Democrats fight back against Trump in Virginia… and win

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0:30how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. Democrats have scored a major electoral victory. They did it overnight with a special election in Virginia. This was a campaign that had both Kamala Harris and Barack Obama involved on the Democratic side. Donald Trump warning it would be a disaster that would affect the whole country if the Democrats triumphed. Well, they did. And their win, rewriting the electoral map of Virginia, will have huge consequences for the midterm elections, for Donald Trump and for his agenda. So how is he going to respond? And are the Democrats now on course to win the midterm elections?

1:08Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover-up, and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump arrangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up!

1:40Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it's Anthony, right here next to Sarah in Washington, D.C. And it's about half past ten in the morning for us. If anybody was in the worldwide headquarters, it would be 3.30 in the afternoon on Wednesday for them in the U.K. And today we're going to be talking about quite an important development in politics, which is rewriting the electoral map essentially across America. In this particular instance in Virginia, where voters yesterday went to the polls and were asked to approve a redistricting, a redrawing of the congressional map there to quite deliberately favor Democrats to create more seats for them.

2:19Why on earth are they doing that, Anthony? Well, it all starts with what Donald Trump tried to do last year and actually did in Texas. He told the Republican state legislators to redraw the maps there in order to give Republicans more seats in the Texas House delegation. You have to remember, the House of Representatives right now is balanced on a knife's edge. It would only take a flip of two seats for Democrats to take back control of that chamber. So Donald Trump last year was looking at the map, thinking about how narrow these majorities are, how important it is for Republicans to hold on to the House of Representatives in his views, because he wouldn't be investigated, there wouldn't be any kind of impeachment inquiries, There wouldn't be all of this oversight that could come along with Democrats in control of the committees there and started pressuring Republican states to find ways to give Republicans more seats in the House of Representatives in this November's midterm elections.

3:16Missouri was another one. North Carolina was a third. Started this ball in motion and perhaps not really thinking about the consequences of that, which were that Democrats in Democratic-controlled states started doing exactly the same thing. And I think we talked about it before. It started in California with Governor Gavin Newsom bringing a ballot measure in that state to redraw the maps to shift about four seats over from Republicans to likely Democratic. And now the most recent example was in Virginia, where it was an arduous process. They had to win control of the state governorship and the legislature last year.

3:56They had to vote on having a ballot referendum that was today last year. Vote on it again this year. And then that put it on the ballot yesterday when Virginians, the state I live in, headed to the polls and by about a 3 percent margin agreed to redraw these lines, which will shift about four seats from Republicans to Democrats. There are 11 House seats in Virginia. Most predictions are that Democrats will now win 10 of them. They had six as of right now. So I won't embarrass you by asking how you voted on this, but let's just go back to the basics of this, which does sound a lot like cheating, but both sides are doing it, as you say.

4:37So we're looking at each state has a different number of representatives that sends to Congress, depending on the population of the state. And within that, there are constituency boundaries for the dozen or so seats. It could be, what, as few as one, as many as 35, is it, that California has? That sounds about right, yeah. And they're redrawn every 10 years normally, depending on the census and where populations have moved to. But these are states doing it in an off year, really specifically, not to make sure there's the same number of constituents in each district, but to deliberately create districts which will favor one party or another.

5:13It is carving up the state in order to give your party majorities, sometimes modest majorities, in as many of these districts as possible. Because you could have one district with 70 % Democrats in it, and then a bunch of other districts with 40 % Democrats in it. They would win the 71, they would lose the 41s to Republicans. But if you drew the lines to move some of those in the 70 percent district into all of the other districts and put them all slightly, maybe 53, 54 percent Democrats, then you are because people tend to at this point vote pretty reliably for their their party. You could give your party a lot more of a chance of winning in each of these states.

5:55And you talk about it. It's it sounds like cheating. It sounds like rigging the game. Yes, but there is a long tradition of this going back hundreds of years. The term gerrymandering actually comes from an editorial cartoon in a Massachusetts newspaper from the 19th century. This is something that is not unusual. Well, actually, interestingly enough, there has been a push to take the line drawing out of the hands of politicians where it traditionally has been and put them in independent commissions that are supposed to look at drawing lines that are fair, that kind of encapsulate different regions or different cities in the same place.

6:34The problem was that this push was generally backed by liberal groups, by Democrats, and it was states that were controlled by Democrats that actually passed, by and large, these measures. So states like Virginia, which just a few years ago had a ballot referendum that set up an independent commission. California was another one. These these states changed their maps to make them a little more balanced, giving Republicans an advantage. And then when Donald Trump did this with Texas in the middle of the decade, as you point out, it was the Democratic states that looked back and said, well, we are going to scrap this kind of hopeful, idealistic view of how to draw these lines and go and go straight back to purely partisan, squeeze as much advantage as we can.

7:21And then you end up with districts that are the most bizarre shapes as people have carved out different neighborhoods and different streets to try and put them into the same constituency, don't they? And I think that 19th century cartoon, it was about a district that had been drawn so deliberately. It looked like a salamander, I think, wasn't it? And that's why I ended up calling it a gerrymandering. And actually, the district I now live in with these new maps starts in Arlington, which is just across the river from Washington, D.C., and stretches out into the hinterland in kind of north central Virginia.

7:55And it has two different prongs that kind of stretch out and reach around. And so it's been called the Lobster District because it kind of looks like a crustacean with two claws. And with a very, very long tail as well, going into Virginia to try and get as many Democrats as possible. I'm now a proud resident of the lobster district. Now, because this is so important in a midterm election year, this means that this has had a huge amount of national political attention. Donald Trump himself got involved in this campaign in Virginia, as did former President Barack Obama, who were both making appeals to voters to support their side.

8:31We need every Virginia patriot to get out and vote no, no, no. Democrats want to go out and overrule those district lines in the service of their own partisan gerrymander. And you're talking about, I don't know what you know, if you know what gerrymandering is, but it's not good. What's going to happen if we lose these elections, you know, the House and this case, the House and just it's going to be a disaster. If they do this, they're guaranteed to pick up a lot of seats. By voting yes, you have a chance to do something important, not just for the Commonwealth, but for our entire country. By voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms.

9:17By voting yes, you can take a temporary step to level the playing field. So interesting that Barack Obama there campaigning for people to vote yes, to vote in favour of redistricting, in favour of the Democrats, because previously he has come out against this practice. And there were a lot of adverts on television, you'll have seen them as a Virginia resident, they also bleed into Washington DC as well, so I've seen them as well, of Barack Obama urging people to vote against this, which was ads that the Republicans were putting out using Obama's former stance against gerrymandering, part of their campaign.

9:51But I think that does highlight one point, doesn't it, which is Democrats have always been taking the moral high ground on this kind of thing and said they wouldn't want to indulge in that. But now they've sort of taken their jackets off, rolled their sleeves up and got down in the mud with Republicans playing them at their own game. Is that going to hurt them, do you think, as they try and portray themselves as more politically virtuous? I don't know. I think they've come to the realization that being politically virtuous is not going to be an electoral benefit. You remember Michelle Obama back in 2016 saying, when they go low, we go high.

10:26And I think a lot of Democrats feel like that was naive. And actually, Hakeem Jeffries, who is the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, put out a statement yesterday. And in that statement, celebrating this vote in Virginia, he said, when they go low, we hit them hard. So it's a very different kind of attitude. I often think that Barack Obama is used as a kind of moral conscience of the Democratic Party, not least because of that famous quote from Michelle Obama. But if he's prepared to get on board with this idea of redistricting, then it probably means Democrats have decided it's OK and that they can at the very least get away with it.

11:01Or, as you say, you need to kind of fight fire with fire. And when you're battling against Donald Trump now overseeing this effort in Virginia, of course, was the reasonably newly elected Democrat governor, Abigail Spanberger, who we have talked about frequently on this podcast before, because she was seen as a real Democrat rising star. She was very moderate, with a background in the CIA. Somebody, the sort of person you could imagine possibly running for president Monday, certainly becoming one of the big stars of the Democrat Party. Listen to her reacting to that win last night. This is what she said in an interview with MS Now.

11:35Virginians understood that it all began when President Trump said that he was entitled to additional congressional seats. And when Republican legislature after Republican legislature obliged him, the people of our Commonwealth had the ability to say, yes, we want to take this step. We want to pass this referendum. And we want to do this redistricting at this moment as a responsive and temporary step, preserving our long-term bipartisan redistricting commission, but recognizing the urgency. And so it wasn't a bunch of legislators who were trying to do the president's bidding. It wasn't a bunch of legislators who were, you know, choosing partisanship over anything else.

12:15This was the people of Virginia saying, we have this option and we are choosing to take it. And that is something interesting and something you hear Democrats point out is that in both California and Virginia, these were ballot referendums. These were the people voting to change the maps. In Texas, it was the legislature that did it. The legislature elected by the people of Texas, but still in a one step removed from the voice of democracy. Same with Missouri. It was a legislature there. And actually, the Democrats in Missouri have been trying to force a ballot referendum to change the map back to one that would give Democrats one more seat.

12:54And the same with Ohio, same with North Carolina. It was legislatures doing it. So is it an absolutely done deal in Virginia? These are the districts people will vote in? Not quite yet. The Republicans have challenged this in court. And after last night's vote, the head of the Republican Party in Virginia said, now we're going to go to litigation about the process on that. The state Supreme Court, which had kind of punted on this issue, is going to weigh in. But it seems likely that this is going to stick. There were court challenges to the Texas maps, to the California maps as well, and all of those ultimately lost.

13:30So So it seems like this is going to be the lay of the land now. And actually, there are candidates who are already running for these new districts who announced even before this ballot measure passed that they were going to be running. To be a constitutional lawyer in America now must just be a license to print money. That's what we should be doing, not this. Yeah, it never has been a bad time to be a lawyer in the United States. But this is particularly for people who do election law, the golden age. And speaking of court cases, there also is a big looming Supreme Court case out there on the Voting Rights Act and challenging whether the requirement by that act that race be taken into account when drawing lines in order to try to guarantee racial, relatively equal racial representation in a congressional delegation from the state, whether that is constitutional or not.

14:18The court could, in theory, strike down that and say that is illegal, that is unconstitutional. And that would allow states to go back and erase a lot of these minority, majority minority districts that were drawn with this law in mind. Minority districts that are by and large in the South, at least, Democratic held. And that could throw all of this back into a big mess and could, by some predictions, lead to about 15 to 17 Democratic seats getting washed away and flipped to the Republicans. But even if they decide that soon, well, they are going to decide that soon. We know that. We just don't know exactly what day.

14:53That probably won't come in in time to affect these midterms. Yeah. At this point, it's unlikely. I think there were a lot of people wondering if they might decide it a couple of months ago. Last month it was argued in October. So this has been sitting out there for quite some time. at this point. And the Supreme Court just handed down some new decisions earlier today, and it wasn't in them. At this point, I think the consensus is that they're going to wait long enough where it won't impact any of the races in November. And it could very well be the three liberal justices on the Supreme Court are slow walking this with that exactly in mind, because if they tear up the Voting Rights Act and this last bit, it will definitely result in a fundamental change in the way these voting districts are drawn in the Deep South.

15:39So let's take a tally across the country of the numbers here and see who is coming out ahead. So we think, depending on how people vote, but probably in Texas, the Republicans scored an extra five seats. Then in California, after that ballot, the Democrats scored an extra five seats, probably four extra for the Democrats in Virginia as a result of last night's vote. And then there's a few others across the country, Anthony, aren't there? One plus for Republicans in North Carolina. What are the others? Missouri is the other one that I mentioned. Ohio probably gives Republicans a chance at one or two more seats.

16:17Utah, interestingly enough, because of a court case, had to draw a line that will give Democrats a better chance. It wasn't strictly redistricting in the way that that's been pushed by politicians. This was one done by a court. But all in all, it balances out right now to either a push or maybe even Democrats picking up one or two seats. So this did not work out the way I think the Donald Trump hoped when he started this ball rolling. But there is one big shoe left to drop, and that is Florida, which Ron DeSantis, the Republican, is calling a special session of the Florida state legislature to consider redrawing the maps there.

16:59And that could be anywhere from one to five seats swinging to the Republicans. So this still could end up a net benefit for Republicans. But just like in Texas and in Florida, if this is a wave election for Democrats and it's certainly shaping up that way that they're going to do really well in November, those Florida Republicans have to be careful when they're drawing these lines not to make them so fine that Democrats could win if this is a beating that Republicans take. So actually, Hakeem Jeffries, in that same statement he put out last night, said, you know, we're going to beat all of these Republicans in Texas who now are in more narrow districts.

17:40And if they decide to do it in Florida, and he ticked through all the list of different Florida members of the House who could be Democratic targets as well. I think it's a warning shot, maybe trying to make some of the folks there are a little more nervous about drawing these maps. Yeah. And so you were saying there's a potential for it to be a democratic wave election. And of course, that's because of things like the war in Iran, the price of petrol or gas in the US at the moment. In fact, the economy in general, the voters are not happy with Donald Trump about. And on that, there have been some recent opinion polls coming out, which have dire numbers for Donald Trump.

18:16Associated Press have his approval rating down to 30 % this month. I mean, that's like a historic low, isn't it? It's down from 38%, which is pretty bad enough. But an eight point fall in a month is pretty dramatic. We're looking at George W. Bush at the height of the Iraq war. Katrina, after the Iraq war went bad. Richard Nixon, after Watergate. Trump himself, after January 6th. So yeah, this is red flashing warning light territory for Republicans. And they've got to be really nervous about what's going to happen to them in November and hoping that I think the Iran war is wrapped up, that gas prices come back down, all of these things, because affordability is still a big issue for voters.

19:01And a lot of things that Donald Trump has done recently have made prices go up, not down. Yeah. And even the energy secretary says that gas prices will not be back to normal by November. Now, America is maybe listening and saying, well, what's Trump's approval rating got to do with it when he's not on the ballot in November, these are midterm elections. Nobody will be voting for or against Donald Trump. But I mean, I think the president's approval rating always matters in midterm elections, but with Donald Trump more than ever. Yeah, because Trump's magic, part of Trump's magic is that he brings people out to vote who don't always vote, who in fact rarely vote.

19:38And he always seems to overperform when his name is on the ballot because he has this ability to rally his base. The thing that we've seen since he came down that golden escalator in 2015 is that when his name isn't on the ballot, his supporters tend to not show up. Democrats won in a wave election in 2018. In 2022, while Republicans took back the House of Representatives, it wasn't the kind of Republican wave that people thought it would be given Biden's approval ratings. So this is another midterm election. Trump's name is not on the ballot. Trump is proving to be a drag on Republicans. He certainly can't go out there on the campaign trail and help them very much.

20:21Democrats are desperate to tie him to every single swing battleground Republican candidate out there. And so I think it's got to be a cause for very real concern. Yeah, I mean, it really wasn't long ago, was it? The candidates were absolutely craving his approval and his endorsement, desperate to be seen with him running adverts entirely, primarily them being seen with Donald Trump. And yeah, they may be running from him quickly come November. And talking of Donald Trump, so we're recording this just 12 hours or so after he extended the ceasefire in the war on Iran indefinitely, saying it was to give the Iranians time to get a proposal together and also for any talks to conclude one way or another.

21:03So, I mean, that could be weeks and weeks and weeks. We could be in this kind of stalemate where he hasn't ended the war, but he hasn't restarted conflict again. that's also not going to be terribly well received. Yeah, this is shaping up to be a war of who can endure more economic pain. Iran, with the blockade, feeling the pain of not being able to sell its oil on the global markets. And the United States and Trump and really the world economy feeling the pain of limited shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. And so something's got to give at some point, but this is not something that could break overnight, it seems.

21:40It seems like both sides are kind of dug in and not willing to make too many concessions. So if it's a battle of pain, Donald Trump is going to be feeling that, not necessarily immediately, but by November at the ballot box. And with Republicans getting more and more squeamish about what could happen, I think that's going to be a very real concern for him. Well, yeah, and he's got a negotiating team on the other side of the table from him in Iran, which he clearly just fundamentally doesn't understand, look at things completely differently. This is not an art of the deal negotiation where people are trying to put together some kind of real estate proposal.

22:15And it's all about the economics. He just has never taken on board that the amount of economic pain that a theocracy that doesn't allow its people to vote for them can take on versus somebody who's facing crucial midterm elections in just a few months time. It's a calculation he clearly just couldn't compute before he even went into this. Right. In a real estate deal, the person sitting across the table from you isn't going to lose their lives, lose their house, lose everything if they come out on the wrong end of this deal. And the stakes for the Iranians are existential, which definitely changes the negotiating dynamic.

22:53And yet, just after having announced that ceasefire extension, there was the most astonishing truth social post from Donald Trump that really caught my eye last night. So he has a fairly typical rant about how well the US has done in the war in Iran, that the country is now in tatters, their navy is at the bottom of the sea, their aircraft has gone. Very similar rant that we've heard from him many, many times where he's basically declaring victory, although clearly the US has not won that conflict. And then he goes on to say there is a moron on the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal writing about me being taken for a sucker.

23:31Well, Iran doesn't think so. Neither does anybody else. Well, I mean, that's disputable. But it's not great, is it, to be railing against a newspaper calling it a failing political rag because you don't like a headline when at the same time you are theoretically dealing with one of the most important and finely balanced conflict negotiations in history. Yeah, there have been a number of mainstream media reports about the pressure that Trump is under behind the scenes. His anxiety about trying to wrap this war up, what the United States has gotten into, that Wall Street Journal editorial kind of based on the Wall Street Journal's reporting.

24:12certainly put it in a much more pointed way. And that's what Trump is responding to. You know, neither you nor I think are going to be at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is this Saturday. Yes, but why are we not, Anthony? Because we're flying over to London to take part in CastFest, where we will be joined by our newscast colleagues, our Global Story colleagues, Marianna and our top comment team. Yeah, a whole bunch of us will all be together. Yeah, put in the plug. We have good reason not to be there, But it will be interesting because this is the first one that Donald Trump is going to attend in any of his years as president.

24:49He also is going to be sitting there as the Wall Street Journal gets a journalism award for their Jeffrey Epstein birthday book story. The one that reported that Donald Trump had signed a birthday message, a lewd birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, one that Donald Trump sued the journal over and has subsequently been kicked out of court, at least temporarily. and now he's going to have to stand on stage and give an award to the Wall Street Journal and then right after he's railing against him now. I mean, it should be, it's going to be the middle of the night for us in London, but I'm going to wake up Sunday morning and I'm going to watch to see exactly how all that played out.

25:28Yeah, it's going to be interesting. Now, there won't be a comedian roasting him, which is usually what happens at the correspondence dinner. There's a stand-up comic comes and makes lots of jokes at the president's expense whilst he sits there and chuckles away. Donald Trump will be spared that because they had already booked a mentalist, he's called, isn't he? A sort of mind-reading act rather than somebody who's going to make any kind of political jokes. But yeah, it's still not going to be easy, is it, with watching him break bread with the people who he says are fake news and liars and who, yes, he couldn't have been more rude about.