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Journalist Nathan Stone and Producer Josh Carmody invite you to sit down for deep dives on the rapid changes happening in Trump’s new America.
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There's trouble brewing in Texas as state Republicans attempt to create five more Republican districts at the request of President Trump. The gerrymander attempt has been resisted by state Democrats who have fled the state, delaying a vote they would otherwise lose. Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom is threatening to fight fire with fire and gerrymander his own state to offset Republican gains in Texas. The whole situation is a mess. But how did we get here? And why does gerrymandering seem to be a uniquely American problem? Welcome to the politics of New America. On the show today, we look at the history of gerrymandering, how it began, its lasting effects, and where we are today. I'm your host, Nathan Stone, and with me is producer Josh Carmody. It's times like these where I like to think back to simpler times when a band could release a song called Walk the Dinosaur. And no one batted an eye. Didn't need a movie. Didn't need a movie with dinosaurs. It's in multiple movies that have dinosaurs. Three, I'm pretty sure. But didn't need a movie. You could just release a song called Walk the Dinosaur and everyone was fine. Everyone was happy and everything was good. Reagan might have been president, but things were generally OK. Well, I think when we talk about Reagan, we have to say that his His legacy and the things that he undid, the protections that he undid, definitely outlived him as president. So his era wasn't as bad as ours, but he certainly had a big helping hand with that. Oh, he poured that foundation. Yeah. Walk the dinosaur. I will always think of... the Super Mario Brothers movie from 19- That is one of the three, And I don't know if it's the best of the three, I don't know what the other two are, but for me it's always Mario dancing with Big and Flintstones and We're Back, I think, are the other Oh my god, that was such easy for, okay, low-hanging fruit, yeah. Okay, I should have guessed The Flintstones is terrible, though. I watched it recently and it does not hold up at all. no. Yeah. Look, those set production guys, they had a fucking blast. It's terrible, though. The closest I ever got to seeing that movie was the McDonald's toys, I think. I had a bunch of those. Yeah, I remember that. I thought live action was such an odd choice for that. Josh, you've got me wanting to talk about better things. Like the Flintstones movie. Yeah, here we are again. And with everything going on, And when we're recording this, the situation in Texas is so fluid, I thought instead of trying to tackle it kind of going forward where it might all change tomorrow, why don't we kind of look back at how we got here? And gerrymandering is a problem basically as old as the United States. And it comes from a uniquely American problem. or I guess a problem that existed uniquely when America was founded. Now, for anyone who's not familiar with gerrymandering, it's a funny term, and we're gonna talk about exactly how that term came about because it's a really interesting story. But what it is at its core is redrawing voting districts, either at a municipal, state, or the federal level to benefit a specific party or candidate. And the reason why this is a uniquely American problem is because other liberal democracies during their either transition to democracy or their kind of evolution set up independent either electoral commissions or zoning commissions, districting commissions, what have you, that apolitically decide what voting districts should be based on usually just population centers, population areas. And so when you look at a map of, say, voting districts in Canada versus the United States, You'll see in Canada, they're mostly rectangular, they're manageable chunks of a certain region or a province. We don't have time for all these fancy jigsaw shapes. Yeah, exactly. We've apparently got stuff to do. I don't know what that stuff is. We do stuff up here. And when you look at the United States, a lot more of them are freakish jigsaws. I think one that... a lot of people might have heard of is the very infamous goofy kicking Donald Duck district, which is Pennsylvania's. Wait, no, I haven't. OK, I'm going to look up the picture here in front of me, but please go on. So it's Pennsylvania's seventh district and it's a doozy. I don't know if it's so much kicking that looks like blind unadulterated rage. Goofy is full on tackling Donald. It's from behind. He didn't see it coming. Yeah. And at one point, this this district is only as wide as a parking lot. Right. So you can do incredible things in the American system to create these hideous districts that. will benefit your party. And the way you can do this is that in the United States, redistricting is set up in such a way that it falls to the state government. Now, that to the framers, the founding fathers, was a totally reasonable thing. And I'm going to explain kind of why that is. And you kind of have to think back about the unique circumstances in which the United States was formed. So you have your initial 13 colonies and all of these colonies, which would later become states, are run with varying levels of autonomy. And they, of course, all answer back to the federal government, which would have been the British Empire, the British government at the time, and the executive, the King of England. Now, when the revolution happened and when the United States, these 13 colonies came together, and won their independence. They were left with a problem of having no real political sense other than they founding fathers were mostly classical liberals. That's that's their their ideology. Now, famously, know, Thomas Jefferson, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, lofty ideals. Of course, those lofty ideals only were for white landowning men. if you were a woman or black or just poor, kind of liberty didn't really apply to you for quite some time. But for them, and they were all rich and slave owning and, you know, again, very, very interesting liberals, but they were they were classical liberals for Interesting is one way to put it. Yeah. I like that Thomas Jefferson was one of the ones who was like, We're going to free the slaves. Oh, get them out of here. They'll kill us. We got to send them to Africa. It was like, just send them back. I don't care where, but like, you know, Africa in general. Yeah, the. So there was a lot of contradictions in in how the founding fathers kind of felt about things and how they approach things. So when they were trying to. bring this nascent country together, these 13 colonies, the argument became about state autonomy. Later on we'd know this as states' rights, which has kind of bedeviled the US ever since. But at the time there was kind of two main points of view. There were the Federalists, who would become the Federalist party soon after. And they argued for a strong central government because there was a lot of fear, of course, that Britain could invade again in the future. that, you know, the idea of having a strong centralized government would allow for a stronger nation and a more well-supported nation where the states were subordinate, yes, but had the protection and also had kind of the legitimacy of working within a larger whole. Then there was the Democratic Republicans. They were also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, and they were much more towards the each state should operate basically autonomously, but with like a minimal federal government to look after defense and oversee. The things you absolutely need a federal government for, so foreign policy, kind of thing. And these two sides very quickly became diametrically opposed. And there was a lot of push and pull. And what they came up with, the newly formed United States, was a bit of a blend of their ideas. But the important thing to realize is before They became parties, Democratic Republicans and the Federalists. They were just factions. They were just factions in the government that push and pulled each other. So when the founding fathers were crafting this, they didn't intend for political parties to emerge. That was never the goal. It was more of a... of an accident and bruised egos that caused the first political parties in the United States. Thomas Jefferson had a lot of big opinions and he would butt heads with, of course, Alexander Hamilton, if you've ever seen the musical Hamilton, that would give you good one, but also John Adams, a lot of the kind of more federalist leaning politicians. Now, to bring this back to gerrymandering, when they were setting up this, this, the new rules around voting districts and how this new democracy would work, they threw the states a bone in terms of powers by saying, hey, you're going to make your own federal districts. And we don't really care how you do it. And That didn't seem like such a bad idea at the time because there were no political parties. So gerrymandering as it was didn't really have cause to take root as far as they would have seen because why would an independent governor and independent state legislatures create federal boundaries that benefit one particular guy or one particular, you know, one senator or candidate? But of course, that's not how it all played out. What actually happened was political parties formed almost immediately, the federalists and the Democratic Republicans, and they got to work, you know, with state legislatures because they also had kind of state representatives to immediately redraw districts to suit. their candidates. And it's been broken ever since. So this is the time frame I'm talking about now is like late 1790s to early 1800s. So gerrymandering has been a problem. And even before that, even before those parties formed, there was still a little bit of it going on just with the the politicking, the natural politicking you get right of this guy knows this guy who knows the governor. Oh, I like him. He's a good candidate. Let's see if we can draw him a nice a nice boundary. Right. And the reason why this one's going to look like Mickey. Yeah, exactly. So the reason why this works is that gerrymandering allows a politician to basically pick their voters rather than the opposite way. So if you are, a politician who doesn't really have anything to say to the poor. Not really into them. Yeah, they're icky. Yeah. But you've got a lot of rich friends and you know, they throw great parties and you're great at parties. So they have soaps that are shaped like stuff. So the problem you might have as candidate is that there might be too many poor in your district and your opponent maybe pulls a lot better with them because your opponent doesn't get get invited to your type of parties. So you would go to your friends in the state legislature. And let's say that your party has control of that state legislature, which is a very good thing for you as a candidate. From the great state of Delaware. Absolutely. Yeah. You would seek to do one of two things. There's there's two gerrymandering techniques and we have covered this on the show before but we're to go into a little bit more detail today. So there is cracking and there is packing and both of those things sound awful. But basically the way it works is cracking would seek to take the poor people and divide their vote among several safe seats. So I. I would have, I would take maybe like a quarter of that group and then my friend Bob, who's in the same party, you know, who's the candidate over, you know, we would draw some of them into his district, but not enough to actually sway the vote. So what we're doing in that case is basically nullifying their voting power by putting them in our safe districts. where because of the American system of first past the post, their votes are wasted. So that's what cracking is. Opposite to that, it's not going to work quite that well. We can't crack them. It's not just one spot where there's a lot of poor people, but there's poor people all over. That's terrible. So what we have to do in that case is the opposite, is pack them. And what we do is we redraw voting district boundaries so that we get as many poor people into one district or maybe two districts that we can and say our state has six districts. Well, then we can secure for ourselves four districts by using the packing technique. to make sure that everyone who might vote against us, or the vast majority of them, are lumped into one or two spots where, yes, we're gonna lose, we're gonna lose hard, but we don't care because we've won four other districts. And those are the two main ways to use gerrymandering to basically suppress the vote. And it's brutally effective, quite frankly. There's a reason why the United States federal elections come down to two or three swing states. That's not normal. That's not usual. That's not healthy for a democracy. It's because so many seats now for both Democrats and Republicans, more for Republicans. Republicans are better at gerrymandering than Democrats are. Republicans are better at most things than Democrats are in terms of political maneuvering. I mean, it's pretty easy when you don't have a soul. Yeah, allegedly. Yeah. I mean, if you're the guys who care about the rules, things are going to be harder for you when you're against the people who don't give a shit. And yeah, that's that's the Democrats main problem. But so few districts are actually competitive in a large part because of. Gerrymandering. which is rife through so many states and is honestly just voter suppression, right? We call it gerrymandering because it's a fun term and it has a historical root, but at its core, this is about disenfranchising people's votes. And this is going to come as a huge shock, I'm sure. But traditionally, this is used against people of color. Specifically black men were the first to really feel the wrath of the hardcore gerrymander. It's been done to everyone, by everyone, but specifically it's usually people of color and their communities that tend to get gerrymandered. Now that we've kind of come to terms with what this is and how this works, I want you to cast your mind back, Josh, to the heady days of 1812. I thought this was a gag. thought you were going to remind me of a year I was alive. No, 1812. So a lot going on 1812. Britain in the United States about to go to war freshly for the second time. And but a lot a lot was going on. And we're going there because it is the birth of the term gerrymandered. Eldabridge Jerry is the man, the myth, the legend who gave us the term gerrymandering and he didn't do it himself. was was thrust upon him. What's his name again? Eldabridge Jerry. Now, Elbridge or we'll just call him Jerry. Jerry got a raw deal out of this whole thing. And to be fair, As we'll see, this was his own fault. But this is a guy who was actually very accomplished in terms of his politics. He was actually one of the founding fathers. He signed the Declaration of Independence and he was a bit of an eccentric as far as politicians go. Wow. All well doing. Five minutes of stand up a night. He, uh... So he was an active politician and a political thinker. And he was actually one of the big thinkers that influenced people in the Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain. He had a large part to play in that. John Adams, in 1776, future president John Adams, second president, said, if every man here was a Jerry, the liberties of America would be safe against the gates of earth and hell. So it looked as if Jerry should have had a place in the pantheon of American great politicians. But he also had... another side to his personality. he was very much for American independence and for this, you know, creating this new country. He was also kind of a bit of a hothead and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. He was obstinate and he was kind of just a bit of a hothead. just getting into fights. I thought this was America. He might have been the first guy to ever say that. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, so after the War of Independence, but before they kind of figure everything out here, he went as a delegate and he spent the first two months arguing for less democracy in the new United States. He didn't think congressmen should be directly elected to the House of Representatives, as well as arguing basically that how great is it really to give so many people the vote? And this, of course, was back in the day when so few people had the vote. But he actually kind of flip-flopped or changed his mind during this Constitutional Convention. During the second half of the convention, he argued that the proposed central government of the United States would actually be too powerful. He kind of walked it back being like, oh, maybe we're creating something that's too big now. Maybe we should just kind of go back to this state thing. Guys, are we the baddies? Yeah. When it all when all was said and done, he actually refused to sign the Constitution. He called it as complete an aristocracy as ever was framed. And he thought that because he thought having a standing army and having a what he considered to be a powerful Senate was a recipe for tyranny. And so he became one of the leading anti-federalists after the the Constitution was signed and everything. He was not a fan and he was arguing for the autonomy of states. He thought that they had gotten the balance of power between states and the national government all wrong. Goddamn Alexander Hamilton. I hope someone shoots that guy. So that being said, even with his grumpiness and his obstinacy, he did do a couple really good things for the United States. He actually successfully argued for Congress's power to override presidential vetoes, which is so important. And it's just a shame that they won't do it. But it's a very fundamental power of Congress, and he was the architect behind that. He served in Congress. where he was one of the leading anti-federalists from about 1789 to 1793 before then President Adams in 1798 sent him over to France as a diplomat, maybe to get rid of him for a while. You cool off. You go over there. So after that, he actually retired for a bit. it was, you know, he was very well-respected, well-regarded, especially once a politician like that is retired, the memories of how much of a jerk he was kind of fade, and people are just like, oh yeah, he's, know. Oh yeah, we deal with that all the time. People regularly forget about all the bad stuff that happens from three years ago. I remember very recently having to... read all of the terrible think pieces on Brian Mulrooney after his death and being like, we like this guy now he gets a state funeral. For our American listeners, that's Brian Mulrooney is the architect of Canadian free trade as well as hugely corrupt. was our prime minister up until like 92, I want to say. And you can look him up but. He was an asshole. And then we had to look at his son post entertainment news for about 15 years. Oh, yeah. And was he not also Canadian Idol? Yeah. Yeah. I remember Ben Mulrooney most from the first two seasons of Canadian Idol that I watched. Oh, boy. You know what, though? Ben Mulrooney, far less. of a national disgrace than his father. good going, Ben. But yeah, getting back to our friend Jerry, he came out of retirement to lead the Democratic Republicans, which again, it's the Anti-Federalist Party, to lead them in Massachusetts in the 1810 gubernatorial election. OK, not the word I thought that was going to go. Yeah. So. He ran and he won, which is great. But something had happened to Jerry in between when he had served as a diplomat in France and then his retirement and coming back. He'd gotten old and paranoid, which is not great when you're already ornery and prone to fighting people for no reason. So by 1811... Right. So this is kind of the eve of war with Britain. Everything's very tense. And Jerry kind of came to his own conclusion that the federalist protest against then President James Madison against his foreign policy had become treasonous. And so Jerry went on kind of a bit of a firing spree, replacing federalists in his own state's government with Democratic Republicans. Where have we seen that before? And then he actually got his attorney general to prosecute Federalist newspaper editors for liable going after them and seized control of the then Federalist dominated Harvard College Board. Time is a flat circle. was about to say that. So all of this happened and the Democratic Republicans under him who controlled the state's legislature, then started redrawing the state's Senate districts to benefit their party. So up until that point, the senatorial districts followed county boundaries, which made a lot of sense and made for nice, neat maps. The new Senate map was kind of your classic gerrymandered gobbledygook. Best I can do is shaping it like Broward. don't know. Yeah. Which so then the federalists called them in the newspapers carvings and manglings. So by 1812, the redistricting bill that that had all of these terrifying new shapes reached Jerry's desk. And apparently he was quite reluctant to sign this. But his his son-in-law. Uh, or sorry, no. Um, he, he was urged by, by kind of friends in the legislature to, to, do this. And, um, he, he kind of felt that he shouldn't veto this and should, should sign it because he should, he should only veto things that were unconstitutional. And there was nothing in the constitution that said a dog couldn't play football or that you couldn't just read, draw maps. Uh, so he, he over, he, he did go ahead with this and the backlash was scathing, uh, to these new districts. And it led to the term the gerrymander and it was coined at a Boston dinner party. This was a dinner party where the folks there were all federalists or at least federalist leaning and, uh, But I am only like hearing them speaking in thick Boston accents, by the way. think of this party talking about the clam chowder. Yeah, exactly. I hear this Jerry guy wicked smile. Redrew up all the districts. Yeah. There was an illustrator amongst this group named Alcona Tisdale, and he drew a picture of a map of the district as one of the districts. as if it were a monster with claws and a snake head and its long neck. And someone said it looked like a salamander, to which another dinner guest replied, no, a gerrymandered. That would have probably died at this party, although great joke, great drawing. But Tisdale's drawing then appeared in the Boston Gazette, one of those Federalist papers that Jerry had gone after in his paranoia, March 26th, 1812. Below it, there was a joke. about how the beast had been born of extreme heat and partisan anger. That just stuck. It captured the imagination of the nation. this just goes to show that back in the day, newspapers had just an incredible amount of influence. You imagine that today, a political cartoon in a newspaper changing an entire zeitgeist like that. In your wildest dreams, that couldn't happen today. But the newspapers... were the media, like the whole of it. And so this was kind of a huge deal. Now, Jerry's gerrymander still worked, at least at first. The Democratic Republicans got a bigger state majority in the April 1812 election, even though the Federalists actually got more votes statewide. This is a trend we'll see continue on forever. in American history. But the one casualty of the gerrymander was Jerry himself, who lost the statewide popular vote for governor to his federalist challenger, Caleb Strong. Suffering from success. Now, things do end up pretty OK for Jerry. Uh, cause yeah, I know you were worried there, Josh. I saw you sweating. So president Madison, uh, awarded Jerry for his, his loyalty with the consolation prize of making him vice president. So he joined Madison's presidential ticket later in 1812 and then served for almost two years as vice president. Hey Jerry, Jerry, you want to come be my work wife? Um, and then. promptly died after complaining of chest pains on November 23rd, 1814 at the World War Honestly, it probably was. So, yeah, that is how the gerrymander was born. It is such an American story. The gerrymander might have, it really became his entire political legacy. Like this is a man who was a founding father. at the Constitutional Convention made huge contributions to what the Constitution would be and became vice president. And the only thing we know him for is drawing a weird little salamander on a state voting district. That is incredible. You kick one chicken. So, yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And yeah, the what made the Massachusetts in 1812 examples so stark and stuck in people's head wasn't just the drawing. was that this was really the first time gerrymandering had been used to that extent, where it just created districts that made no logistical or logical sense. And what it really did, though, was It broke the dam on gerrymandering. And people started to look at this and they're like, oh, we can get away with this. We can just do this. when you're famous, they let you do it. that's what they did. Gerrymandering wasn't just used to draw fund salamanders, unfortunately. It has been used as traditionally a tool of voter suppression. and unfortunately a tool of extreme racism. following the Civil War, black men won the right to vote. And that's when things got turned to 11. The Southern states in particular really drew districts to maximize the electoral advantage of the Democratic Party, which was what most white southern voters supported the Republican Party at the time. Remember the Republicans in this era. Now this is so that the Democratic Republicans that we were talking about earlier are not the predecessors of the GOP, the Republican Party as it exists today. Different party. Just use same name. This Republican Party after the Civil War. That is the GOP. That is the but that is the Lincoln Republicans basically right so they are very much a party of the North at the time and again not popular in the South because oh didn't we just lose a war to that guy so black men in the South heavily favored the Republicans because they're the ones that kind of brought the whole freedom train through so this was kind of the one of the very first backlashes towards What would become civil rights at that point? It was just hey, you've got the vote You're we still don't consider you on equal footing to to a white man, but you you do get the vote So this is where we we start to see a lot of long stringy districts and usually What they were trying to do in this era was to pack right instead of crack. They were saying, okay there are just too many black men in this state. We brought in a lot of people and we didn't think that we were ever gonna have to deal with them actually voting. And so now they outnumber us in a lot of areas. So how do we get all of them into one, just one or two districts and we still maintain our kind of white supremacist lock on? the state's government. Hey guys, let's dress up like ghosts. Oh, so many ghosts. In 1874, South Carolina took it to a whole other level by introducing the first non-contiguous voting district. So a voting district that wasn't even connected to itself. They just absolutely weren't even trying at that point. We just really feel like we got a lot in common with that county. So, you know, we figure why let distance be a problem. It is the first long distance district relationship. So now they had to change that back because the U.S. House of Representatives just flat out told them that the state wouldn't seat any more members. Elected under such a system. They were basically like if you send people to Congress, we won't let them in South Carolina, what the hell is this? is this? This continued right up Until the early 20th century, especially in the south the north didn't have so much of a problem but that's not to say that gerrymandering didn't happen in the north it was just It's most egregious in in the South. Now, in the early 20th century, it actually fell off in the South gerrymandering, but not because of anything good. We don't have to say I was like, oh, I think they've just found a cleaner version of hate. Yes. So, yeah, it was an evolution of hate in that they just figured out that if they suppressed the black vote and stopped black people from voting, then they didn't have to worry about drawn salamanders on maps. Poll taxes were a huge one. There were kind of skill tests. They brought in kind of like eugenics-esque intelligence tests to vote. There was all sorts of things. Also, just the threat of violence and murder in a lot of cases. So a lot of those tactics that stuff still goes on now. There's people that still, despite how illegal it is, will hang around voting booths with guns to intimidate people. Because of this, the only people who were voting in mass in the southern states were usually white and usually Democrats. And so because of that, the that. establishment didn't feel the need to manipulate the districts to maintain its control. To show you how kind of effective that was, after the 1900 census, some southern states didn't change their districts at all until the 1960s. So that just shows you the absolute effect of these suppression tools that even though you would have had growing black communities, would have had, you know, migration to cities, you know, all sorts of things happening with demographics in these states. They didn't have to change anything to maintain this white supremacist majority. Now, something funny happened in the 60s, which is the... Black population of the United States demanded that they have rights and be treated as human beings, and the United States establishment, both in the South and the North, very reluctantly passed civil rights reforms. There was a Supreme Court ruling known as the Redistricting Revolution, and that was under Chief Justice Earl Warren. that in the 60s that ruled that all states voting districts must have roughly equal populations, which you would have thought would have been a rule beforehand, but did in fact take to the 1960s. And in addition, states must adjust their federal congressional districts after every 10 year census so that each of the 435 members in the United States House of Representatives represented roughly the same number of people. So this gives us that ruling gives us the system that we have in place today where most states will redistrict once every 10 years after the census. Now, the way they do this is by of in most cases that state's legislature redrawing district maps. And a lot of times that is when gerrymandering happens. We get through that and that doesn't stop gerrymandering, but it does change gerrymandering, right? Where you have to worry about balancing populations. This is when cracking becomes a legitimate strategy for redistricting. Because now, well, it's harder to just pack. all of these people we don't like into one district. If there's too many of them, then there's going to be two districts and then they get twice as much representation and we can't have that. So now we have to look at cracking and breaking up these populations and putting little bits of them into our safe districts. so cracking has become the modern kind of style of gerrymandering, even though packing is still very much used. In the 1990s, so getting even more modern. What do you mean 1990s was 10 years ago? clearly. Oh, come back 90s. Come back. But there was a real revolution and that revolution was computing, using computing in drawing of districts and specifically using it and abusing it to really get nitty gritty with how you're dividing up populations, right? So now all of a sudden you have, know, algorithms that you can run to see what's the best way that you can divide up these districts to best cement your party's advantage, right? It takes another step when it's not just, you know, five guys in a smoke-filled room, you know, going over a map with pencils and erasers and talking about, you who lives in what neighborhoods and stuff. Now you have computer programs that can do it for you and do it better and do it so precisely that all of a sudden your voting districts start getting safer and safer, both for Democrats and Republicans. Blue states start getting bluer, red states start getting redder. And all of a sudden, your presidential elections start coming down to fewer and fewer districts. And that kind of brings us to where we are today, which is a system that has become so efficient and so effective that the majority of seats in the House of Representatives, every federal election, are not in play. They're safe. They are as safe as safe can be. And it doesn't matter who your candidates are. It doesn't matter who your presidential ticket is. You know, for most of the districts in Congress, how people in those districts are going to vote, how they've historically voted. And you've maximized your chances so well that It doesn't even behoove your opposition party to really try and successfully flip that seat because the money that they have is going to be poured into the handful of these actual seats that are in play. That's kind of where we're at today. It's not good. It really is the type of thing that is not democratic and not at any way healthy for a functional democracy, which I think at this point we kind of have to give up the ghost on calling the United States a functional democracy. really isn't and hasn't been. We haven't even talked about the Senate, which is just an absolute democratic nightmare. Things are so tough that a handful of voters in swing states are determining not just the outcome of presidential elections, but how Congress is made up. Do you have a Democratic or a Republican majority? And to bring it all back to what's happening today, Republicans are better at this than Democrats, which means They have more gerrymandered seats. have more safe seats. They have an advantage going into every single election. And they didn't do this by accident. They did it in a through a push years ago to take over state. Legislators, it was a ground up program that that the Republican Party, both federally and at state levels, supported. because they recognized that being in power when you redistrict, they can, with this advantage, create more and more safe seats. To give you an idea, in the last kind of election cycle, Republicans in state legislatures drew 184 districts, which is 42 % of all congressional districts and far more districts than any other kind of map drawer. So the other two types of map drawers are the Democrats, obviously, and independent commissions. A handful of states, mostly blue states, unfortunately for the Democrats, have moved to independent commissions that are apolitical, which is what every state should have. But where it's a hodgepodge, that it's actually a huge detriment to the Democrats that a lot of Democratic states have this non-political redistricting commission. What that meant in terms of the election, the last presidential election, was that Republicans started with a massive advantage. So to give you an example of how skewed this can make things, let's look at North Carolina. In North Carolina, because of a Republican gerrymander, Democrats won 46 % of the vote in congressional races, which is about kind of where you would expect in terms of how the states make up. But they won... only 29 % of the congressional seats up for grabs. That is the absolute power that gerrymandering has to affect the outcome of elections. It suppresses the power of voters to an incredible degree. And if not for gerrymandering, There would be a Democratic Congress right now. It's something like 16 seats is the difference between a gerrymandered map of the United States and a kind of a more fairly balanced map. so 16 doesn't sound huge, but the Republican majority is like two. Yeah. So it really is. absolutely pivotal for Republicans to maintain power to keep doing this gerrymandering because they're even as unpopular as the Democrats are right now. I mean, as unpopular as both parties are. Republicans have a more reliable voter block. in terms of older, whiter voters. But that voter block is always shrinking as a demographic. So they have to keep creating these chimeras, these awful salamander districts, because it keeps them in power, especially in the South. Everything that you're seeing today in Texas is a direct result of this long history of voter suppression through gerrymandering. which is baked in to the American political system since almost day one. If you're trying to understand this, either as an American or as someone as an outside observer, this is something that was born of kind of American paranoia about big government and about centralized government, but also an ignorance of how the American political system would evolve and how quickly it would evolve and the emergence of political parties. What needed to happen after the emergence of political parties was another constitutional convention dealing with that because the system doesn't work for that, but it's the only thing the system has ever known also. So that's how we got here. That's how we're in Texas looking for five seats for Trump. It's hugely unorthodox and unprecedented that firstly a president would ask that of a governor and that a governor would try and redistrict like this in not in a redistricting period right not following census but I mean all pretense is gone at this point with the Republican Party so they're gonna do wheels down there you don't care he'll do whatever yeah exactly Uh, so that's kind of where we got to today. And, uh, yeah, I really wanted to go over the history of this because it's, just so interesting. And it, if you're an American, your life is profoundly impacted by this. Uh, you know, whether or not you live in a gerrymander district, it doesn't matter. This is the thing more than anything else that determines who represents you because you aren't picking. your politician in a lot of places they're picking you. And I really think it's worth knowing about. But yeah I think that's good about do it for this one. I've talked every once a year off poor Josh probably couldn't get a word in this whole time but I piped up a few times. Now I just would you know I'd go to my happy place and walk the dinosaur. So yeah any any big thoughts to. to send us away on tonight? Not particularly. I do think that people should look into this. I've been following it as far as like kind of what's on my news cycle. The you had mentioned the 10 year census. The last one was in 2020. So this is it's not just one thing. It's a collection of unorthodox things that make this upsetting. And I think the thing to really be watching now is the response that we're getting from California, potentially also New York and some other states that This is the time I don't have any faith in them doing it, but this is the time for the Democrats to start playing the same game the Republicans are otherwise. They're never going to win again. They can't keep falling back on decorum and being like, oh, well, we have to heal. I'm like, no, no, no. You need to you need to start putting the bucket of water above the door. It's not going to work otherwise. Yeah, I think they're absolutely right when they say that. And here's. The other thing, think just psychologically, democratic voters, people who believe in kind of the liberalism that exists in the United States, I think they need a win. I think they need a win. Just anything. The Democrats have just been pathetic. They've been pathetic for... They've been pathetic for what feels like years now. Right? This is not a party of winners. And sometimes that just psychologically has an effect, right? You say you're resisting Trump, but we're not really seeing any evidence of it. You lose a lot of the battles you fight. The courts have been sometimes, you know, giving you gifts, but otherwise... just the Democratic Party on a whole needs a backbone for Christ sakes at this point. Like you cannot play by the rules if you're the only one playing by the rules. At that point there aren't any rules. There's only your own self-inflicted handicap. So we'll see what happens. I don't have any faith in the Democratic Party. I don't think anyone should, but... You never know. Maybe this is what lights a fire under them. And we see a little bit more resistance to everything that's been going on. But I guess we'll soon see. Probably. I'm sure there'll be a hundred more things by next week that will have happened in this. Oh, God, there's going to be a billion things by the time those actual midterms roll around. And I will say, if you live in Texas and you are listening to this, go and vote. A lot of you don't. Yeah, the voting record public. There's a lot of registered Democrats and they don't vote. And if they had, it would have been a completely different election. The margins of of the for the the wins in Texas for like I forget who was that. I guess Beto just always would have lost to Greg Abbott, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like that. It was so few, like down to thousands. Yeah. So, yeah, it does make sense, even with the gerrymandering, to still go out and vote, because there's only so much they can do, but it's an advantage to them, to people, not vote at all. Absolutely. They don't want people to vote. mean, voter suppression is so effective. I mean, that's part of the takeaway from this episode is just gerrymandering is a form. Everything that we talked about from intimidation to just forced apathy. Because you don't think there's any hope. You don't think there's any way you can win, right? You know, that's why negative ads are so effective because they don't inspire your base to vote. What they do is they make your opponent's base more apathetic and less likely to vote. You say, oh, I, know. I hate the Republicans, like, man, our Democratic candidate really sucks, you know? And she laughs weird. And I mean, really, what is democracy against a weird laugh? I to get pedophile, guess. Allegedly. Allegedly. All right, folks, that's going to about do it for us this time. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, and we'll see you next week when something even crazier will have happened. Yeah. Go listen to Walk the Dinosaur. Cool off. Thanks for listening. you enjoy the show, please subscribe, give us a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice, and tell all your friends. The Politics of New America is hosted by Nathan Stone and produced by Josh Carmody. You can follow us on Blue Sky at Politics New America. This has been a Honda Mouse Production. Cut that out.