aggressively start on pro-democracy reforms, which means banning partisan gerrymandering across the country and making it very clear that racial gerrymandering is also illegal, contrary to what the corrupted Supreme Court says.
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.
Sargent: And if Republicans are going to continue gerrymandering, even in the face of all this, Democrats in these states have to respond. It’s just got to happen. Max Flugrath, thanks so much for that overview. We really appreciate it.
Flugrath: Absolutely, Greg. Anytime.
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