Year In Review: Trump, Gerrymandering & Redistricting

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Speaker 4 Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith.
I cover the White House.

Speaker 2 I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

Speaker 5 And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.

Speaker 4 And today on the show, we want to take a look at what's happening this year with redistricting.

Speaker 4 That's the process where states draw the maps to decide which voters their members of Congress will represent.

Speaker 4 And Miles, for some background, this is something that happens on a regular basis, but usually every decade or so. And it is 2025?

Speaker 2 It is 2025 and going into 2026. And we are talking about it, right? Yeah, this is something that in modern electoral history usually is attached to the census.

Speaker 2 So the census basically counts where people are, and then districts are drawn based around those counts.

Speaker 2 And I will note that, like, in recent history, in the last few decades, there would usually be a few states that were sort of stragglers where a state would draw a district and then somebody would sue, and then the court would say, you have to redraw this.

Speaker 2 And so there would be here and there a case where a state would have to redraw mid-decade.

Speaker 2 But a few years ago, the Supreme Court basically gave the okay to partisan gerrymandering in a decision in 2019 where they said, no, federal courts don't actually have a role in policing this.

Speaker 2 And at the time when that happened, election experts were saying, oh my gosh, this might just open the door to crazy partisan gerrymandering in the near future.

Speaker 2 And so that seems to be what we're seeing right now.

Speaker 4 What changed this year? Like, why is this the year that this is going nuts?

Speaker 2 Well, President Trump, right? I mean, he gave the order to Texas to redraw districts to give Republicans five new seats.

Speaker 2 And that has set off this avalanche across the country, this tit for tat We're seeing where then Democrats felt the need to respond to that.

Speaker 2 And then Republicans seem to be responding to that Democratic response. And then Democrats are responding to that Republican response.
And so we're seeing this back and forth.

Speaker 2 But it all goes back to President Trump giving that initial order that he wanted seats drawn differently in Texas to make it specifically more likely for Republicans to hold on to the House of Representatives because that's really important to him.

Speaker 2 You know, you think about all the things that come with a potential change of power in the House.

Speaker 2 You talk about investigations, you talk about the potential for impeachment, you talk about even certifying the election in 2028, which is something our colleague Mara Leison always likes to bring up, that it's a whole different ballgame if there's a Democratic House of Representatives there.

Speaker 2 So there are a lot of things that come with who controls the House of Representatives, and President Trump seems really invested in keeping Republicans in power.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, his presidency after the 2018 midterms was pretty miserable when Republicans lost the House of Representatives.

Speaker 4 Just to put this in context, the control of the House is really close right now. Republicans only very narrowly control the House of Representatives.

Speaker 4 So Ashley, this may be like a harder question than it seems, but how many states have redrawn their maps ahead of next year's midterms?

Speaker 5 Right. So there's a lot of moving parts here.
So I'm going to start with the for sures, the states that are well on their way or have already redrawn their maps.

Speaker 5 As we mentioned, Texas has already redrawn its map. It's gone through a court battle.
The Supreme Court gave an okay to it. That's pretty much set in stone.

Speaker 5 California also had a ballot measure before voters this year asking their permission to also redistrict in favor of Democrats.

Speaker 5 That should lead to another five seats, although the process of actually redrawing those seats hasn't started yet, but it's well on its way. There's barring any court action that is likely to happen.

Speaker 5 Then there's Missouri. Lawmakers, Republican lawmakers there have redistricted, redistricted, but there is a group trying to get a voter referendum to overturn that redistricting.

Speaker 5 They have gotten something like 300,000 signatures for that referendum in just a few months. North Carolina has also redistricted.

Speaker 5 Republicans there have gerrymandered their map to create more favorable seats for Republicans there. Ohio is a for-sure thing.
Both parties came to a bit of a consensus there, which was surprising.

Speaker 5 Republicans were expected to have a little bit more of an edge there, but that process process is pretty much done. And Utah, thanks to a court order, has redistricted as well.

Speaker 5 There are all these other states we're looking at, though. Virginia, Florida.

Speaker 5 At some point, New York came up. I mean, there's really like a lot of moving parts.

Speaker 5 And because legislatures don't start meeting until early next year, it's going to be hard to say concretely where anything lands. And there's always the wild card of the courts, which comes up a lot.

Speaker 2 I feel like this is, it's giving like fifth grade pop quiz, having you mention that, where it's like, it's getting to the point where it's like a quarter of the states are now in play and you're like, okay, this is happening here.

Speaker 2 This is happening. It's just a lot to keep track of, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then last but not least, right, is Indiana, which had this massive, maybe the most high-profile battle when it comes to the state legislature versus Trump.

Speaker 2 You know, there was an all-out push from the Trump administration to try to get the state to redraw their maps. J.D.
Vance visited the state.

Speaker 2 There was lots of posting and even, you know, not from the Trump administration themselves, but there there was pressure from the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 And then we saw a number of lawmakers actually receive threats and get a lot of harassment from their constituents.

Speaker 2 And still, when the actual vote came to pass, a majority of the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, voted not to redraw.

Speaker 4 Do you remember that? Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas,

Speaker 2 that's going to be the list for gerrymandered states by the end of this. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. You just don't know what, like, so much of this is driven by political will in each respective state.
And political will is not a static thing. So it just depends like at what point.

Speaker 5 I mean, one of the things that is sort of hard is when states hold their primaries, but that can also change per lawmaker's request. So, I mean, it's, it just depends, like,

Speaker 5 what next year looks like. how much time they have.
And again, like, who has what political will to get something done like this? Because it is a heavy lift depending where you are.

Speaker 4 Right. And how many lawmakers feel like going through this just because President Trump says do it?

Speaker 5 Right. And as Donald Trump's like, I guess political capital changes too, that is also something that could ebb and flow depending when things get done.

Speaker 4 All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, the politics of all this.

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Speaker 4 And we're back. And as promised, I want to dive into the politics behind all of this.

Speaker 4 President Trump, as we mentioned, pressured Texas to redraw its maps to give Republicans a larger advantage and in theory to send more Republicans to the House.

Speaker 4 Miles, I know that there's no apples apples-to-apples comparison possible here, but

Speaker 4 do some math for us anyway. Based on the redrawn maps, do you have any sense of which party has the most seats where they are favored to win in 2026?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So the Cook political report, the way they lay it out, which I think is pretty helpful, is basically they play out all the different scenarios and they say if everything goes Republicans' ways, I'm talking court battles, referendums, every single break that can break breaks for Republicans, that they potentially could net four to five seats out of this redistricting battle.

Speaker 2 If everything, all of those different variables go the Democrats' way, then they could end up netting something like two to four seats after all of this is said and done.

Speaker 2 So if you think about those being the sort of partisan extremes, then the median result at this point seems to be if not a wash, somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 2 Like it doesn't seem likely at this point, assuming with a big asterisk here, the Supreme Supreme Court doesn't strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and we can talk about the role that could play.

Speaker 2 But assuming that does not happen in time for states to redraw based on that result, then it seems the most likely result is somewhere in the handful of seats one direction or the other.

Speaker 2 It doesn't seem that one party's going to come out like up two dozen seats as a result of this.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, Okay, you threw out a mention of the Voting Rights Act. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the Supreme Court is set to rule on this case related to whether states can or should use race as a basis when they're drawing districts.

Speaker 2 If they decide that that is not acceptable, then you could see this rash of redistricting across especially the south, where there are a number of districts currently held by black Democrats because the maps were mandated to be drawn that way.

Speaker 2 If that changes, then you could see a bunch of those states redraw basically a number of these black Democrats out of power.

Speaker 2 And that could end up meaning Democrats lose up to a dozen or more seats potentially.

Speaker 2 But it's not clear, A, how the Supreme Court's going to rule at this point and when they're going to rule, which could determine whether that comes into play for 2026 or 2028.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, that is one big thing that's up in the air. The other thing that is up in the air is just which voters will show up in 2026.

Speaker 4 And Ashley, as we've been watching all of these special elections and off-year elections this year, and

Speaker 4 they just keep coming in, Democrats continue overperforming what they did in 2024 by you know, about a dozen points.

Speaker 4 So, if the Cook political report says it's possible that all this redistricting arms race just ends up in a near wash, then what does that mean? Could this ultimately backfire on Republicans?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so it could. It depends on what the atmosphere is moving into the general.
Like, we are talking about special elections where different kinds of voters appear.

Speaker 5 Like, a general election next year is going to have a different mix of voters, some more low-propensity voters.

Speaker 5 Democrats are overperforming right now in special elections because they kind of have been for the past few election cycles. But then like, look, you know, 2024, they did not perform well.
So

Speaker 5 that is an open question. But yes, the sort of direction that we're seeing from elections that have happened this year in 2025.

Speaker 5 you know, it's looking like Democrats have had voters sort of swing their way in some pretty significant ways.

Speaker 5 And if you look at how redistricting is happening in places like Texas, what they're doing is is they're taking Republican voters out of currently very safe Republican seats and moving them into sort of less safe seats that are going to be slightly more favorable to them.

Speaker 5 And that's why we're kind of counting them in the roster of, you know, these are seats that Republicans are likely to win.

Speaker 5 But if the electorate, that turns out, is swinging in like a 15-point direction towards Democrats, that's not super super helpful.

Speaker 5 That is now a competitive seat for Democrats that Republicans do for themselves.

Speaker 5 So it's just just a big question about who votes, who's motivated, how close the margins are in these redistricted seats. So, you know, it is a wild card for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 5 And I think that's why a lot of Republicans in some states are looking at this and saying, look, we're incumbents.

Speaker 5 We don't want to make our seats or our colleagues' seats less safe because the president asked us to.

Speaker 4 Miles, I want to ask you about voters who don't, it doesn't seem like they've had a lot of license in any of this. They're just sort of being plucked and moved and put into different districts.

Speaker 4 But do you have any sense about how voters feel about all this redistricting?

Speaker 2 It is so confusing, honestly. I think voters are so interesting right now because you look at a place like California, which gave this question very straightforward to the voters there.

Speaker 2 Basically said, are you okay if we redraw the districts to favor? Democrats and more than 64% of voters said yes. Like we are okay with that specifically as a result of what President Trump did.

Speaker 2 And so you've got that, that it's clear that voters feel like this is an existential time for whichever party they support and that Republican voters seem like it's okay if Republicans do it and Democrats feel like it's okay if Democrats do it.

Speaker 2 And it's this sort of tit for tat. But then when you ask people just the flat out question of like, do you like this?

Speaker 2 Like an NBC News poll a couple months ago asked voters, should parties be drawing districts or should it be done by an independent commission?

Speaker 2 And more than 80% of voters said we'd like partisan politics to be taken out of this, that this should be done by independent commissions.

Speaker 2 And so you simultaneously have people giving the okay to their party to do it while also saying parties shouldn't do it, which I just think is really fascinating.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I ran into this a lot when I was reporting in California on Prop 50, which is the ballot measure that lawmakers put before voters that would allow them to redraw their maps next year.

Speaker 5 And so many of them were like, look, we feel as Democrats, like we have to do something to combat what is essentially a power grab by Republicans and Donald Trump. But we don't like this.

Speaker 5 We think that this should not be left up to politicians. They shouldn't just be able to choose their voters as opposed to being chosen by their voters.

Speaker 5 No one seemed to be clicking their heels like this was a great thing, broadly speaking. It doesn't say great things about our democracy.

Speaker 5 And I mean, we don't have a lot of polling, you know, that gives us a better picture of what the electorate feels like about mid-decade redistricting.

Speaker 5 But I have seen, you know, little polls here and there, like Common Cause had one in September, and something like 60% of Americans, including Republicans and Independents, don't like mid-decade redistricting.

Speaker 5 It's very unpopular. I mean, it's why you saw a bunch of those independent commissions pass those ballot measures passed 10, 20 years ago.

Speaker 5 People just don't like this, but they feel like their hands are tied because this is the political fight that that's before them.

Speaker 2 I feel like it's underrated also how confusing it is for voters.

Speaker 2 I mean, you think about that, how many voters think their congressperson is one person and then like go to vote or go to like Google it and be like, I want to write my congressperson and it's a completely different person now.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't know. There's something about it that is also just really confusing and hard for voters to keep track of.

Speaker 4 These district lines are already very confusing and now they are getting even more convoluted.

Speaker 5 And I think something I heard a lot was like people were just surprised that partisan redistricting is even legal. Like it sounds like unfair to people.

Speaker 5 It sounds like something that should be illegal. And everyone is just sort of surprised to find out that the Supreme Court's like, yeah, how that is.

Speaker 2 Well, what was so interesting in the Supreme Court decision a few years ago, too, is that they even, when they said that courts couldn't police it, they openly said it was not good for democracy as part of that same opinion.

Speaker 2 So it's not like the Supreme Court was saying like, oh, this is great. Like, nice job, guys.
Go get them. They were basically like, we shouldn't be involved in this.

Speaker 2 This should be Congress or this should be the states that are determining how political lines are drawn. But I mean, that opened the floodgates to what we're seeing now.

Speaker 4 People in the abstract think this is bad for democracy.

Speaker 4 A few states actually did, like California, pass redistricting commissions that are nonpartisan and intended to take this out of the hands of politicians.

Speaker 4 And California voters were like, yeah, but this is an arms race and we've got to do this thing.

Speaker 4 So, do you see a possibility of going back towards more of this

Speaker 4 nonpartisan redistricting, anti-gerrymandering move that was gaining steam like a decade ago?

Speaker 2 I feel like personally it has to come from Congress if it's going to come. Because I think if you're in this position where states...

Speaker 2 each individual state says, well, yeah, we would like to do it this way. But if other states are doing it badly, then we want to change our mind, then every state is just going to do that.

Speaker 2 You're just going to have, because you're never going to get each individual, all 50 states to decide to do it in the way that all the other states agree with.

Speaker 2 That I think truly, if you want there to be uniformity in how these districts are drawn and you want partisan politics out of it, then you need to have some sort of independent process for the entire country.

Speaker 2 Whether there's political will for that, I mean, that seems, it's really hard to get voting reforms passed in the last few decades. You know, it's almost impossible.
But.

Speaker 2 You know, if there was going to be a time, it would be at a time when wide majorities of voters feel disillusioned and feel angry with the way things are.

Speaker 2 And I think this sort of open political gamesmanship potentially could move people in that direction.

Speaker 5 Yeah, usually it's when things get really ugly for a long period of time that enough political will just sort of presents itself.

Speaker 5 And I mean, it's an open question about how long voters can stomach this.

Speaker 5 It's also very expensive for lawmakers to be doing this every two years.

Speaker 5 I also think there's also some budgetary issues that might come up in the future because state legislatures don't have the resources to be be doing this every two years.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I, I, it's an open question because people don't like it now.

Speaker 5 So I can't imagine that this could go on for very long, but also Congress doesn't tend to get its act together on stuff like this often. So who knows?

Speaker 4 Congress doesn't self-regulate much.

Speaker 4 And the current system, although this is frustrating a lot of members of Congress, including incumbent Republicans who risk being drawn out of their seats or already have been drawn out of their seats and are mad.

Speaker 4 Members of Congress don't have a strong record of doing things that could hurt themselves or that don't give themselves an advantage.

Speaker 4 And right now they've got like their friends in the state legislature who can draw lines that help the incumbent.

Speaker 2 And exactly. And if there were some sort of blanket nonpartisan process that was imposed, it almost certainly would put many members of Congress in less safe districts.

Speaker 2 Because at this point, you know, we know we're at like an all-time low, at least in recent decades, in terms of the number of competitive districts in the House.

Speaker 2 And so that would change, and that would make a lot of members of Congress pretty uncomfortable in their reelection campaigns, I'm sure, which, yeah, obviously that's a big part of it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and one last note. I think we are in this situation because we have the Supreme Court we have right now.
And as long as that is the case,

Speaker 5 it kind of doesn't even matter sometimes what Congress does because the court has a very particular view on stuff like this.

Speaker 4 All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for now, but it is definitely something we will be watching in the new year.
I'm Tamar Keith, I cover the White House.

Speaker 2 I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting.

Speaker 5 And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.

Speaker 4 And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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