The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 11 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a new redistricting that gave Democrats additional House seats, Donald Trump celebrated the outcome. In so doing, however, he accidentally revealed that he and Republicans expressly reserve the right for themselves to play by their own rules and rig elections in their own favor unilaterally. In truth, the only chance Trump and Republicans have of salvaging the midterms is extreme cheating, as a remarkable new poll shows. But what are friends of democracy supposed to do in a world where one party is openly rigging the game and the other isn’t? Where are these gerrymandering wars really headed?
We’re talking this over with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, the great reporter on voting rights. Ari, good to have you on.
Ari Berman: Hey, Greg. Great to talk to you. Thank you.
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?
I would say Republicans are probably going to net about five seats from redistricting at the end of the day—possibly more, maybe less—but they’re ahead right now in the gerrymandering arms race because of what the state Supreme Court in Virginia did and because of what the U.S. Supreme Court did last week.
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?
Berman: Yeah. I mean, in a wave election, it’s definitely—it just gives them less margin for error in terms of the map. I mean, they are going to lose one or two seats in Virginia. The map is going to be more difficult for them in Florida because of the new gerrymander—not insurmountable, but more difficult. And then in some of these southern states, these districts that they’ve had for decades in certain places, like Tennessee, for example, where they broke up Memphis—those are no longer going to exist. So they’re going to have to put Republicans on defense in some new places and they’re going to have to expand the map.
Sargent: Let’s talk about what Donald Trump tweeted about the Virginia ruling. He said this:
“Huge win for the Republican Party and America in Virginia. The Virginia Supreme Court has just struck down the Democrats’ horrible gerrymander. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
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?
Berman: Yeah, I mean, Trump was just celebrating all this week the fact that he ousted all of these Republicans in Indiana who were opposed to gerrymandering. So it’s very clear that under Trump, the Republicans are an openly pro-gerrymandering party. He’s been pushing maximum gerrymandering everywhere in really unprecedented ways.
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.
So it’s a total double standard. Democrats already have to face a higher bar in places like Virginia and California because voters have to approve their maps. And then even when they’re approved, in the case of Virginia, you have courts retroactively throwing out millions of votes in a way that they have not done so far in places like Texas.
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.
Berman: No, I mean, you can’t make any kind of false equivalence here. In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis openly said that Florida’s prohibition on partisan and racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional. He basically is now daring the courts to strike down what is enshrined in Florida’s constitution. That is far more blatantly unconstitutional than whatever minor technical errors may have occurred in Virginia—and there’s obviously debate about whether there were even any technical errors that occurred in Virginia.
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 mean, look at the backdrop between Virginia and Tennessee this last week. In a matter of basically three days, Tennessee Republicans dismantled a majority-Black district that had existed for decades. In fact, Memphis had had its own congressional district since 1923. So it had existed for basically 100 years. They split it into three—no opportunity for anyone to weigh in. Virginia, this took months. Voters had lots and lots of time to weigh in here. And to me, the vote by the voters in Virginia should have been the end of the discussion, right? The Supreme Court should have said, even if we have some minor qualms with the process, voters approved it and we are going to defer to the voters.
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.
Sargent: It’s absolutely not fair. However, Democrats are still favored to win the House. Not that that makes all that okay. A new Marist poll has Democrats up 10 points in the generic House ballot matchup, 52 percent to 42 percent. Among independents, that’s 49 to 37—12 points. A 12-point spread among independents. That’s indicative of wave stuff.
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?
Berman: I would lean more towards your interpretation, Greg. I think the battleground is going to be bigger than people are thinking based on how these special elections are going, based on the fact that Democrats are making inroads in what had been previously red states like Iowa and Ohio. I think that some of these GOP gerrymanders are not as secure as they think. In Florida, in Texas, some of these maps were very hastily drawn.
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.
And I think particularly about the fact that all of this mid-decade gerrymandering and then dismantling of all of these majority-Black districts across the South that we’re going to see—I mean, southern states are now doing things that would have been illegal under the law, at least back to the 1980s and possibly earlier than that. We are going back literally 40 years in terms of what is legal under the Voting Rights Act.
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.
Sargent: A hundred percent. So let’s look at the out years now. This state of affairs in which one party is openly, explicitly, gleefully declaring that it plays by its own rules no matter what, it gets to rig elections, and the other party doesn’t—that is going to absolutely require Democrats to start redistricting more aggressively next cycle in time for the 2028 elections.
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?
Berman: Yeah, Democrats have no choice. And honestly, it’s about fairness at the end of the day. It’s about making national elections fair. And the only way that national elections are fair is if the parties play by the same set of rules. I think a lot of Democrats were devoted to good government when they got power. I think that was defensible at the time. But what it meant is that in a lot of states, Democrats are playing by one set of rules, Republicans are playing by another set of rules.
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.
We’re going to hear a lot about the race for Congress this year. And obviously that’s critically important in terms of holding Trump accountable. But at the same time, most of these battles are going to be fought in the states. And Democrats have a tremendous amount of opportunities in a lot of these states. You wrote about it—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada. I mean, there’s all of these places where Democrats could potentially get trifectas and they could redraw the maps for 2028. And it requires something of a long-term strategy.
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?
Well, Democrats won the governor’s mansion. They won a bunch of seats to get a progressive majority on the state Supreme Court. They struck down the gerrymandered state legislative maps. Now they could flip both chambers of the legislature. That to me is a roadmap of what Democrats need to do everywhere, which is figure out how to maximize power so that you play by the same set of rules as Republicans do.
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.
Now, people like you and me, Ari—good government liberals and so forth—had long been kind of hoping that there was a path to mutual de-escalation. These commissions—the whole premise of the commissions is that if you invite Republicans to try and do something that’s mutually fair, then maybe it de-escalates the hardball on both sides. But they have just said, fuck that, no way. Now they’re openly threatening to maximize their own gerrymanders after the Supreme Court ruling. So such hopes of mutual forbearance are dead. That’s all there is to it.
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.
And so I think Democrats have learned this lesson. I still worry about what an endless gerrymandering arms race will mean. I think it will lead to more partisanship, more polarization, less competition. But the alternative is worse, which is that Republicans just gerrymander in all these places, they have a perpetual lock on the U.S. House and on state legislatures, and Democrats have no way to fight 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.
There are really important state Supreme Court elections this year in North Carolina, in Georgia, for example. And so Democrats, when they think about the states, they also have to think about those places where either governors appoint state Supreme Court justices or state Supreme Court justices are elected, because that’s a critical part of making the system more fair.
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.”
Now, that’s something of a bombshell, I think, Ari, because he’s not exactly saying that in Virginia Democrats should simply ignore the courts, but he’s floating that as an option. And I take him to be saying that we are now inevitably going to enter into a period of procedural total war and Democrats have to be willing to do whatever Republicans do in those fights. That’s kind of a bombshell, right, from a major Democratic Senate candidate?
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.
The difference here in Virginia is that the voters weighed in. I keep harping on this process because I think it gives it a legitimacy that doesn’t exist in all of these other states.
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.
Roger Williams (voiceover): Well, I would hope not. It’s pretty easy to vote for something like this. I mean, we want the right people voting. I don’t know—the Senate acts in different ways from the House. We pass some good legislation. We send it to them. So let’s see what they do with it.
Sargent: So isn’t that something? He said, “we want the right people voting.” Again, Ari, unintentionally revealing. Your response to that?
Berman: Yeah, I mean, that’s just a dog whistle that goes back many, many years. I can think of so many segregationists in the Jim Crow South saying the same kind of thing: we want the right people voting. And I think in this week in particular, it’s just revealing that so many things that we thought were of the past have come back really with a vengeance. And so I think it’s just indicative that when they say they only want certain people to vote, they really do mean it.
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.
Yes, Democrats have to adopt popular positions, but we don’t need to choose between these two things. There should be a two-track approach here. One is try to adopt the most popular positions and execute the best politics possible, best political strategies possible. But on the other, you’re going to have to enter into procedural maximalism here. Otherwise, you perish. Isn’t that the essence of this?
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.
Sargent: Agree 100 percent. I hope Democrats follow that advice. Ari Berman, great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Berman: Great to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.
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