How Openly Partisan Gerrymandering Is Becoming Normalized

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Hi, this is Sam from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where I'm listening to the podcast while I pack for next week's vacation.

I don't like packing, but this is the first trip for my two young kids to the same beach town that I went to every summer for many years.

So I'm also really excited and that makes the stress worth it.

This podcast was recorded at 1234 p.m.

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Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my kids, my husband, and I will still be creating wonderful memories at the beach and eating all the saltwater taffy we can handle.

Enjoy the show.

That is very sweet.

I just brought you all a lot of saltwater taffy.

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I'm going to eat some right after this.

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Well, the opportunity awaits you.

Okay.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Tam Ra Keith.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

And I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And today on the show, we're taking a deep look at redistricting and how states led by both Republicans and Democrats are working to squeeze out every advantage they can for their parties.

Miles, I want to start with you.

Let's go with the basics.

What is redistricting?

Why is it important?

And why are we talking about it in 2025?

Yeah, so I mean, redistricting is just the kind of drawing of political maps, right?

It happens every 10 years after the census, but gerrymandering, which is kind of what we're talking about now, is doing that with the explicit idea of benefiting one side or the other.

This has happened in American politics basically since the country was founded, but a few things have changed since then that make it kind of especially important right now.

One, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that courts had no role in policing political gerrymandering.

They basically said state legislatures can decide whether this is okay or not.

And at that time, experts saw that and said, oh, it's open season.

I mean, there are going to be some states that just do this now explicitly knowing that they can get away with it and not get sued.

Number two is that these sort of things, anytime we talk about election manipulation, changing the election system to benefit one side or the other, whether it's drawing the maps, changing the voting rules, it matters the most when elections are close.

And right now, this country is incredibly closely divided.

You know, Democrats only need to net a handful of seats to retake control of the House of Representatives.

And so anytime we are in this situation where

an entire body of government rests on, you know, whether how a map is drawn or whether an election policy increases turnout by 1% or something in some state.

There are just going to be a lot more fights over these little aspects of elections.

Yeah, and a partisan gerrymander is essentially the politicians choosing the voters rather than the voters choosing their representatives or their politicians.

It is carving up different...

cities and areas and demographics and creating the perfect way to win.

Yeah, and I will say also, it's a lot easier now than it was 100 or 200 years ago because of computers.

You know, it used to be kind of like, we're going to draw this map, and I think this city might vote for me more than this other city.

But now, you know, with all of the ability for data analysis that politicians have at their fingertips, it's a lot easier to predict how different demographics are going to vote.

So, Ashley, you have lived in Texas, you have covered Texas, and now we are going to talk about Texas, which is where all of this started this year.

What are Texas Republicans trying to do?

So, they are in the process of, I mean, depending when you're hearing this, the Texas Senate could have already approved a new congressional map that will create five more potentially safer seats for Republicans.

And this was a specific ask from President Trump to Texas Republicans.

And, you know, this should be headed to the governor's office as soon as today.

Okay.

And as you say, this is something that President Trump explicitly asked for.

There is no secret here.

Yeah.

As we talk about all the time, he says the quiet part part out loud.

And what he is saying out loud is, I want more Republicans.

I want Republicans to have an advantage.

And I do not want to risk Republicans losing the House in these midterm elections in 2026.

Yeah.

And Texas is a great place to start because, one, it is big.

It gained congressional seats during the census.

A lot of states didn't.

It is also a state where Republicans made gains among Latino voters and some other key demographics.

So if you look at 2024 data compared to 2020 data, you have like a new group of voters you can sort of pull from.

And also, politically speaking, this is a state that has had uniparty control by Republicans for now 30 years.

There's really nothing stopping them.

So it was a sort of easy place for, if you want to gain some seats for Republicans like that, is a good place to start.

Miles, while we have been watching this drama play out in Texas, and it has been fairly dramatic, there has been this bubbling up in California.

And now California is poised to try to do the same thing.

Right.

It's a little bit more complicated in California, right?

Because

what the California legislature has approved is this new map that now is actually going to go before voters.

And voters are going to have to decide.

Honestly, I feel like what it means is that California instantly becomes the most interesting election to watch this year, right?

Because there are just maybe it's just for voting nerds, but I feel like there are a lot of political dynamics at play.

And like when we talk start talking about

do voters support getting rid of an independently drawn map to explicitly favor one party over the other?

Political wisdom has said they don't, but it's going to be really interesting to see if in this special case, how California voters feel about this.

Yeah, and I think what we have to explain here is that California voters decided that they didn't want gerrymandering anymore.

There was a long history of both partisan gerrymandering in California and also gerrymandering meant to protect incumbents.

And then California voters, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the big people who campaigned for this, actually approved ballot measures that said there should be an independent commission.

There shouldn't be gerrymandering.

The goal should be that the state's residents are well represented and that their districts are contiguous and all of these things that

have nothing to do with partisan advantage.

Yeah, but that was 2008, I should say.

The world very different from that.

There was a lot more optimism about government, if everyone remembers then.

Things like hyper-partisanship has been on like a steady incline for like the past 10 years.

That has been only accelerated by Trump.

It is not solely because of Trump.

And, you know, the world looks very different.

The whole understanding of these good government proposals is that everyone would do it.

You know, swing states and Republicans, but it turned out to be just mostly swing states and Democratic states.

And that has caused a situation where Democrats find themselves with their hands tied behind their their back.

And they say, and they're, you know, so it's just not in vogue anymore.

Like we're in a different world right now.

And so, you know, unfortunately for California, when they're looking at, you know, how easy it is for Texas, like once Governor Abbott signs that bill, it's over.

The maps are in.

But, you know, California, Democrats have to convince voters to vote for this ballot measure, and then they have to redistrict.

You know, it is a, it is going to be a lot longer of a process.

But I will say this does offer Democrats an opportunity that they haven't really had in the second Trump administration, which is is a place to fight, where they actually have power.

In California, they have power where they don't have in Congress, where they don't have in the White House.

So, this is a place where Democrats can sort of flex their muscles.

And by the way,

we're about to find out how voters feel about that.

Yeah, I feel like your point about this political moment being different than anyone before it, it all does go back to Donald Trump winning the popular vote in 2024 after trying to overturn an election in 2020.

It makes sense to me that politicians would look at that and say, voters told us they really do not care as much as we thought they did about these sort of big democratic ideals.

So that is why we are now seeing the lawmakers in Texas are not being quiet about this.

They are saying explicitly, we are doing this to try to gain power in Congress.

And so I just, I just do not think that they would be so open about it.

They might still try to do it 10 years ago, but their openness and kind of not being as scared of how voters are going to perceive that, that is a post-2024 Trump winning tactic, I think.

Yeah, and in California, they're saying, this isn't about redistricting.

This is about democracy.

This is about fighting Trump.

That's what Democrats in California are saying.

And by the way, even good government groups are saying, hey, we were, this was like the whole basis of our like worldview of politics.

And now we are taking it back because the situation is so different.

Groups like Common Cause have said, go ahead.

This is a different reality than we were in, you know, just a year ago.

So it is, i mean things are very different right now all right it's time for a quick break when we come back the political implications of all this

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And we're back.

And Miles, other states are now contemplating similar plans.

Do we have an idea as to what the overall benefit for each party would be if they gerrymander everything based on their current ruling party's lines?

I wish I could give you an exact number at this point, but that would be, I think, a little bit too speculative.

I know it's a little unsatisfying.

I will say that Republican-controlled states have a lot more flexibility in this area generally than Democratic states.

And so we're already seeing President Trump and his administration put pressure in other states to try to take action here.

Florida, Indiana, Missouri are all states that we're watching that potentially they could eke out a seat or two seats or a few seats here and there.

I think there is a little bit of flexibility in some other Democratic-controlled states like Illinois.

But I think the bigger point here as we talk about this is it's easy to talk about when we talk about gerrymandering is these are a sure thing.

But a year and some change is a really long time on the political calendar.

And I think it's very unclear how the political wins or the direction the political wins are going to be pushing.

come November.

And so the voters will still have to decide.

There are going to be a bunch of competitive seats.

And so it's really hard to say with certainty at this point how, even if these districts are drawn in a way that advantages Republicans generally, it's just very unclear whether that's going to actually translate to them keeping control of the House.

Yeah, sort of the margin of benefit for each party is probably getting a little smaller.

But it also, like, I do think it's important to note that like a lot of the data that is being worked into these maps that didn't exist in 2020 is the 2024 election.

And that was an election that had a lot of voters that don't usually participate.

in elections.

Voters that, I mean, Latino voters are a great example of this.

These are swing voters.

Those are not reliable voters for any party.

And so I would look at a state like Texas that, you know, those maps that were gerrymandered in the sort of southern part of the state near the border.

You know, Latino voters, we're already seeing like polling that suggests that Latino voters.

aren't as in the bag for Trump as they were before.

The economic reality hasn't changed much for much of them.

So they are not looking to support Republicans.

A big chunk of them are not looking to support Republicans in the next election.

Or we haven't seen polling that suggests they're going to support Democrats, but they might just sit it out.

So we actually don't know how reliable 2024 data is when you're looking at a midterm election.

And so much of these new maps rely on this new information from this latest election, which I don't think is a given to begin with.

Yeah, I will also add that like the demographics over the last 10 years have changed a lot.

I feel like 10 years ago,

the political wisdom was that Republicans had an advantage in midterms.

That has completely changed with the Trump demographic of 2024, which really relied on low-propensity voters.

The high-propensity voters, the college-educated college-educated voters, those are Democrats, and those are the people that turn out in off-election years.

And we should note that President Trump is not technically going to be on the ballot in 2026, but he has a whole lot at stake, which is why he is running this game right now.

Yeah, I mean, what happened the last time that

he was in the presidency and the House was controlled by Democrats, Tam?

Oh, well, he got impeached twice, and his agenda was put on ice.

There were a lot of investigations, a lot of pushback.

And he does not want that.

Right now, the President of the United States controls all of the levers of power.

He has the House and Senate very compliant, doing what he asked them to do.

And the only check on that, there's the courts, but that's slow.

The only other check on that would be Congress.

And right now, he controls Congress and he does not want to give it up.

And Republicans in Congress don't want to give it up either.

Right.

I mean, there's this like explicit motivation for President Trump

to be politically invested in the the 2026 midterms.

But I will also note,

even in addition to this redistricting war, we are seeing Trump having this outsized impact on election policy more broadly.

He clearly feels like he, as the president, should have a role in how elections are run across the country.

This taps into a lot of his fraud narratives from 2020 and 2016 as well.

Democrats seem to think these attacks on democracy matter a lot.

It is an open question how much voters feel like these things matter a lot.

There have been a lot of concerns raised about this path that we're currently on.

This was predicted by a lot of people who were concerned by, as Miles said, that Supreme Court ruling, the hyper-partisanship of our politics.

There have been efforts to slow that roll, as it goes.

You know, there were last year, there were a bunch of ballot measures proposed that would create non-partisan primaries, things that are aimed at reducing partisanship in our politics.

Like people have been worried about this.

And I am sort of shocked at one, you know, those all pretty much unanimously, those efforts all failed across the country.

But also, just how still there are so few guardrails to stop us from going down this path because this is, it really seems like there's really nothing in the way of stopping parties in control from doing something like this in the future now.

All right.

Well, with that, we're going to take one more break, and then it's time for Can't Let It Go.

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And we're back and it's time for Can't Let It Go.

That's the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise.

I will go first.

Of course, this week there has been a lot of continuing coverage of President Trump's federalization of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., the addition of National Guard troops from several more states.

I saw some guard troops from South Carolina last night on the Metro.

However, yesterday, President Trump announced that he was going to go out on patrol.

Now, the reality, it was a little less exciting than that.

He went and he rallied various law enforcement, National Guard, federal law enforcement, all of these people at a command center and gave them pizza and burgers.

And he delivered some extemporaneous remarks that included a lengthy discussion of grass.

One of the things we're going to be redoing is your parks.

I'm very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place.

I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world.

And we're going to be re-grassing all of your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy, just like Augusta.

It'll look like Augusta.

It'll look like, more importantly, Trump National Golf Club.

That's even better.

But we're going to look, we're going to have all brand new, beautiful grass.

You know, like everything else, grass has a life.

Do you know that?

Grass has a life.

You know, we have a life and grass has a life.

And the grass here died about 40 years ago.

Really philosophical.

We have a life.

Grass has a life.

The remarkable thing about this second Trump term is the amount of focus on aesthetics, on remodeling or renovation.

He's redone the rose garden with a deck instead of grass.

There's a ballroom coming.

And he is focused on...

aesthetics.

Optics, yeah.

Yeah.

I was going to say the last Can't Let It Go we did, I think you did bring up him doing a tour of the renovations he made, I think in the Oval.

And I'm like, oh, I guess he's moved on to landscaping, which is, I guess, like how every homeowner, like, I guess they sort out the interior first and then work on landscaping.

I mean, I do have to say, though, I can't help but now imagining like a putt-putt golf course on Capitol Hill, which would work really well considering the sort of like hilly nature of it.

That it would for an 18-hole little putt-putt course.

I don't know.

I'm more open to it than I thought.

I would be is all I'll say.

I want fairway grass on my median strips.

That's all I can say.

Miles, what can't you let go of?

So, what I can't let go of is this is actually a throwback, can't let it go, because

you'll remember, Tam, maybe my end of year can't let it go last year was about how I was like voraciously consuming poker videos on the internet, like hundreds of hours of poker videos during my parental leave at two in the morning.

And I just wanted to circle back on that because I played poker at a casino for the first time last week.

I found myself in Biloxi, Mississippi, basically the Vegas of the South.

And I decided at the casino, I was talking to somebody who said, I've never done this before.

I've always been intimidated about playing poker.

And I was like, me too.

And we both kind of decided, should we just do it?

And we did.

And so, circling back on this question of like, does consuming hundreds of hours of poker videos make you better at poker?

I turned $100 into $550.

Oh, wow.

Whoa, Congress.

And not $500.

No, $550.

I made $450.

Well, so small sample size, but I am like, I got home and I was like, all proud of myself.

But there is nothing scarier than telling your wife that you think you might be good at gambling

just because where does this head, you know?

And so

I don't think I can leave my job and become a professional poker player today.

But I'm just saying, not off the table based on my one experience in Biloxi.

Don't let it get to your head.

Yeah.

You know, the first time is always the best time.

Yeah, yeah, right.

I'll just live on that forever.

Ashley.

Okay, so what I can't let go of this week is this story I saw on NBC News.

So last weekend, human handlers from 16 countries competed their humanoid robots for what is basically like a robot Olympics.

So according to this story, they put about 500 bipedal robots through various motions to showcase the promise and limits of embodied artificial intelligence.

Yeah, so apparently they competed in like 26 different sports from like kickboxing to soccer, as well as more practical job skills such as sorting medicine and hotel concierge duties.

I find that super upsetting, but.

Dude, would people pay money to watch the humanoids compete?

Yeah, yeah, unlike ESPN the Ocho.

Like this is not

battle boss, though.

This is like on their feet, humanoid robots, which I find really upsetting.

I kind of just want us to decide as a society, like the human race, race, that we want like Star Wars droid-level, like helpful R2D2 types and not three CPOs.

Like, I think we should draw a line somewhere because humanoid robots make me really uncomfortable.

No robots with anxiety.

Yeah, it just also like ruins the point of sports to me personally as a big sports fan is like the whole point of me watching is like I want to be able to slightly imagine myself in there, you know.

Like, I know these guys are not like me, but they're like also they're kind of like me, they're human beings as well.

Yeah.

And so, I don't know.

I just, I have a little trouble imagining paying my hard-earned cash to go see a bunch of humanoids, sort medicine, but maybe that's just me.

I mean, robots can't even like fold laundry yet.

And until they can fold laundry,

I'm not ready for it.

Yeah, but I just don't want us creating a space to compete them to get better at anything.

I think it's my final story.

Don't encourage that.

Don't encourage that.

Let's keep them kind of mediocre at a lot of stuff.

Okay, that's all for today.

Our executive producer is Mathani Maturi.

Our producers are Casey Morell and Brea Suggs.

Our editor is Rachel Bay.

Special thanks to Ben Swayze.

I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

And I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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