Redrawing Democracy: Prop 50, Trump’s Maps, and the Battle for 2026

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.
On November 4th, Democrats didn't just score a few wins or survive this off-year election cycle.

Speaker 1 We won a lot, everywhere. We elected new governors of New Jersey and Virginia, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger.
New York City set records in electing its new mayor, Zoron Mandani.

Speaker 1 In the South, where we've been written off more than once, Democrats unseated Republicans in two of five slots on Georgia's Public Service Commission.

Speaker 1 And in Mississippi, Democrats picked up seats in the state legislature and broke a Republican supermajority in the state senate. Now, most of these races required statewide consensus on the outcomes.

Speaker 1 Even though Georgia's Public Service Commission is divided up by district, every candidate still runs statewide, a remnant of Jim Crow that we can tackle on another day.

Speaker 1 However, the Mississippi election came about because the state was forced to comply with the Voting Rights Act and redraw its districts.

Speaker 1 This was a heavily litigated issue that only occurred due to a court order. And the goal was to expand voter access, not manufacture electoral outcomes.

Speaker 1 Which brings us to the other big win on November 4th, California's Prop 50, the Election Rigging Response Act.

Speaker 1 This emergency change to the state's electoral maps was enacted to secure five additional House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms and to counter racist gerrymandering in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, where congressional maps are being redrawn by naked political ambition in order to diminish the voting rights of people of color and limit their choices.

Speaker 1 No court order mandated this mid-decade massacre of voting rights. An authoritarian political power grab made them do it.

Speaker 1 You see, next year's midterm congressional elections will give Democrats the strongest chance to assert legislative authority in our democracy.

Speaker 1 And it will aggravate the concentration of power in the executive branch. And that's exactly what Republicans are so afraid of.

Speaker 1 You see, step three in the 10 steps to authoritarianism is to weaken competing powers.

Speaker 1 Well, step 10 is to end democracy itself by disrupting election systems and redistricting, restricting who can vote so no meaningful opposition can ever win again.

Speaker 1 Texas Republicans, directed by President Trump, redrew their maps to dilute Latino and black voting power, which tends to lean Democratic.

Speaker 1 In Missouri, they carved up the one seat held by a black Democrat representing a majority white district.

Speaker 1 North Carolina recently created the seventh new Republican-leaning district, also targeting voters of color.

Speaker 1 Look, this tactic is nothing new, but they didn't anticipate Democrats in California and across the country fighting back.

Speaker 1 So now the battle lines for a competitive democracy are quietly being redrawn, where partisanship rather than representation is the stated and explicit goal.

Speaker 1 While redistricting is not a new field of dispute, this is about more than Democrats and Republicans.

Speaker 1 With a weakened Congress that has shown few signs of standing in the way of expanded executive power, from an undeclared war in the Caribbean that has taken 79 lives so far, to the rampant corruption that includes, most recently, a $220 million no-bid contract going to a cabinet member's friends, American democracy needs a second branch of government willing to speak truth to power, if not just slow it down.

Speaker 1 Joining me today to talk about why redistricting is a matter of democracy's survival and what it tells us about the state of the Democratic Party is Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of Pod Save America, author of the MessageBox newsletter, former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, and Crooked Media's resident polling expert.

Speaker 1 Dan Pfeiffer, welcome to Assembly Required.

Speaker 2 I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1 Thank you. I was telling you before the show, but I'll say it's for everyone to hear.
I love the message box. It is one of my favorite sub stacks.
And so thank you, thank you for doing that.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you for saying that. That really means a lot.

Speaker 1 Okay, before we get into what's happening in individual states and what we can learn from this month's elections, I really want to start with some history and some fundamentals.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So, we know redistricting typically happens in the year after the census. And although mid-decade redistricting has occurred before, typically it's driven by court order.

Speaker 1 In 2002, Texas and Colorado Republicans both tried to redraw their maps, and it was the first time in U.S.

Speaker 1 history that a state reopened redistricting for partisan political purposes after a redistricting plan had been adopted. The Colorado Supreme Court shut those maps down, but Texas proceeded.

Speaker 1 And I know you are very familiar with all this history. So can you talk for our audience a little bit about why what Texas did mattered so much after that 2002 election?

Speaker 2 Well, certainly after that, that was the beginning of Texas really leading the way in trying to use every possible tool at their disposal to rig democracy for Republicans. This led to

Speaker 2 some real strong arming and potentially illegal strong arming from Dick Army at the time, led to a massive scandal.

Speaker 2 It actually, in a very karmic way, blew up in the Republicans' face because it led to massive election scandals with Tom DeLay and Dick Army and others that then helped the Democrats take the House back for the first time since 1994 in 2006.

Speaker 2 But it opened the door to the idea that Republicans would use everything they possibly can to hold power and that the and that districts, that partisan redistricting, partisan gerrymandering was a tool in their toolbox to use.

Speaker 2 And you would see this again later on, earlier in the Trump era, when North Carolina, which has actually now redrawn its districts in almost every single election cycle, has done similar things.

Speaker 2 And then everything exploded this year.

Speaker 1 Okay, and you just said something I want to really hone in on. Can you explain the difference between redistricting as a tool and gerrymandering as a political mechanism?

Speaker 2 Right. Well, every 10 years we get new census information, and it is a reason to redraw the districts to balance population shifts, to balance diversity

Speaker 2 within districts. You know, we are, for the time being, at least operating still under the Voting Rights Acts, which insists that you cannot draw

Speaker 2 districts in ways to exclude racial minorities. It's a way to ensure that districts don't look like that because of huge population shifts.
And so that is simply just a normal process.

Speaker 2 It happens every 10 years, happens for legislative districts and congressional districts.

Speaker 2 And then there is partisan gerrymandering, which is the specific idea that we are going to draw the districts, not to ensure equal representation for everyone in the state, but to ensure specific advantage representation for one of the two parties.

Speaker 1 So, my very first special session as minority leader was when Georgia Republicans controlled redistricting for the first time in Georgia history.

Speaker 1 And they intentionally gerrymandered the state to give themselves nearly 70% of congressional seats, 67% of state legislative seats, even though they'd only won 53% of the statewide vote.

Speaker 1 But states like Georgia have never considered independent maps like California. And that's typically because the states that play fair are the only states who believe in fair play.

Speaker 1 Do you think it was a mistake for states like California to pursue independent redistricting if not every other state was on board?

Speaker 2 Probably. I mean,

Speaker 2 if you go back to the time when California did this, it was way back when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in charge of the state of California. This was an effort led by a Republican at the time.

Speaker 2 And it was before a lot of this happened.

Speaker 2 Michigan did this, I think, back in 2018. They passed a ballot initiative to do it.
It is the right thing to do. Like we should get gerrymandering out

Speaker 2 of our politics things got made worse in 2014 2013 or 2014 when the supreme court over uh in the uh rucho v common cause case basically allowed partisan redistricting which with a totally perverse idea that uh

Speaker 2 your way the way to complain about partisan redistricting was to win at the ballot box which you can't do if you've been if there has been partisan redistricting a little bit of logic that eluded justice roberts at the time the states were doing the right thing and they did not foresee where our politics would go to the point that we would be

Speaker 2 not only just doing redistricting and possibly gerrymandering at the decade, you know, at the decennial census, but just randomly when they thought it would help the party.

Speaker 2 So it is, it has come out against our advantages by Republicans, at least at the outset of this

Speaker 2 part, this redistricting war of 2025, have a huge advantage because they're just more Democratic states that have the opportunity. So I would say it has hurt us in this, but

Speaker 2 it's hard to fault the people who made the decisions when they made them at the time, because it's hard to foresee that things would get this bad.

Speaker 1 Was it hard to foresee or were we naive?

Speaker 2 Maybe naive.

Speaker 2 I guess maybe naive. I guess you could say, which is maybe that's the story of the last decade of American politics, is that we were naive.

Speaker 2 Maybe if we looked at what happened in Texas in the early 2000s, that that would have been the hint of what was to come.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, the position we're in today also started with Texas.

Speaker 1 So we are here today to talk about Prop 50 out of California, but this started with Texas. And can you just ground our listeners in what happened there, why Texas decided to once again destroy America

Speaker 1 and how Donald Trump was personally involved?

Speaker 2 Yes. So Republicans were looking nationally at the map.

Speaker 2 History would show that it would be a good year for Democrats.

Speaker 2 This is, depending on how you look at either Trump's first or second midterm, either way, usually that is usually a very good election for the party out of power.

Speaker 2 While all of our political system tends to advantage Republicans, the House is the least advantaged to Republicans. Romans also have one of the narrowest majorities in history.

Speaker 2 So you would, if you were just a betting person early in 2025, you'd say the Democrats are probably going to take the House. One way to stop that is to go create more Republican seats.

Speaker 2 The easiest ways to get that done is Texas because they have a history of doing this. They have a very partisan governor and a very pliable legislature.
And Texas has had a lot of demographic shifts.

Speaker 2 It's a state that actually moved very Republican between 2016 and 2024.

Speaker 2 And so Trump and his political team, they didn't have to put very much pressure on the Republicans to get it done, but they urged them to do it. And Texas

Speaker 2 undertook the idea of redrawing their districts. Democrats from the legislature in Texas fled to deny them quorum, but eventually they had to return.
And they passed these maps.

Speaker 2 And these maps likely give the Republicans between four to five seats in this upcoming election.

Speaker 1 And that sparked a, as you mentioned, sparked a war going forward that would lead to both sides upping the ante and a lot of redistricting to come so the u.s justice department is now suing california to block the new maps that were authorized by proposition 50.

Speaker 1 uh pam bondi has decried these maps even though nearly 65 of californians voted for prop 50.

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 2 get inside pam bondi's head i apologize for sending the errors please please yes it's a lot for a monday morning yes

Speaker 1 so what grounds uh would the Justice Department have to sue? And

Speaker 1 what do you think it tells us about how they're going to approach what's happening in California and elsewhere?

Speaker 2 We have a lot of states who are doing redistricting. California is unique because California has an independent redistricting commission already in place passed by the state legislature.

Speaker 2 Gavin Newsom found a way to go around that.

Speaker 2 to be able to do a temporary redistricting that would just redraw the districts until the census and was contingent upon Texas finishing, because he had to start this process before they passed theirs, was contingent upon Texas doing it.

Speaker 2 And so they had to jump through some legal loopholes here in California to get this done. That is the putative grounds upon which they are trying to stop this.

Speaker 2 It is obviously, if Texas had jumped through legal ground, you know, similar legal loopholes to get this done, they would not have done, they would not have sued there. And so

Speaker 2 this is an attempt. I think the people here in California that I've spoken to feel very confident in

Speaker 2 how all the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed.

Speaker 2 Everyone here is doing Trump's bidding. Texas doing Trump's bidding.
Other states are doing Trump's bidding. Pamboni, per usual, is doing Trump's bidding.

Speaker 2 I'm skeptical she will succeed here, but it's evidence that they are going to use every lever of power available to them to try to hold onto the House at all costs.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about some of the other states that are taking sides in this fight.

Speaker 1 I don't count Utah, where their actions were court ordered, or Indiana, where they have now refused to convene a special session. Are there any specific states that you've got your eye on?

Speaker 2 Well, so let's go through what has happened so far. So you mentioned Utah, which was by court order, but we actually picked up a seat in that.
There's now a likely Democratic seat.

Speaker 2 It's the seat that Ben McAdams held in Congress for a long time before losing it. So that's a possible Democratic pickup.
You have Missouri, which has likely picked up one Republican seat there.

Speaker 2 As you mentioned, Indiana has taken themselves out.

Speaker 2 They keep doing it, although reports are Trump actually just either last night or this morning threatened to endorse the primary opponent of every Indiana state senator who would not do this.

Speaker 2 And they are trying to haul a bunch of these people in to meet with J.D. Vance and Trump in the White House to see if they can change the direction here.

Speaker 2 We also have Ohio, which is another interesting one, where Ohio was looking at redistricting and they were going to aggressively partisanly gerrymander.

Speaker 2 They're actually came to a bipartisan deal there to avoid sort of a court case. And that is going to end up being much less pro-Republican than Trump actually wanted.

Speaker 2 It probably ends up, I think the Cook report, they analyzed it as a,

Speaker 2 like maybe one seat, likely half a seat, depending on how it all turns out, but it could have been much worse.

Speaker 2 And then we are also,

Speaker 2 they wanted to do Kansas. Kansas has, is not going forward as of right now.
And then we have a couple of states outstanding from the Republicans, most notably is Florida.

Speaker 2 Partisan gerrymandering is actually illegal in Florida.

Speaker 2 That has not stopped them in the past because they have a very pliant state Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 But governance santists and legislators there have looked at possibly doing this. They have not moved fully forward other than forming a commission.

Speaker 2 I think they're going to be under real pressure from Trump to go forward.

Speaker 2 And they could pick up two to three seats there.

Speaker 2 And then for the Democrats, we have two outstanding questions. One is Maryland, where the Democratic state Senate president has been very, very resistant to it.

Speaker 2 If they were to move forward in that state, we would pick up one seat. And then Virginia,

Speaker 2 very cleverly and very aggressively has a process in place to look at to do redistricting next year and that could potentially pick up two to three Democratic seats there.

Speaker 1 Can you talk a little bit about what the state of play is in Missouri? Because I know they passed those maps. There's the challenge to the maps because of the process that they used.

Speaker 2 It's unclear, I think, how that all plays out. I think in the end, the likely scenario is they're going to pick up one seat, Robinson will pick up one seat in Missouri.

Speaker 1 So I wanted to talk about this because because Maryland, I think, is an example of the reticence we're seeing on the side of Democrats.

Speaker 1 His argument is that it is against the process and we shouldn't fight fire with fire.

Speaker 1 And nationally, you know, we continue to debate which strategies we should be using to defeat an authoritarian Republican regime without losing our virtues.

Speaker 1 So can you talk a little bit about how you see California's strategy resonating and what are the dangers that you see if we refuse to engage in this kind of

Speaker 1 strategic oppositional approach?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think what Gavin Newsom did was very bold and relatively, I think, pretty risky for him, both at home and

Speaker 2 nationally as someone who pretty clearly seems to have presidential ambitions. Like he won by a lot.

Speaker 2 It was never actually ended up being a campaign, but that wasn't obvious from the outset. And he had to work really hard.

Speaker 2 Nancy Pelosi was very helpful in this to get everyone in California, all the leaders, all the stakeholders, the Hispanic caucus, the Black caucus, labor unions to agree to these maps.

Speaker 2 And it was very aggressive because it's not only five Republican seats, the most almost as importantly, there are several toss-up districts that he's made Democratic enough that the party will probably save tens of millions of dollars in money defending those seats that can now be deployed on offense in other states.

Speaker 2 And so, very, very aggressive. But it like, this is, as someone who lives in California, there is a really strong anti-jerry, like anti-gerryman culture here.

Speaker 2 People are very proud of what they passed many years ago. We've seen ourselves as sort of a beacon of democracy in that way.
And so, to take that on,

Speaker 2 to go up against the league of women voters, like you generally never want to go up against the league of women voters. It's like the one political organization with like a 99% approval rating.

Speaker 2 And to do that took

Speaker 2 real risk for him personally.

Speaker 2 It also sent a signal to Virginia, Illinois, which I left out, which can pick up a Democratic seat, to those states that this is something you can and should do if you have the power and the law behind you to do it.

Speaker 2 Because I think we all believe, or at least I think we all believe, that we should have a national law banning partisan redistricting.

Speaker 2 We are only, I mean, it is the irony of politics in Sarah, but we're only going to have that law if we do partisan redistricting to match what the Republicans are doing so that the next Democratic president, hopefully in 2029, can have a governing trifecta to pass such a law.

Speaker 2 And because we will lose the House for, we haven't even gotten into the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, but under current status quo,

Speaker 2 2026 should be a better year for Democrats than 2028 in the House, just because of how we turn out as a party. And so if we lose that opportunity because

Speaker 2 we refuse to fight fire with fire, we may not get it back. And you would very potentially have a Democratic president with a Republican House in 2029, which means nothing we want to do passes.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about the College decision, which is the voting rights decision. It's a case brought by a group of white voters in Louisiana who were opposing the redrawing of the maps that were.

Speaker 1 required because for a moment the Supreme Court actually upheld the Voting Rights Act.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Which was notable. Yes.

Speaker 1 Very notable. It's like they got confused for a second and now they're trying to undo it.
And there is the very real risk that with the College decision, the House will lose upwards of 19 seats.

Speaker 1 And if you combine that with redistricting, we're essentially looking at an American Duma that is populated by right-wing Republican authoritarians for 10, 20 years.

Speaker 1 Did I miss anything?

Speaker 2 No, no, that's exactly right. I mean,

Speaker 2 what's interesting, we can get into that case specifically, but if you look at it right now, if let's say Florida moves forward and Virginia moves forward, but Indiana and Maryland, which don't seem like they have a good chance of doing it, don't, we're kind of going to net out at about a tie because of what California did and because of what happened in Ohio in particular.

Speaker 2 And so I think that I don't think that's great, but it's, you know, maybe we're down a seat out of that. But that's like still a world in which we can win.

Speaker 2 If the Supreme Court were to strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act early enough in the year that those maps could be used in 2026, there is probably not a, there is a, probably not a realistic path to the Democrats voting in the House.

Speaker 2 And this is the timing here matters a lot because most of the, these are, this is going to matter most in southern states.

Speaker 2 Most of these southern states hold their primaries pretty early, like in March. And it becomes very, very challenging to do this if the decision comes after the primaries are done.

Speaker 2 Because then you have to redo the primaries, redraw the maps, redo the primaries, hold the general election all by the first Tuesday in November.

Speaker 2 And so we're like, I think probably every day, starting around, you know, the second week of January, we're all just going to be waiting

Speaker 2 on pins and needles to see what the Supreme Court is going to do. Are they going to do this on, if they do it on their normal calendar in June,

Speaker 2 that would at least forestall the doom until 2028 at the earliest? But it's very, very concerning.

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Speaker 1 So, I want to stay here because part of what's been happening in our party is this argument about identity politics.

Speaker 1 And I've been very vocal about my distaste for how that is framed.

Speaker 1 But at the heart of striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the elimination of majority-minority districts, which were designed to provide people of color in particular with the ability to vote for candidates of their choice.

Speaker 1 And what I want you to do is to talk about it both from the vantage point of the VRA as a tool, but also what it presages for the arguments that we're having within our party about identity and race.

Speaker 1 And I'm just going to let you talk.

Speaker 2 Sure. So

Speaker 2 I think the way to think about it in, I think it has often been talked about in the discourse over the last few months here, as we've been talking about the striking down, as that these districts were drawn specifically to ensure most, mostly Black representation in the South.

Speaker 2 I think that's, and that, and that's how the Republicans want it talked about.

Speaker 2 But the other part to understand is it's also that way because the way the Republicans were drawing the district, or not always Republicans, because before the VRA, it was also Democrats in the South.

Speaker 2 But the way the districts were being drawn by white politicians in the South was to divide up these very concentrated enclave, you know, either in cities or in rural areas and divide them up so as to ensure that no single district had enough black voters to possibly allow there to be black representation.

Speaker 2 And so what taking this down will allow them to do that again, right?

Speaker 2 To draw the districts in cities in the south that have, you know, very concentrated, large black populations and just cut off this little part of the city,

Speaker 2 this little part of the city, and to create these suburban districts as opposed to one singular city district, in instance, which would likely have,

Speaker 2 which would, you know, be similar to the districts we have now. And to give a sense of how devious they are about this, there was a

Speaker 2 sort of a Republican gerrymandering expert who was advising the party all throughout the 2010 redistricting and then got involved in North Carolina and when they tried to redraw their districts back in 2016 or 2018, I can't remember.

Speaker 2 And when he passed away as part of a lawsuit, all of his files came forward and they showed the maps they were going to use in North Carolina where they were literally drawing through

Speaker 2 HBCUs in North Carolina to ensure that the entire population of like North Carolina A and T was not in one district. Like that's how devious this would be.

Speaker 2 And so this is going to allow that to happen again.

Speaker 2 It's going to allow white politicians for both racial and partisan reasons to draw districts to dilute black representation, mostly black representation in the South, but it can also be Hispanic representation like in the Rio Grande Valley and some other parts of the country.

Speaker 2 And what that is going to mean is we're going to end up with a much wider Congress.

Speaker 2 a much, much wider Congress and a much more Republican Congress that is not going to be representative of the country.

Speaker 2 And this is a place where, like, we're, as you point out, we are wrapped around the axle on these arguments of identity politics and

Speaker 2 DEI and critical race theory. And Democrats have felt like they've been on the back foot for years now on this, pretty much ever since 2021.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this is one of those times where you can't shy away from the fight because it really, it's about a small group of politicians. using their power to keep power for themselves.

Speaker 2 And I think we have to be willing to take on that fight and argue for it. Because if we don't do it, if we're not fighting for that, like what are we fighting for?

Speaker 1 I mean, for me, that reminds me, you know, two weeks ago when we were in our sugar high, when Mondami won, a significant portion of his victory was absolutely powered by younger voters.

Speaker 1 And he focused heavily on sort of the practical aspects of affordability, you know, freeze the rent, fast and free buses, universal child care.

Speaker 1 But he also sharply rebuked those who tried to attack him on issues of religion and ethnicity.

Speaker 1 And his campaign succeeded at the same time that, you know, governor-elect Abigail Spamberger also achieved dramatically high turnout rates from young people. And

Speaker 1 you hear this argument that one was about identity and the other was not. And I think we're learning the wrong lessons.
Okay. I would love to hear you talk about why it is absolutely logical that

Speaker 1 Democrats seize both Abigail and Zorhan's approach because identity does matter in this moment when we're talking about who holds political power.

Speaker 2 Well, this is sort of gets at the

Speaker 2 intellectual paucity of the quote-unquote identity politics debate because everything's about identity. Everything's always been about identity, like who you are.
And it's not just like who I am.

Speaker 2 It's how people, like, how people see from a policy perspective, what do people see in me that they relate to that connects to their identity?

Speaker 2 That could be we've we've had similar experiences growing up in a certain way.

Speaker 2 It could be similar, you know, obviously, I think what Zoron went through in New York and the sort of the very gross and racist and Islamophobic attacks from Cuomo and the super PACs.

Speaker 2 Like there are a lot of people in New York who have been through that, a city with a large Muslim and immigrant population have been through that. They see that in themselves.

Speaker 2 And it's actually even more true

Speaker 2 now in the age of the internet, where everything is identity, almost operates on an identity graph, right?

Speaker 2 Do you remember like in the early 2000s, you would get those BuzzFeed quizzes or the 2010s, they were like, how to know that you're a 90s kid who loved MTV or that you're from Virginia or you're from like, and that those rocking across the internet because people, it was a chance to be a part of themselves.

Speaker 2 And then that could be, that could be your ethnic background. It could be your.
your economic background. It could be the state you're from.

Speaker 2 And that there is just every part of politics identity because it is a every politician is trying to to relate to people in some way in a shared experience.

Speaker 2 Like my experience is obviously, political experiences working with Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 And there were people who related to him because he was black, people who related to him because he was a son of a single mother, people related to him because he

Speaker 2 grew up on, was on food stamps at some point, or he had these Midwestern Kansas grandparents or whatever else.

Speaker 2 And that, and like everyone, this idea that we've sort of identified this idea idea that a candidate of color runs as an identity, runs on identity politics, in this case, Lauron, and Abigail Spanberger as a white candidate does not when everyone's running on a form of their own identity and trying to relate to as many people as possible in ways in which their identities connect.

Speaker 2 It's one of those things that's almost hard to have this argument because people are having it in one dimension when the reality is in three dimensions.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the issues that I have with the way we talk about it, and this, I think, is a place where you and I vehemently agree, is that we are being guided in our conversations and our policies and our politics by Republicans.

Speaker 1 We don't have independent thought anymore.

Speaker 1 I have this triad that I think Republicans use where they demonize what we say, what we think, what we believe, and they spin us into these circular arguments where we are fighting over our language as though if we come up with the right verbiage, they'll suddenly agree with us.

Speaker 1 They will never agree.

Speaker 1 But while we're busy fighting over the language that they're never going to like, they move on to litigation and legislation while we're still trying to figure out how do we rearrange the letters or appeal and appease with how we talk about who we are.

Speaker 1 And I think that Republicans have been ruthlessly efficient in using this as a way to cement structural power. They've done this at the state and local level.
They've done it now at the federal level.

Speaker 1 And they have this never-ending pipeline of candidates pundits, and policymakers and ideas.

Speaker 1 And that's allowed them to not just aggressively gerrymander for decades, it's allowed them to restructure the arguments that we have.

Speaker 1 It's allowed them to seek judges that will uphold their maps and their policies.

Speaker 1 And Democrats have largely been, I think, timid or ineffective in response.

Speaker 1 And one of the reasons I enjoy reading the message box is that you continue to show ways to pierce that tendency, tendency, not only to

Speaker 1 cater to Republican ideology as a way to justify our existence, but also as a challenge to us to think about what we should be.

Speaker 1 So how should Democrats think about this present moment as an opportunity for courage and for fighting back?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so you have hit on something that I call the magic words fallacy, which Democrats have had for as long as I've been in politics. Every time we have, we run into some sort of political trouble.

Speaker 2 I remember this after 2000, remember after 2004, we become, I remember just watching politics as a college kid after the 1994 election.

Speaker 2 We become obsessed with how do we find the right words that will persuade people of things. And it's never the right policy or the right messenger or the right politicians.
The right words, right?

Speaker 2 Because we've convinced ourselves that we lost the taxes argument because they use the term death tax, we use the term inheritance tax, that for a long time, this has changed recently, but for a long time, we lost the abortion argument because they said pro-life and we said pro-choice.

Speaker 2 And they had defined their position as pro-life. And that is just such a, that is a simplistic and I think almost cowardly way of looking at it because it allows you to,

Speaker 2 one, it pins you into fighting the argument on their terms. So you have to have the argument now in their territory, but it also allows you to not wrestle with any of the harder questions.

Speaker 2 about what we actually stand for, what our values are, anything else. Because if it's like, we don't have to get new leaders, we just have to get new words.

Speaker 2 And words are much cheaper and easier and less uh disruptive than new leaders.

Speaker 2 And so, I think for we've fallen into that trap again since 2024, like we are obsessed with really, it really actually began

Speaker 2 in 2021. It sort of began when we looked at we kind of started the Biden era like on our back foot.
That election was closer than we thought, and we lose the governorship in 2021.

Speaker 2 It's CRT, it's DEI, it's the sort of the perceived backlash to everything that happened in from 2018 to 2020.

Speaker 2 And like for Democrats, I think going forward is we have to think about how to be on offense, not on defense.

Speaker 2 Where can we push forward? What are the issues that

Speaker 2 I guess I'd say, how do we abandon this sort of learned helplessness where we can't win the arguments that,

Speaker 2 you know, that we sort of decided we can't win the immigration argument?

Speaker 2 And so the way to do it is to not talk about it. When you can't not talk about it, because large portions of this country have massed ICE agents storming through them and the U.S.
citizens are being

Speaker 2 detained and without, and people are being rendered to torture prisons without due process. Like we have to talk about it.

Speaker 2 So how can we think about it in a way to talk about it, not from a perspective of defense? Like how can we,

Speaker 2 you know, you sort of hear Democrats talk about it and they're like, we have to like use all these caveats at first. before we can get to offense.
So we have to, we always start on defense.

Speaker 2 It's like, you know, I think, you know, I think the border should be secure, but all of these things. And like, yes, we should absolutely be for secure border.
Voters want that.

Speaker 2 We've been for that for a long time. How do we think about being on offense? I think the big thing is it's like really a mentality shift in the party.
And there is a massive opportunity right now.

Speaker 2 This is one of those moments you can see it happening before us where

Speaker 2 it is. I really think it's like an emperor has no closed moment for Trump, where people are beginning to see that he's not what they thought he was.
The MACA coalition is cracking up.

Speaker 2 The 2025 election showed us that there is a pretty decent swath of people who voted for Trump in 2024 who are open to us now.

Speaker 2 And if we can think about this moment, not in just how do we get to exactly 50.1% in seven battleground states, but how can we have the sort of broad, aggressive, populist, progressive, unifying message that could put some of these states that haven't been in play in a while back in play?

Speaker 2 right? Where we could be potentially be competitive in places where we haven't been competitive before.

Speaker 2 And that could mean going on offense in states like south carolina or places in the south where we have made progress but full or winning back you know becoming competitive again in the ohios and iowas and floridas of the world that have moved away from us since 2012.

Speaker 1 and so i just think we have to think big and i think our tendency as a party is to think small well speaking of which uh we recently watched Democratic senators cave on the shutdown, followed by some members of the House who were very happy to also lend their support.

Speaker 1 And you wrote this piece about how angry you were at the eight Democrats.

Speaker 1 You said they capitulated at the point of maximum leverage and that they were trying to sell this as some sort of win is embarrassing. Now,

Speaker 1 to your point, there are a lot of folks who've been pushing back, saying, Well, this no other outcome was realistic. We couldn't have gotten anything better.

Speaker 1 And so, just based on what you just said, I'd love for you to expand on that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think even I think we went, I give a lot of credit to senator schumer and hakeem jeffries for getting us for being willing to unify their caucuses to support shutting down the government refusing to fund what trump is doing and i give them credit for really winning being the first side that initiated the shutdown to like actually win the messaging war if at the end of this more people blame trump and republicans than democrats people the people who cared about health care affordability went way up.

Speaker 2 The people who knew about the Affordable Care Act tax credits went up. Like they actually won the message war.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure that any, that most of the people who voted for that shutdown, even many of them in leadership, thought we were actually going to win in the end.

Speaker 2 And so they were looking for an off-ramp. And like what really frustrated, like it may have been the Republicans were never going to give, but there was a real reversal of feelings.

Speaker 2 Like we come out of the election on that Tuesday. Everyone's feeling great.
I was at Crooked Con in DC. Everyone's fired up.
People feel fired up.

Speaker 2 We feel like good for the first time in one year as a party. We are on offense.
We're feeling good.

Speaker 2 Sunday night, they pull the rug out. And it's like, you have to actually, if you're going to do it, if you're going to have the fight, you got to be willing to push it as far as you can.
And maybe,

Speaker 2 you know, there'd be at some point where we decide the pain was too much. And because Trump, like the Trump's advantage in this, and I, is that he was willing to be cruel to people.

Speaker 2 He was willing to starve people. He was willing to make them freeze in their homes.
He was willing to fire federal workers. But we should have pushed it longer and harder.

Speaker 2 Because if the fight is as important as you think it is, you can't really turn tail and run at the first sign of turbulence, which is, I feel, like what happened here.

Speaker 1 I mean, to your point, he's still going to starve people. We are still seeing cuts.

Speaker 1 I mean, right here in Georgia, they just denounced the thousands of people who will lose SNAP benefits because of the Republican mega bill.

Speaker 1 LIHEAP is still on hold for thousands and thousands of Americans as we head into winter. And their cruelty doesn't seem to be letting up.

Speaker 1 But you recently wrote a piece about how those same elections revealed that Trump has entered sort of the lame duck phase of his presidency. And I would add to it his plaintive whine last night.

Speaker 1 We're recording this on a Monday.

Speaker 1 He told the House to go ahead and vote for the Epstein files, knowing that he was going to lose that fight and hoping, I think against hope, that we'll forget that he has the power to just release them on his own if he wanted to.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 But my concern, I want to talk about the Epstein thing too, but

Speaker 1 my bigger concern is that we are so myopically focused on Trump that we are ignoring this broader authoritarian regime from Palantir's control of surveillance to how vote is gutting civil service to, as you pointed out, the just absolute cruelty that we are seeing.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's also this

Speaker 1 rooting of corruption that's expanded to include Christy Noam giving a $220 million contract to her friends. And we've got foreign actors who are receiving favors from the American government.

Speaker 1 And so, do our Democratic leaders get this? And

Speaker 2 this is hard. This is really hard.

Speaker 2 This is really hard because one of the first things I wrote after the election was, after Trump was sorted in, was that Trump's never going to be on the ballot again.

Speaker 2 Now, a lot of people at the time called me really naive for saying that, but my argument was we we should not just focus on Trump.

Speaker 2 We got to focus on Republicans because it's Republicans we're going to beat in 2026 and it's

Speaker 2 a different Republican we're going to beat in 2028. And then I've written about Trump like every other day for the last 11 months.
So I've, I've, you know, listen to what I say, not what I do. And,

Speaker 2 but there is this like tough incentive for the Democrats, which is there were a lot of anti-Trump arguments used in Virginia and New Jersey.

Speaker 2 And particularly in New Jersey, where Jack Chittarelli was endorsed by Trump, gave Trump, I think he gave Trump Trump an A-plus or something

Speaker 2 in the primary when they asked him how he was doing as president. That was great fodder for

Speaker 2 persuade, not just persuading voters, but turning out voters in that state.

Speaker 2 So we have this short-term incentive to talk about Trump because it fires up the people we need to fire up, particularly in these lower turnout, you know, off-year elections.

Speaker 2 But in the long run, we're never going to, I really believe we're never going to face Trump again.

Speaker 2 And honestly, if it turns out he engages in a military coup in January of 2029, like my being wrong wrong on this podcast is really low, low on the list of problems I'm going to have.

Speaker 2 And so, but we have this larger movement to defeat, and this movement is moving on without him right before our eyes. It's the Epstein vote, it is the

Speaker 2 just the debates within the party over their breaking with him over H-1B visas,

Speaker 2 over you know, there's like real frustration about some of the things he is doing, some of the foreign affairs, the wars in

Speaker 2 the extra, you know, the extra-legal bombings in in the Pacific and

Speaker 2 outside Venezuela and all of that.

Speaker 2 But the movement's going to be someone else has me ahead. And

Speaker 2 I do think there is a risk that we're going to be so Trump obsessed

Speaker 2 going forward that we're going to miss the fact that Trump is not going to be around and we're going to have to defeat something else and something bigger and something more dangerous because

Speaker 2 Trump has always been the symptom, not the disease.

Speaker 2 There is a Republican right-wing culture,

Speaker 2 power, you know, sort of culture of, you know, power accumulation that led to a world in which Trump could win in 2016.

Speaker 2 And that same culture led to him being able to come back from January 6th and being convicted of crimes and win again in 2024.

Speaker 2 And defeating Trump, but not defeating that culture means we're just going to be in the same place with a different figurehead at some point in the very near future.

Speaker 1 And I think the Epstein files are one issue where there's a point of opportunity.

Speaker 1 As we said, we're recording this on Monday, but it's expected that more than 100 Republicans are going to vote to compel the Justice Department to release all of the files.

Speaker 1 However, in response, notably, Megan Kelly has been trying to redefine depravity, and others are twisting themselves into pretzels to justify why Trump shouldn't be implicated.

Speaker 1 But there's the undercurrent of how this party is addressing what has made sort of its central theme of morality and family values.

Speaker 1 So beyond the hope that the Epstein files weaken Republican loyalty, how can we exploit this tension?

Speaker 1 And to your point about how we've got to shift from this focus on Trump to this broader focus on Republicans,

Speaker 1 What should we be doing in this moment to continue to leverage that rift?

Speaker 2 So I think the core theme that runs throughout Trump and this Republican Party is corruption. There is depravity.

Speaker 2 There is

Speaker 2 moral abomination. There is criminality involved in the Epstein files and in that whole case.
But it is also the story of a rich and powerful person.

Speaker 2 trying to using their power to protect themselves and their rich friends. And that is what everything about that is that is Trump

Speaker 2 building a ballroom paid for by corporate donations. That's all the crypto schemes.
That's the free jet. It's the gold he's getting from Switzerland in order to both take the tariffs down.

Speaker 2 Like it is a we are living in kleptocracy. And that is that is not a Trump problem.
That is a party-wide problem. It is being enabled across the board.

Speaker 2 And the very close relationship between the Republicans and these powerful members, like this is the corruption that drives people insane.

Speaker 2 It's also the corruption that led a lot of people to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Speaker 2 Because as an outsider who is hated by the, by the quote unquote system, there were a segment of voters who thought that Trump would actually take on that system. He has made that system worse.

Speaker 2 He's used that system to help himself. And I think Democrats have to, I think we have to run against that.
And we have to prove to people that we are

Speaker 2 capable of being the ones who actually fix the system.

Speaker 2 Because I think one of the traps we've fallen into is we have made ourselves, I think, sound a lot a lot like the defenders of the broken system because we're so rightfully outraged about all the institutions that Trump is burning down, the norms he's breaking through, the federal workers he's firing that we are constantly telling him to stop doing those things,

Speaker 2 but not saying what we would do differently.

Speaker 2 We're going to have to understand how people actually feel about politics and institutions in the United States and be seen as people who will actually take them on and fix them.

Speaker 1 How do we do that when we don't control Congress? I mean, it seems to be that we get that we should and we complain about it to each other, but it doesn't seem to break through.

Speaker 1 What's you're in charge of democracy and Democrats for the next three minutes?

Speaker 2 Give us instructions. What do we do? Well, so the first thing I would do is I would have the every house, I would do a version of the contract for America that has,

Speaker 2 we could pick 10 ideas. Six of them are

Speaker 2 involve getting money and power out of politics. We have to get rid of stock dealing by stock trading by members of Congress.
We want to get dark money out of politics.

Speaker 2 We want to reduce corporate influence.

Speaker 2 I think we should have rules that members of Congress can never become lobbyists, that people who work in the government cannot be lobbyists for five years or 10 years.

Speaker 2 We have to end we have like, so we need those ideas that show we actually want to get money out of power.

Speaker 2 And then the other four ideas, or we can do five and five, whatever, are about affordability and lowering prices and raising wages. And everyone should run on that.
Every single democrat.

Speaker 2 Like, obviously, we can't do those things right away. We're not going to have the presidency even if we win, but

Speaker 2 we should absolutely have an agenda.

Speaker 2 And then I think when we, in 2028, when we have a bunch of Democrats running for president and that process will start the day after the 2026 elections, I will encourage every one of those Democrats I talk to publicly and privately to really have a reform agenda, to run as people who are going to fix this system.

Speaker 2 We should have a big debate about those ideas, right?

Speaker 2 We need economic ideas because affordability will remain a huge issue because of economic inequality and low wages and higher prices in this country. But we also need,

Speaker 2 it's not just political reform, because I think that can be sometimes a little

Speaker 2 like ivory tower, but it's got to be really like getting money out of politics, right? Get special influence and corporate power out of politics.

Speaker 2 And I, so I think those two things allow us to have that, the hat to set ourselves up for in 2028 to be that party. And it starts in, but it starts in 2026.

Speaker 2 I don't think they're going to take my advice, but I'm going to try.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to do my best.

Speaker 2 Okay, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Okay, last question. So here at Assembly Required, we give homework And usually it's action items on how people can make a difference.

Speaker 1 And you are welcome to offer that because I know you're at CrookedCon and you heard lots of things for people to do.

Speaker 1 But I have you here not only as a redistricting MAVEN but as the resident polling expert at Crooked Media. And so I've got a polling question for you.
Okay. That will be an action item.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So over the next 50 weeks, people are going to hear poll after poll after poll telling them about either doom or salvation coming our way.

Speaker 1 How should listeners talk about the polling data that they're going to be hearing? How should they process it?

Speaker 1 And what's the one thing you want them to do with that polling data and the one thing you don't want them to do with that polling data?

Speaker 2 Okay. So here's how to think about polls.
They are imprecise snapshots in time. We cannot think about them as prediction of what's going to happen.
And what we really have to stop doing,

Speaker 2 and I'm guilty of this too, is using them to manage our emotions about the election, right? Where it is, you know,

Speaker 2 I always think about 2020, where if the polls showed a tied election and then Biden won by this very narrow margin in these battleground states two days after the election, everyone would have been super happy.

Speaker 2 But because we all thought he was going to win by seven, they were going to call it at 10 and we could all have the open the champagne we didn't open in 2016, everyone was freaking out.

Speaker 2 And it's because they are their emotional crushes for us. And so we have to stop thinking about that way.
The way I would just think of polling as a snapshot in time and to use it as motivation.

Speaker 2 And I just thought I would tell you: just

Speaker 2 if you, if the polls feel too good, think they're too good and go do work to make sure that they end up being that good. If the polls seem bad, go do the work,

Speaker 2 the volunteering, the canvassing, the phone bank, whatever it else, to make sure that the polls end up the way you want them. It's just like, that's all it is.
We obsess about it.

Speaker 2 I mean, I host a podcast called Polar Coaster, so I am guilty of this, but that's one of the messages we have is it's just, it is, it is just.

Speaker 2 giving you one infrecise snapshot of what's happening in time. And then it's up to you to determine what actually happens at the end.

Speaker 1 Dan Pfeiffer, thank you so much for joining us on Assembly Required.

Speaker 2 So happy to be here. This is so much fun.

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Speaker 1 As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges. First, be curious.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed my conversation with Dan Pfeiffer, subscribe to his weekly message box newsletter, where he breaks down the latest polls, key events, and political trends.

Speaker 1 It's one of my go-to sources for analysis and insight. You can also become a friend of the pod here at Crooked Media and get access to his subscriber-only shows like PolarCoaster.

Speaker 1 Number two, solve problems. As Dan said, polling can offer useful insight into where people stand, but it's a reflector, not a predictor.

Speaker 1 However, we have the ability to shape outcomes using polling as an illuminator. What people are hearing, what worries them, and what they want for the future.

Speaker 1 Instead of slipping into anxiety, we can channel that energy into action, starting now.

Speaker 1 Voting is the end of the process, but the work starts immediately.

Speaker 1 So encourage your neighbors, your community, your friends, and your family to understand how politics will affect them, whether they know it or not.

Speaker 1 Look for issues that resonate and work together to see who is responsible for making it better. The midterms are more than congressional races.

Speaker 1 City, county, and school board races will all be on the ballot. And all of this may feel far away, but they'll be here before we know it.
So start planting seeds now.

Speaker 1 Volunteer with organizers, knock on doors, have real conversations with people, asking what they need to make their lives better.

Speaker 1 Percentages can only tell you so much, but talking to real people can tell you everything.

Speaker 1 And last, of course, do good.

Speaker 1 This past weekend, more than a thousand Starbucks workers went on strike across 40 plus cities due to stalled contract negotiations.

Speaker 1 Organizers say they are ready to widen the strike if executives don't budge, and they're asking customers to stand with them by steering clear of Starbucks as part of the no contract, no coffee campaign.

Speaker 1 We've talked a lot on this show about the power of protest, about labor unions, and about how boycotts are one of the most effective tools we have.

Speaker 1 It's also a muscle we have to flex if we want to be ready for broader actions. So please, do your part.
Skip the latte. Stand with the workers.

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Speaker 1 More and more people are looking for ways to understand what's going on, and they want to hear the voices of experts who can give us insights and action items. So, tell people about us.

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Speaker 1 You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 1 And please also check out my sub stack, Assembly Notes, where we dive deep and where I share more of my thoughts on how we fight back against this authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 And once again, I want to thank you, the thousands of you who have signed up for the 10 Steps Campaign at 10stepsCampaign.org.

Speaker 1 We now have a toolkit where you can find concrete examples of the 10 steps to freedom and power.

Speaker 1 We include links to organizations, recommendations for you, regardless of where you are, or what you're ready to do. And we're constantly adding new organizations and examples of how to get involved.

Speaker 1 I'd love to hear more about how you're processing what's happening around us and what tools and resources would be helpful. If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

Speaker 1 You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod. Our number is 213-293-9509.

Speaker 1 That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Be careful out there and I'll meet you here next week.

Speaker 1 Assembly Required is a crooked media production. Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.
Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

Speaker 1 This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Our theme song is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Speaker 1 Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Munca for production support. Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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