Where the Puck Is Going: Why Maximum Gerrymandering May Be Inevitable

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today, Nate, a topic that's been in the news quite a bit, something that's really important for the United States, for democracy, for game theory, and that topic is gerrymandering or redistricting in salamanderish ways, as we'll talk about soon.

This is a gerrymandering episode, Maria.

All gerrymandering, everything about gerrymandering.

We're going to explain a little bit of the history of this, but this is a problem that suits the show's interest really well.

It's a high-stakes problem and one where, as you mentioned, game theory in particular,

very literal real-life application of the prisoner's dilemma, as you'll hear us talk about throughout the show.

So, before we get into what's happening right now, I think it's really interesting to kind of position this a little bit historically and give our listeners who may not remember, you know, their U.S.

history 101, a little bit of a background of what gerrymandering is and where it actually came from.

So, the original term gerrymander, it was first used in 1812 in the Boston Gazette, and it refers to a figure, Governor Elbridge Jerry.

He was

basically, yes, good old Elbridge.

I still, it's so funny.

So I obviously did a little refresh before this segment, but I remember that name so well from my history class because I was like, Elbridge Jerry.

Like, how do you ever forget the name Elbridge?

Anyway, so

he was a Democratic Republican.

And for people, once again, who need a U.S.

History 101 refresher, the Democratic-Republican Party would go on to become the

Democratic Party, right?

Under Andrew Jackson.

So when you have these leftists saying that Democrats are really Republicans, it's kind of true.

Yeah.

So

basically, yeah, the party told him, you know, we need to kind of do this redistricting in Massachusetts, right?

During the state Senate elections.

And Jerry actually got a bad rep on this because he disagreed with the proposal and he said he found it, quote, highly disagreeable, end quote.

But he was the one who signed the bill in 1812.

So his name is the one associated with this distinction.

And the reason it's called gerrymandering comes from obviously his last name, but also that the map looked like a salamander, basically.

So it was such a weirdly drawn map in order to try to get the votes

to the Democratic Republican Party.

Massachusetts is a little bit of a weird looking state, right?

You got that fucking Cape Cod look.

You got like a lot of, and it's very square on the left end.

I think it used to cover more territory.

I didn't.

Massachusetts used to have some of Vermont and stuff like that.

But like,

you know, you're going to get some weird looking shapes if you have a fractal coastline, like the beautiful coastline you have outside of Massachusetts.

It is.

It is.

So you are going to get some weird shapes, but this one was weird enough that it, you know, prompted an entire term.

No one actually knows who coined the term to begin with.

But yeah, so that's the, that's the origin of the term.

And I think that if we,

if we actually then look at the history, we see that in the past, you know, the Democrats knew how to fight dirty, right?

Like if we look at the Democratic Party of the 1800s, like with the political bosses, they like they really fought tooth and nail to get those votes.

And they did everything they could to make sure that their districts had the votes they needed.

So even though today, you know, this is happening in Texas and, you know, Democrats, especially since the 1970s, have really kind of tried to step back and tried to say, you know, you can't do this.

You cannot manipulate districts to try to get votes for one specific party.

That's not the way democracy works.

They, you know, have tried to kind of put that party boss history

behind them.

But I think that

it's very interesting just to keep in the back of your mind that this was not always the case, right?

That this is the party that originated the practice and that it used to be everyone brought their boxing gloves to the ring in the past and then it changed, right?

So now we're in a very different situation.

But if we go back to the 1800s, the parties were quite different.

And there have been, I think people would say there's been progress, right?

But now, Nate, if you want to bring us to the present day.

The Constitution requires that after every census, every decade, that states are responsible, the apportion members based on the census to the House of Representatives, and that states are responsible for setting their own boundaries.

without a lot of limits, at least based on how recent courts have decided this, right?

There are some limits based on the Voting Rights Act, where you want to have enough seats that are representative of black and Hispanic voters and sometimes Asian Americans that meet certain thresholds.

Apart from that, though, the Roberts Court has said that, hey, this is a legislative decision.

There are elections to Congress.

The Constitution doesn't say a lot about them.

And so therefore, if Congress wants to implement more procedures on redistricting, they're in charge of elections.

They have to do that, except nothing has really happened, right?

Now, throughout history, there have been periodic periods.

I'm redundant there, right?

There have been

feints and spells where there was more or less mid-decade redistricting, meaning that like,

there's not a new census, but we're going to reset boundaries in advance of the next election anyway.

This sometimes happens because of court decisions where a court rules that a map is illegal.

It can also happen strategically.

In 2002,

or 2003 rather, Texas used to be kind of a

Democratic state.

I was going to say a blue state, but not really in the classical way that we think of a blue state.

It's just you had like conservative Southern Democrats, for example.

LBJ was from Texas, of course.

Beginning in the mid-2000s.

And LBJ, of course, was the administration that passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Of course, with a very liberal, the Warren Court, right?

In 2003, or beginning in the mid-early 2000s, late 1990s, the South, the conservative Democrats in the South began to be replaced by Republicans, right?

So 2003, Texas thought that its map wasn't Republican enough, and they redistricted it in the middle of the decade.

Now, courts have ruled that this is probably fine, too.

If Congress wants to print that, they can also pass a law.

I mean, it's kind of like a frequent technique of the Supreme Court, which I don't think is like inherently terrible, right?

But when you have kind of a dysfunctional Congress, it's very partisan and very,

you know, especially in the GOP case.

I think this is not totally a both sides things, but very much, very much like enthrall.

Is that the right word?

Very much at the command of Trump.

You're not going to have a lot of bipartisan legislation.

Enthrallis is the right word.

Yeah.

Not going to have a lot of bipartisan legislation passed, right?

So it's kind of a free-for-all.

And Trump, being a maximizer as far as strategic gain, is saying has told Republicans in Texas who are initially reluctant, hey, we can probably squeeze five more seats out of this map based on the fact that Trump had a really good year in Texas in 2024.

And in particular, Hispanics in like the Rio Grande Valley have shifted very Republican.

The suburbs have not had this Democratic shift that they thought.

So

they can squeeze more seats out of the map than they currently have, right?

My colleague Eli McCown-Dawson did an analysis of this at Silver Bulletin.

It probably will not be the five seats they claim.

That's kind of the high end, right?

Call it like one to five, depending on whether Democrats rebound among Hispanics, but expected value of maybe three seats, right?

Which, you know, three seats might not seem a huge deal.

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives.

However, because so many other states are gerrymandered, because voters are so polarized, there might only be a couple dozen competitive races.

And so three seats in Texas matter a fair bit.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California has proposed to have an even more aggressive districting plan in California.

It's currently done by a nonpartisan commission.

You're welcome, by the way, to

roll your eyes a little bit, just a little bit at nonpartisan commissions.

It's kind of,

you know, look, Maria, sometimes when groups of experts get together, they tend to favor in current times, Democrats, right?

And so, like, so I would say it's, but still,

California now could go and be like, we're just going to go back and restore the power to the state legislator.

And because they have super majorities, we can gerrymander as aggressively as we want and as unapologetically really as we want subject only to the voting rights amendment or voting rights act amendment excuse me um because of course a lot of minority groups in california um polling by a newsome affiliated group today claim this measure has a big lead in california if it were to make it in the ballot on the ballot in next year's midterms um so that could reciprocate right but yeah you the the the theme here is that democrats are are always a half step behind right one important thing that happened is that, you know, in the 2010s, so Republicans had a really, really good midterm in 2010 because Barack Obama started out very, very popular, tried to do healthcare, quickly became quite unpopular, backlash against the liberal, backlash against the first African-American president, et cetera, et cetera, right?

However,

2010 is a really important election because that dictates congressional registering for the rest of the decade, pretty much, right?

So in 2010, Democrats were disadvantaged.

The next time around, in 2020, Democrats had had a comparatively better year.

They had a good year in 2018, which carries over into the for four-year cycles into state legislatures and so forth.

So basically, since 2020, since 2022, I should say, the maps that went into place after the 2020 census, the GOP advantage of the 2010s is gone, in part because the roulette wheel landed on a better number for Democrats in terms of the timing of all this, but also because Democrats have gotten more more aggressive in states like New York, although not as aggressive as they could be, right?

Democrats are often more risk-averse.

Incumbents are terrified of having to fight other incumbents or losing any, you know, of having a 97% chance of winning instead of 99%.

Even in Texas, Republicans were initially reluctant, but that's kind of a brief, I guess that was more than 30 seconds.

That was like a brief five-minute history of this.

Yeah, no, I think that, I think that the last point you made, let's just highlight the reason that Texas was reluctant, not because they were opposed to gerrymandering.

It was because they didn't know if they could redraw the districts in a favorable way because they were afraid that there would be too many Democratic voters basically in other districts if you split it.

But now they're like, oh, no, I think we can do it.

I think we're fine.

So it wasn't like a principled opposition.

It was a, wait, can we get away with this and get the get the votes?

Which, by the way, like, that's not to say like, ooh, bad Republicans.

Like, gerrymandering has always been an incredibly political thing with the sole purpose of trying to get power for your group.

So that should be your number one concern, right?

Can I get

by

forcing these like dubious practices, can I get the votes I need?

And if the answer is maybe not, then maybe you don't want to expend political capital on doing that.

Now, what I think the kind of another big issue here, though, which we're starting to see is like anything that you do, to me, I can do back to you, right?

So if Texas starts this game and Republic and kind of Republicans try to do what they're trying to do in Texas with the redistricting, then

as Gavin Newsom,

as Kathy Hochl has also said in New York, like, fine, you know, you want to do it, we'll do it.

And we're going to redistrict our straits too.

And there's nothing kind of stopping then people from

basically getting in the ring and getting starting to fight dirty.

And I don't know, I mean, personally, I don't think that that's the way we should be going.

And I think that your idea of a constitutional amendment against this is not a bad one because the Voting Rights Act has been, like, in the last five years, the courts have definitely chipped away at the power of the Voting Rights Act.

And according to the Voting Rights Act, you can't redistrict in a way that dilutes the votes of minority voters.

And it's being completely tossed on its head these days, right?

With Texas saying, well, you can't

have too many minority voters of different minorities in one district so that then they become a majority, right?

Like such like absolutely backwards logic that has actually very little legal basis.

And so we're in a very interesting situation where

the act that has kind of been holding the line against gerrymandering for multiple decades is fraying.

I would push back.

I mean,

it's a, I mean, first of of all, until fairly recently, you didn't have a lot of opportunity to create majority non-white districts, right?

But yeah, I mean, you know, if you have hopes of using the Voting Rights Act, not the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act as a kind of crutch to rely on for gerrymandering, A, it is probably going to be weakened and B, I'm not sure it was helping Democrats that much in the first place.

Again, maybe get for other reasons, but, you know, it's more that the Roberts Court said that this is not our job to regulate what states do.

Congress has the power to regulate elections.

That's pretty clearly enumerated in the Constitution.

And also, like, it is kind of hard to have constitutional standards, right?

So one thing that has been upheld is

contiguity, right?

Where it means that, like, I can't take the East Village and then merge it into a district with Buffalo.

Right.

And then everything else is.

No, I can't.

Some people argue for compactness, which means the maps have to have logical shapes.

How you define that?

Does it look like a salamander?

Well, it's a little bit objective.

They're various or subjective, right?

There are algorithms that you can use, but it's not a national requirement.

Only continuity has upheld.

So there is some flexibility.

But yeah,

Democrats have been a half step behind.

in this game.

I do want to say if we look at kind of like the very

long-term equilibrium, right?

I mean, first of all, this is a somewhat predictable move.

When people say, oh, this is unprecedented, it's not unprecedented, right?

No, it's not.

That's what I think.

It's pretty well protected by current constitutional law that will remain in place as long as we have a conservative Supreme Court almost for certain, right?

It has happened at times.

It's been threatened at other times.

And so, like, this is a fairly predictable escalation.

And I don't think it's in the category of like

authoritarianism per se.

It's more like

maximizing what's pretty clearly within the rules constitutionally.

You know, with that said, I do feel remiss for like talking about some of the problems of gerrymandering.

First of all, it means that in a large majority of districts, perhaps 90%, you know, for Congress, it doesn't matter.

It's going to be Democrat or Republican combined with all the polarization that we have today.

Secondly, you have a bunch of fucking wackos in Congress, right?

Maybe more on the right than the left.

Maybe some readers disagree and can point to left-wing the squad or whatever they want.

I don't mean to equivocate those exactly, right?

But

when you have members that have no chance of losing a general election, they move even further to the right or the left because they're afraid of losing a primary.

They come more parliamentarian where they do the bidding of Trump or

Biden for that matter, right?

You can count, and there are a handful of dissident, contrarian, whatever you want to call them, right?

independent-minded representatives and senators, but there are a few where you can kind of count them on one hand more and more and more.

And I'd argue that's not good for the country, right?

We have not seen, you know, I think compared to

Congress, the courts have done a relatively good job of restraining Trump, right?

Congress has not.

Congress, and again, we're going to piss off certain readers, but like listeners, but like, you know, Congress did not push back against RFK Jr.

or Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Hakeseth being appointed to their respective cabinet positions.

Personally, I think that is, these are some of the worst parts of the Trump administration so far.

Congress, which is supposed to have authority over tariffs and Trump is interpreting the precedents very liberally, right?

Has not really pushed back very much on that, right?

We saw how few members of Congress voted to impeach Trump even after January 6th, and the handful who did,

very few of them remain in office today, right?

So, this is a big problem that kind of creates self-perpetuating polarization.

And we'll be back right after this.

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You know, after last week, I was thinking about kind of you saying that this should be a constitutional amendment.

And I think that you've just made a lot of points for why that should be the case.

In the sense that also if we kind of go back to one of the core elements of the show, like how we how we model this right from a game theory perspective, the outcome as of now like doesn't doesn't look great, right?

Like we know how this game is going to play out if we continue playing it this way.

And it's it's not a very, it's not a great

game tree that we're on right now, right?

Like it's it's bad options.

Like what are if you're the Democrats, right, and you're looking at what's happening in Texas, you have the option to say, no, you know, they go low, we go high.

Yeah, that hasn't worked well.

And that's probably not going to work.

Well, what they say is we're going to go, it's tit for tat strategy, right?

They go.

Now it's definitely tit for tat.

It's not tit for two tats.

Well, maybe it's been tit for two tats, right?

They've, they,

They've been more than one step behind and they've let kind of they've let it devolve a little bit.

They're like, well, let's wait.

Maybe that tat wasn't really a tat.

So maybe they did start playing that.

But now they've realized that no, the tats are going to keep coming.

And so

you can no longer sit back and you do have to start retaliating, in which case, as we've talked about before, you get.

that downward spiral where the payoffs are just worse for everyone.

And as you say, Nate, this isn't good for the country on numerous levels.

Like let's just, let's forget, you know, voting rights, civil rights, all of those.

Let's just say that a democracy is good if people are afraid that

voters might not elect them, right?

If they feel like they are accountable to the people that they represent.

If that accountability is lost, right?

If you know that no matter what I do, I am going to get reelected with 99% certainty.

Sure, 99 is in 100.

But as long as you do that, you are no longer representing your district.

You're no longer representing what the people of your district necessarily want.

And sure, there might come a tipping point, but this isn't healthy.

And you end up getting policies that,

as you said, enthralled to Trump.

Right now, they're Trump dictated,

whoever's in power.

It's not

the premise of the democracy, right, is that we elect leaders who are going to be representing our interests in the best way possible.

And that premise gets broken.

Yeah.

And to set a threshold for this, right?

I mean, you said 99%.

The 1% is like in Alabama in 2018, I think it was, or 2019, there's a special election.

Roy Moore, Judge Roy Moore, lost that special election to a Democrat just barely in Alabama because he had been credibly accused, he denied the allegations, of repeated acts of sexual misconduct with women under the age of 18.

And that was enough for the people of Alabama.

51% of them say that's too much.

But hey, that was in a pretty good environment for Democrats.

That was also in a time, you know, it's five years ago now, six years ago, seven years ago, a little bit less polarized than now.

So, like, yeah.

And Alabama, by the way, is very red, right?

But some of these districts are like more red than Alabama.

So you might, we've done the modeling, right?

You might have a 0.001% chance of losing your primary if you put it in a logistic regression model, or not your primary, your general election, right?

If you put it into a logistic regression model.

And so, you know,

polarization is not

the fault of the Constitution per se, but like

our Constitution was probably not designed to deal with the degree of partisanship.

It's not a parliamentary system, right?

We can have a no confidence vote.

Not inclined to deal with the degree of partisan polarization that we have right now.

And this is a

predictable escalation.

I mean, you know, the one Democrat who seems to to get this, I saw a

Beto Arour speech.

He's, of course, down in Texas trying to encourage Texas Democrats to

flee the state to avoid having a quorum.

You can only do that for so long before you have to see your family and so forth.

He's like, yeah, I don't care if Hucklebuns do it.

We should preemptively do this.

I think it's actually smart, right?

Good for you, Betto, right?

Which is that like you can see where the puck is going.

Also, these things take time.

In California,

you have a ballot initiative deadline.

I don't know exactly when it is, right?

But it's going to be litigated in courts.

That's why this is all happening.

You know, you might think that, like, okay, if Trump were really cunning about it, that he would wait and kind of do a sneak attack.

If you do that, it's going to get struck down by courts, or people might get skittish, or techniques like, you know, all the Democrats go to Oklahoma.

That could actually work in the short run.

So I guess it's smart by Trump to kick this off now.

But given that they've flagged it, and given that if it doesn't happen this year in one state, it'll happen in other states.

You know, the cat is out of the bag and Democrats are,

I think, being smart by understanding this, right?

I mean, I think they're trying to like, they're trying to like weave it into a narrative of like, Republicans are terrible for democracy and we are reluctantly reciprocating.

I mean, I don't know.

That's a little bit kind of too cute by half, right?

I mean, it's a little bit like people say, okay, well, Nate,

you support higher taxes on the rich.

I'm not sure I do or not when you live in a state like New York, but let's ignore that for now, right?

Maybe higher taxes on the rich in Alabama or something.

But like,

but why don't you just give the government more money yourself?

It's like, no, because I want like the rules to apply reciprocally to everybody, not just to me, right?

Maybe in the long term, if people get very dissatisfied, they feel like the member of Congress is a wacko, they feel like their vote doesn't matter.

Maybe you can get a momentum for some type of

legislation or constitutional amendment, the former being much more likely, right?

It's very hard.

Yeah, constitutional amendments, by the way, are incredibly tough to pass.

So let's just throw that out there.

It's really hard to get those majorities.

The other thing is that, like, you know, look, if you have once a decade redistricting,

then what's called a dummy

mander.

A dummy mander is when you cut it too close and you wind up actually costing yourselves seats, right?

Over the course of 10 years, there are five congressional elections after each census, right?

By six, eight, ten years out, things can change a lot in a state like Texas, where there's a lot of migration shifts and voting patterns.

So then you can get some dummy matters, right?

That kind of restrained the risk.

Now the precedent, the norm is that you can redistrict whenever you want, right?

And so therefore, you can be more aggressive because if you fucked up, then, and by the way, you can also

also gerrymander very importantly, state boundary lines that you are more likely to retain control of the state legislature.

Wisconsin had a cycle for many years where

the the representative or the legislator was vastly misrepresentative of a very divided purple state, right?

And it's still perpetuating until Democrats finally won control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and forced the drawing of new maps, right?

The one thing the GOP ought to be careful about is that like

It used to be Democrats had higher benefited from higher turnout.

They would do comparatively better in presidential years and then lose ground in midterm election years, lose ground in special elections.

And now that's reversed, right?

Now Democrats are the college-created people who have the in this house, we believe signs.

They're voting for a municipal dog catcher.

They're voting in every fucking election, right?

And since half the elections are congressional, or are non-presidential elections, actually more than half, if you count special elections, right?

You could have a thing where now Democrats actually gain ground at the midterms and congressional years and use that to kind of hold the fort down in presidential years by gerrymandering aggressively, right?

So I'm not actually sure that if you get to the equilibrium where every party, when they have every ability to, and then some states it requires regular majorities, some states supermajorities based on the state rules and constitutions, some states do have requirements that are stricter than the U.S.

Constitution, right?

In the very long run, if everybody is maximally aggressive, I'm not sure this actually helps Republicans at all, right?

There are other debates about, well, Democrats are concentrated in cities, and therefore, if you go for things that are compact, compact, nice listening districts, maybe that helps Republicans because Democrats are a sync of votes.

I'm not sure that's as true either for one reason.

You have seen cities actually become comparatively less blue, very blue.

New York is very, very blue, but less blue.

We saw Zoran in the primary, right?

But less blue than it was in presidential voting than it was 10 or 20 years ago, right?

And meanwhile, the rural areas are very, very, very trumpy, right?

I mean, you always, you always got the little, you always got the Asheville, North Carolinas, Maria, right?

You got the, you got the little colleges, you got the gays, there are gays everywhere, right?

There are minority groups everywhere, right?

There are always smatterings of Democratic voters, but like less and less, especially as like rural Hispanic voters, rural black voters, right, you know, have become more and more Republican,

then you have very, very red areas.

And so I don't know there's any intrinsic disadvantage to Democrats in the long run.

By the way, the current maps as of 2024, if anything, had a very slight half a point Democratic bias, right?

Because Democrats kind of had a good year in 2018.

And,

you know, California, even though it could gerrymander even more,

you know, it's a pretty aggressive map and so forth.

And so

it's not so much that this, I don't know, the equilibrium is one where, in theory, you'd say, well, if neither party really benefits in the long term,

then why not avoid this mutually assured destruction and,

have a

gentlewoman's agreement to avoid doing this too aggressively.

I mean, that we know from game theory, from the prisoner's dilemma, et cetera, especially when the parties increasingly see politics as a zero-sum game, it's very hard for that agreement to hold.

And by the way, they're selfish too, right?

In districting, what happens is that you are usually protecting incumbents by having fewer competitive seats, right?

And obviously some incumbents lose a game of lucky chairs, a bit like a poker tournament.

They're kind of eliminated one at a time, right?

To protect the other incumbents, but like for the most part, selfishly.

You know, if anything, it might lead to an equilibrium where they're not as aggressive as they might be because they want the 99% chance and not 95%,

right?

Because they're nits, Maria.

They're nits.

They're nits.

They're terrified of taking any risk.

They're selfish.

I don't know why I don't want to become a member of Congress.

I, you know, I don't know.

Does that mean

you gotta be weird?

I mean, maybe the house.

The house seems fun.

Fucking governor.

I want to hang out with the governor.

I'd have a beer with the governor, right?

Fucking senators are like wax figures.

They're weird as fuck.

It's one of the most objectively weird things to be as a United States senator.

Why would you want to do that?

I have no idea.

I don't know why anyone would want to be a politician.

But one of the things that

apart from the weirdness of U.S.

senators, one of the points that you've made

in not so many words is that one of the things to remember about redistricting in general is it takes time and it's a thing that you're doing for the future.

And the future is inherently uncertain, right?

And we're not quite sure how trends are going to play out, how different things are going to play out, how populations are going to move.

And there are certain things that you can't predict, right?

Like no one predicted, sure, people said pandemic coming at some point.

No one could predict, you know, what happened during COVID and where kind of people started moving, what that would do to maps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Those events will happen.

We're talking about a long timeline, you know, five years, 10 years, all of these things.

And then once you actually do the redistricting, it could be, you know, challenged in court.

That could take a while.

So all of these things, like, this is massive time horizons.

And so when you say like, you're not sure how much it hurts, you know, Democrats, That's, you know, it is other than like everyone loses mutually assured destruction.

That's very true because like we don't know.

And when you're drawing these lines, you're drawing them with the present in mind, not with a future mind.

Even if you think you're taking the future into account, right?

You might be making gross mistakes because you have kind of this present.

bias.

And I don't know how many experts you're consulting and what kinds of experts you're consulting, who the experts would be that you would consult even to say, okay, well, in five years or in this crucial election, we predict X and Y.

This is, it's a really, really difficult science, right?

It's a complicated process.

And just humans, humans are bad at that kind of uncertainty.

And this is just something that people aren't really talking about.

They're like, oh, well, let's, you know, let's see what we can do with the districts now to try to kind of capitalize on our votes.

And those 95%, 99%, all of those things, that's going to matter.

That might change.

A few percentage points might shift here and there.

And as we talk about over and over, and Nate, as poker players, we know a few percentage point shifts actually make big differences and can make, have big waves overall.

There's one other important aspect here, which is like

it matters most at the margin when you have close control overall for the U.S.

Congress, right?

Now, let's say

that the economy goes into a big recession before next year.

Let's say the terrorists really hurt, and let's say this might be next week's episode.

I don't know, right?

Let's say there's an AI-driven recession that, because this this is kind of happening in markets, right?

That people feel as though GPT-5 and related things have hit a plateau.

Half the capital, still massive, putting these AI companies disappears.

Meanwhile, it removes some mundane jobs, right?

Let's say we're in a pretty bad recession next year.

I mean, Democrats might have a really good year, right?

And in that case, Maybe the Texas map, it's a pretty clever plan.

Maybe then some districts that Eli and I didn't even look at come into play and it winds up netting Republicans zero seats or negative one seat or something.

In that case, it kind of doesn't really matter because you only elect people to Congress for two years at a time anyway, to the House, right?

And in that case, Democrats have a huge majority anyway, right?

So what matters is how robust is the map in a relatively neutral national environment where your swing districts in your state could determine overall control of Congress.

But I think, you know, members of Congress are selfish, I guess rationally so, right?

And so they sometimes not willing to push things as far as they might if you were, if I were playing fantasy politics and trying to maximize seats for my party, right?

But, but yeah.

Yeah.

All true, all true.

And by the way, I do want to point out, since we kind of were talking about the weakening of the Voting Rights Act, et cetera, that these redistricting, these redistricting maps and these voting maps are for all sorts of elections.

Because you said, you know, you were, you were talking about the fact that you know presidential election is just one and uh one of many many but um because this week there actually was an important federal decision um in mississippi where mississippi was ordered to redraw its supreme court electoral map um because it was found to violate um the voting rights act by diluting the power of black voters so this is a decision that just happened this week the week that we're taping and It's been litigated, by the way.

The lawsuit was first filed in April 2022.

So that's how long it took, right, for this decision to be made.

So this just highlights several of the points that we've been talking about.

And it's something that's kind of also in the news that didn't make as many headlines because it's not

as big a story on some on some level as Texas, California, all of that.

But it does illustrate a lot of these points that we've been talking about,

including the fact that the Voting Rights Act is actually still being used.

We'll see what happens, right?

This is a federal court, but you can see this being appealed even further.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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What do you do if you're a citizen, a voter?

You know, you might want some type of bipartisan grassroots effort, right?

I mean, we've seen like Democratic groups that formulated or progressive groups or just anti-gerrymandering groups

have conceded, they've understood the prisoner's dilemma, right?

They're like, it is fucking terrible if the other side does this and we don't and so like you know maybe you need a bipartisan grassroots movement and you know we have ignored like

there might be some benefit to this kind of

half stance democrats are taking where they're like this is bad but we're gonna do it anyway right i mean in principle if you shift the overall electorate because you persuade people that Republicans are trying to steal elections or steal majorities in Congress, right?

That could have a backlash.

I mean, I think it doesn't help Democrats that they haven't always made aggressive districting a priority necessarily, nor constitutional

or congressional-led actions to prevent this.

And so like, I don't know.

Right now, I wouldn't worry about that message if I were to.

I'd be like, we know where the puck is going, right?

We know where the puck is going.

And maybe voters will see the implications of this where they have some fucking wacko representing them in Congress.

Their vote doesn't matter, right?

They're already in a state where their vote probably doesn't matter.

They used to be able to vote for Congress where it did, right?

And people get fed up and there's some push against this now, where if you're a state legislature and you draw a mid-district, mid-decade map or really aggressive map or weaken the VRA or whatever else, people know your name and they vote you out of office.

One problem in general that political types have is to focus too much on federal elections and not enough on state and local elections, right?

So, you know, making this an issue where, okay,

this guy is a ringleader registration and we want to vote him out of office.

You know what I mean?

You can even pick a Republican who is just as conservative on abortion or whatnot, right?

But like, but not trying to, you know, steal quote-unquote Democratic rhetoric.

And we haven't really seen that much focus there.

And when you don't have focus, then what happens is the default equilibrium, that's what prevails.

And the equilibrium here is that you're going to have, it's unlimited by courts.

It's unlimited by political incentives.

It's unlimited certainly by any trust the parties have in one another.

And I'm not being totally both sides.

I think the GOP

kind of mostly started it, right?

But Democrats have responded in kind.

I mean, there are lots of very aggressive gerrymanders.

Illinois, for example, is one state that, like,

you know, not that blue down in southern Illinois, but like you have these crazy-looking districts, right?

And so we know where the puck is going.

And Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they don't have to play the game.

And if they do play the game, they might not lose the game, right?

They will have plenty of control of their own in blue states.

There are plenty of people and seats in blue states.

And so, and so I don't know.

Beto had it right.

Yeah, so let's see how it let's see how it plays out in California.

And maybe we'll see a roadmap for

getting this to play out on a broader scale.

In any case, a really, really interesting, I think, topic with lots of different things to consider and lots of applications for how we think about U.S.

politics and what the future of politics is going to look like.

I don't have a prediction.

I don't want to be optimistic or pessimistic.

Let's just wait and see.

you know how

when how this plays up when nvidia and open ai and tesla you know they control the majority of seats in congress anyway in 2050 i think and like like the Thor, meaning people's seats from New York, who really cares, right?

They can't really do very much.

That's probably where we're headed, I think, Maria.

Yeah,

that does seem likely, Nate.

And on that very promising note,

you and I can both resume

our non-U.S.

adventures.

And let's see what's happening in the news and in the breaking news cycle next time we talk.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you.

That's coming up right after the credits.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova, and by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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