Democrats’ redistricting win could tip midterms in their favor

0:00Brandon Rottinghaus:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

0:16David Weigel:WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Maybe Republicans take the lesson here that we just need a national ban on gerrymandering.

0:26Brandon Rottinghaus:Democrats notch a win in the race to redraw congressional maps. It's Wednesday, April 22nd, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Ashley Locke.

0:48Brandon Rottinghaus:Today on the show, political scandals are roaring back in the headlines. why some lead to downfall and others have few consequences, and how you can have a say in the National Mall's only monument dedicated to women's history. But first, Democrats are celebrating a victory as they try to take back control of Congress. A slim majority of voters in Virginia have given the thumbs up to a ballot measure to redraw the state's congressional map, likely giving Democrats four additional House seats in this fall's midterm elections. David Weigel is a politics reporter covering the news for Semaphore. He chats with Scott Tong about the significance of what's happening.

1:37Brandon Rottinghaus:You're at a political conference. We hear a little bit of convention center noise in the background. Virginia is now considered a blue state. But this is a very close vote. What do you make of the results?

1:50David Weigel:It was a close vote that Democrats anticipate. The state only voted for Kamala Harris by six points. So Democrats always saw this as a single-digit race they'd have to grind out. And Republicans ran a very good campaign, which I saw on the ground. They had resources, which California Republicans did not have when they tried to beat a similar effort in 2025. They had former Governor Glenn Youngkin, who remains popular, personally campaigning for it. They had a message, which was Democrats ran on affordability. Why are they obsessed with overturning these fair maps and deleting four Republican seats in a state with only five Republican seats, deleting them and replacing them with Democrats.

2:26David Weigel:Democrats made the argument that this is basically an emergency response to what Donald Trump was doing, which worked in California and worked more narrowly here.

2:34Brandon Rottinghaus:Yeah. And you are at a political conference, I think, with a lot of political liberals. What's the reaction to this today?

2:42David Weigel:Well, very positive. And the way that liberals generally talk about this, and they did during the election, it's almost like describing chemotherapy. We hate that we have to do this. It's painful. But the goal, in the end, is something that we all agree on as liberals, which is getting rid of Donald Trump, or at least getting rid of his control of the House of Representatives. People debate the timeline, but Eladigal Spanberger did not want to gerrymander when she was running for governor initially. This started up when Donald Trump was pressuring Texas, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina. Every state Republicans could do this in to draw Republicans into more seats and draw Democrats out of theirs.

3:17David Weigel:And right before the election, Virginia Democrats, led by a very aggressive state Senate president, Louise Lucas, said, if they're going to do that, we're going to have a 10 to 1 Democratic map and make whatever they're doing irrelevant. They had an election in November. Democrats won Virginia by a landslide. They took that as a mandate to go ahead with this. But you might notice there's kind of a pattern between both parties saying they need to do this to save America.

3:39Brandon Rottinghaus:Yeah. Well, speaking of the maps in Virginia, my county, Arlington, Virginia, is now split in two under the new state map. I mean, when you look at the new map of Virginia and the congressional districts, what do you make of them? The strategy, the shape of the districts?

3:54David Weigel:Well, they do not look physically appealing. They're drawn to make it so that Democrats win most seats. There are some safe Democratic seats that are less safe now. There are some seats that voted for Trump that now are seats that voted for Harris because of these lines. The one that Republicans tried to make famous, they called the lobster mander, which was basically starting where you're talking about and going down into rural Virginia like two crab claws, capturing rural areas and diluting them with both Arlington and with college towns. But look at Republican maps and states they control. They can make them a bit more compact because what they often do is put urban liberals, non-white Democrats into small seats and then stretch out rural areas elsewhere.

4:34David Weigel:But they've been splitting up counties and cities to do this for a very long time. So nobody has clean hands when they talk about this.

4:40Brandon Rottinghaus:That's the game, yeah. When you look across the country, David, is it kind of, the Democrats claim now it's kind of equal footing. You kind of net out the extra seats Republicans may have gotten and the Democrats may have gotten here. Is it kind of equal now?

4:57David Weigel:It is actually slanted a bit towards Democrats. If you just do the math and say how many seats did they draw for themselves, they drew five in California. They drew four in Virginia. And they'll say this on the record. Texas Republicans were too confident when they drew their map. They were assuming that Donald Trump's performance in the Rio Grande Valley, really all over nonwhite areas of Texas, where he made huge gains over Kamala Harris, they assumed that would stick. Democrats think three of the five seats that Republicans drew with Latino majorities, they can win anyway. So right now, Republicans are looking to Ron DeSantis in Florida, where there is a constitutional ban on gerrymandering, but courts have a way of doing what governors want.

5:37Brandon Rottinghaus:David, finally, once upon a time, there was democracy outrage at this map changing. Now the parties seem to be saying, you pulled my hair, so I get to steal your lunch. What does this mean for democracy, for representation?

5:53David Weigel:Well, the most optimistic Democrat, and maybe there aren't that many of them, will tell me that maybe Republicans take the lesson here that we just need a national ban on gerrymandering. There are not many countries that let the party that wins an election draw its own maps for the next. Much more common for someone else to do this so that you have competitive elections. And on average, there are more Democrats, more Democratic good government groups that favor that, fewer Republicans. That is the way they see it ending. Republicans see it ending a different way, which is they expect sometime this year the Supreme Court to overrule parts of the Voting Rights Act that have required majority-minority districts.

6:30David Weigel:And then they expect states to go back and punish Democrats. So I'd say that some people think maybe this arms war is so ridiculous that we end up in a, you know, Reykjavik situation and both parties come to the table and say disarm. That's the only way they can see this ending. Otherwise, it's perpetual fights, not just every 10 years to draw maps when originally the states are mandated to do that by the Constitution. But every time they take power, they're going to try to draw more maps for themselves. That looks like the future unless there is a detente.

7:01Brandon Rottinghaus:Yeah, yeah. That's the next start treaty, perhaps. David Weigel is politics reporter for Semaphore. David, thanks. Thank you.

7:15Brandon Rottinghaus:Coming up next, in the wake of the Me Too era, why some politicians survive scandals and others don't. support for this podcast comes from is business broken a podcast from the mayrotra institute at boston university on the show host kurt nickish asks the thorny questions necessary for this moment about the role business plays in society questions like why are executives paid so much why is innovation in health care so hard is esg just greenwashing and of course is business broken Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts.

8:21David Weigel:Let's start with the latest. Yesterday, Sheila Shurfulis McCormick stepped down as a congresswoman from Florida minutes before the U.S. House Ethics Committee was to consider whether to vote to expel her. It had already concluded she had stolen millions in pandemic relief funds and used that money for her 2021 House campaign. U.S. Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez both resigned last week after allegations of sexual harassment towards staffers. In Swalwell's case an accusation of rape. Both of them deny the charges. Trump's labor secretary, Lori Chavez de Reamer, also resigned after an investigation of a broad range of misconduct.

8:57David Weigel:And FBI Director Kash Patel is facing controversy tied to reports about his personal behavior on the job. He's suing the Atlantic magazine over that one. Brandon Rottinghouse, that is a lot, and it's just the past couple of weeks. How do we define this moment? It is definitely a punctuated moment for scandals. It often feels like these scandals come in waves, but this perception is heavily shaped by how we consume news today. The reality is that scandals have always been a constant feature of American politics, but our modern media ecosystem amplifies this and clusters them in ways that makes them seem simultaneous.

9:34David Weigel:The reason is that we've got social media now. We've got partisan outlets. We've got controversies that you have partisans pushing that all tend to dominate at once. It's a tit-for-tat kind of strategy, and obviously it ends up being the case that it feels like there's a saturation of scandals. So let's talk about that. You've studied it over time. At a basic level, what makes something a scandal in politics today? Yeah, historically, a scandal requires more than just a controversy. It has to involve a clear allegation of some unethical, immoral, or illegal wrongdoing that violates a social norm or triggers some kind of public outrage.

10:09David Weigel:Over time, though, that definition has blurred a little bit. Today, a scandal is applied to a large range of behaviors, and that can oftentimes be confusing for voters. We're seeing this flooding of the zone with information and a saturation of a media environment where it's basically nonstop. Your book is subtitled How Politicians Survive Controversy in a Polarized Era. How do politicians survive controversy in a polarized era? It's a great question. If I was going to create a roadmap for how to have this be a survival mode, it is certainly the perfect moment to study this. Affective polarization, which is this story in political science where it's this intense dislike of the other side, especially in partisanship.

10:54David Weigel:Media distrust also leads to this blunting of the consequences of scandals. The type of scandal matters, the strength of partisan backing matters, and how the media frame it all matter. We also see differences with respect to institutions. Some institutions are more insulated from some of these concerns, whereas some of them are more likely to be challenged. So the fact that we see more House members being taken down by scandals is an effect where institutionally the House is better designed to be able to investigate these scandals and then to hold people accountable. What distinguishes the cases in your study between moments where people are forced to withdraw from public life and times when people ride their scandals out?

11:35David Weigel:Personal scandals like affairs or private misconduct tend to have less lasting political impacts than scandals involving corruption or financial wrongdoing. Voters do separate politicians' private behavior from their public roles, especially if they agree with their policy positions. In contrast, scandals that are tied to governing responsibilities. So for instance, if a person had engaged in some political shenanigans, it more directly hits at perceptions of competence and trust, and those can be more damaging for people in office. You know, there has been a sense building really over the last 20 years, I'd say, since the global financial crisis, that people at the very top of public life, of the nation's government, but also of major private institutions like financial powerhouses ultimately escape accountability.

12:27David Weigel:How true is that? It's to some degree true. There's clearly evidence that people in power are able to survive these scandals in ways that they weren't in the past. The real conundrum here is that it minimizes accountability. That is the thing that we really lose. We need scandals. It's the canary in the coal mine for us to understand where there are problems. Maybe there are corporate rules we can change. Maybe there are disclosure issues that we can have legislatively at the state or federal levels. These are moments where we want these scandals to be impactful because they do tell us that there's some flaw in the system.

13:04David Weigel:The less scandals are impactful, the harder it is for us to hold those people in power accountable. Brandon Rottinghouse is a political scientist. He's also author of the book Scandal, How Politicians Survive Controversy in a Polarized Era. Brandon, thanks. Hey, thanks, David.

13:26Brandon Rottinghaus:Coming up, Scott explores how the women who secured our right to vote should be remembered.

13:36Brandon Rottinghaus:Do you have a monumental idea for Washington, D.C.? Let me explain. A new monument is coming to the National Mall, which will be the first stand-alone monument dedicated to American women's history. It is the Women's Suffrage National Monument, and its foundation is now soliciting design ideas. And with us now is a representative and ambassador of the foundation, Patricia Taft, is great-granddaughter of William Howard Taft, our 27th president. Patricia, welcome. Hi, Scott. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be joining. Nice to talk to you. Now, this project was authorized by Congress six years ago.

14:14Brandon Rottinghaus:Both President Trump and former President Biden played roles in its approval. Why are you crowdsourcing ideas for this? So basically, there's a brainstorming session taking place. The Women's Suffrage National Monument is stored not for what it represents, but how it's being created. For the first time ever, a monument is launching a nationwide ideas call. So we are inviting the American people to help shape the vision for a monument on the National Mall from the ground up. We like to say we're not looking for blueprints. We're actually looking for a national brainstorm. And what really makes it so special is that sharing stories and symbols and personal perspectives from people across the country will help ensure that the monument actually reflects the collective spirit of America rather than the vision of just a single committee.

14:59Brandon Rottinghaus:And that's never actually been done before. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this project. First, the location. As it's dedicated to the 19th Amendment, naturally, it will be near 19th Street and Constitution Avenue, not too far from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Tell us more about the location here. So the monument itself will be, like, as you said, located at the Constitution Gardens. It's very centrally located, very appropriately at 19th and Constitution. It will reflect the 19th Amendment being passed and the suffragists behind that movement. It's actually appropriately right in the middle located between the World War II Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as between the Reflecting Pool and the White House.

15:44Brandon Rottinghaus:It really is just a center cross-section of representing the spirit of survival and putting forth, yeah, all that there is for this area. Yeah. And what about the timing? When will this break ground? What's the timeline here? So right now we're really focused on the inspiration and design phase. So along with fundraising, we often say that if every woman in America gave just$1, we could have built this monument tomorrow. Okay. Okay. Well, so as far as the design from your website, a few ideas are already in the hopper. Some are drawings. Some are just photos. I see Molly, age seven from Alabama, sent in a photo of Washington, D.C., decorated with Disney princess stickers.

16:28Brandon Rottinghaus:So there's one. And then Quinn from South Carolina, she's 11, wrote in, Votes for Women means to me that girls can do anything they put their minds to, and I want the monument to be a place of celebration for me and my friends. So when all these ideas come in, how are you going to incorporate them into the design process? So the themes and ideas that we're gathering during this phase will actually directly inform the monument's design. So what we're really doing is creating a lifelong connection. The spirit of those designs is what we'll be reflecting in the monument. And for me, that's something that's very special because my great-grandmother, Helen Taft, is who's responsible for planting all the cherry blossoms around D.C.

17:12Brandon Rottinghaus:For me, that feels like a living— Yes, you just got to experience it recently. And for me, that's sort of a living heirloom that we get to experience as our family's legacy. And by getting to contribute to these ideas, I just imagine a middle schooler now submitting their ideas or the little girl submitting her Disney princess inspiration. She'll get to go visit the monument decades from now and she'll get to feel like that is her family heirloom. She got to contribute to that. And that's really something that I feel all Americans are entitled to experience. And that's what makes monumental ideas so wonderful is that we're granting that opportunity to everyone.

17:46Brandon Rottinghaus:Yeah. You know, the 19th Amendment was ratified more than 100 years ago. Why is it taking so long, you think, to get a monument on the National Mall to American women? I think that it's sort of similar to what I discovered when I was looking to my family history. I come from a long line of public servants dating back to the late 1700s. And I, for one moment, realized, like, what's going on? Where are the women? And I realized that there was a thread of women making a difference through this history, especially one of my greatest ancestors, Lydia Chapenthal. She was the first woman to vote in the colonial United States in the late 1700s.

18:22Brandon Rottinghaus:But it's not really a lack of presence. It's a lack of recognition. So I think that now that people are starting to think and see, and when you go to the National Mall and you realize this really is America's backyard, it is where all of these children go, it's all these families go, and we have to think about what they're seeing. And I think for a moment you realize that representation matters. and to change history, you sort of have, or to create history, you have to see yourself reflected in history. And I think that's now why this is coming about. Real quick, Patricia, this call for ideas closes in July, July 4th of this year.

18:57Brandon Rottinghaus:How do people submit their thoughts? People can submit their thoughts by uploading their ideas to our website, womensmonument.org. It's really great as we celebrate the 250th birthday of our democracy, we're also celebrating the greatest expansion in our nation's democracy through the passing of the 19th Amendment in the Women's Monument. Patricia Taft is a representative and ambassador for the Women's Suffrage National Monument Foundation. Thanks, Patricia. Thank you so much.

19:33Brandon Rottinghaus:That's it for now. I hope you find the same happiness as singer Billie Eilish did over the weekend, crying when her childhood crush, Justin Bieber, serenaded her on stage at the closing of Coachella with his hit, One Less Lonely Girl. One Less Lonely Girl One Less Lonely Girl I'm gonna question first I'll say what you were If you let me decide your way It's only one less lonely girl Only you, Charlotte.

20:07Brandon Rottinghaus:Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WB or Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jill Ryan, Jenea Williams, and Jenna Griffiths. Today's editors were Mark Navin, Michael Scotto, Kat Welch, and Chico Thierry. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Andre Peralta. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. Here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. She goes with you tomorrow.