How badly did partisan gerrymandering backfire?

0:00NPR Plus is a great way to support independent journalism. But did you know it also saves you time? Over a year of fresh air, NPR Plus listeners can save more than 17 hours with sponsor-free episodes. As a thank you for your support, get more NPR in less time, plus bonus content and dozens of other sponsor-free shows. Sign up today at plus.npr.org. A lot has happened this week. And as the dust settles on the midterms, we're wondering, what lessons will each party take from partisan gerrymandering? Why isn't the right-wing election denial outreach machine in full swing after Republicans lost big?

0:39And when will Mississippi be done counting ballots? It's time for the Weekly Roundup.

0:48It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. I want to start with something that's caught my attention in the wake of these huge Democratic victories. President Trump knows Republicans lost and lost big. He said so on election night, albeit saying that they wouldn't have lost if he were on the ballot. But for a man who still refuses to accept that he lost the 2020 election, he hasn't really been talking about rigged votes or the election being stolen. So, like, when it comes to stages of grief, he seems to have zoomed straight to acceptance.

1:28I feel like one of the most amazing parts on election night was he was actually asked by Brett Baer on Fox News, will you accept these results? And he said, sure, I will. Why wouldn't I? And it was kind of like, were you not in attendance the last 10 years? I don't know. I just love that so much. I will say he has started to cast a little doubt as the process continues in Alaska. So I wouldn't completely declare that the president is going to claim this election was completely free of any issues. But it definitely hasn't been what we would have traditionally expected in a year where Republicans have lost a bunch.

2:02Well, Miles, what happened to the very formidable election denial machine and conspiracy theory machinery that the president has been building for the last 10 years? I mean, don't forget, he said in 2016 that Ted Cruz stole the Iowa caucuses from him. This is the distinction. It's not that people weren't claiming online that fraud was happening. This actually was happening all over the sort of far right Internet. We saw Stephen Miller's wife post that elections were being stolen in New York. We saw Laura Loomer, the right wing conspiracy theorist, post a bunch of things about fraud in Florida and things like that.

2:36To me, this was an example of what happens when those sort of opinions aren't mainstreamed by the candidates themselves or by the president of the United States. And the answer is they don't really go anywhere. They stay on the Internet. Well, and I mean, it's remarkable, perhaps, or maybe it's not remarkable, but there were a number of candidates running in races all over the country who have denied the 2020 election outcome, and yet they accepted their losses. Right. That has happened before. In other words, in 2020, when he denied the results, he didn't deny the results of other Republicans who had won.

3:10But, you know, Donald Trump in the past has talked about we have to make these elections too big to rig so the Democrats can't steal it from us. But I wonder if one of the reasons he didn't pursue a whole lot of election denial is because it was the loss was too big and too sweeping. It's kind of like, you know, the weave was no match for the wave. Well, a part of that, I think, is that because the margins were so wide, there also wasn't the red mirage on election night where there wasn't this period of six hours where it looked like some Republicans might win. That goes along with that. Right.

3:40But I will I want to bring up one other point. There were indications all year that voters seem to be also kind of tired of these narratives, including Republican voters. I was just talking to a county clerk in a deeply red part of Colorado a couple of weeks ago. And I've been thinking about this quote for the last couple of weeks leading up to the election day. Her name is Carly Coppess. She's the county clerk in Weld County, Colorado. And she said when she talked to Republicans in her county, they just seemed kind of tired of the 2020 shtick. You have to remember when you try to reignite a fire that is already burned, you're never going to get the same impact and volume.

4:12And I don't know. I just like that has been playing over and over in my head thinking about what is the president going to do? Obviously, he also wasn't on the ballot. And this is a big part of it. And we talk about how much the president's decisions are driven by his own personality and his own ego, too. And I guess I wonder whether that was part of this, too, whether this would have been a different story, A, if it had been closer, but also B, if he had actually had a personal skin in the game. Donald Trump is known for his inconsistency, but I can't think of anything more profoundly inconsistent than to go out and tell voters, pretend I'm on the ballot, and then all of a sudden scamper into his safe place, I wasn't on the ballot.

4:46Oh, but Mara. I mean, of course he said he wasn't on the ballot. I don't say it's surprising. I'm just saying of all the inconsistencies, this is number one. But also arguably the one that was most predictable all along. Which was the thing that I had been thinking leading into this election was the thing that was sort of tipped the balance towards, well, maybe this will just be a normal election. That said, I think there's been a lot of people saying, well, you know, the voting community was really being so dramatic all year, thinking that this was going to be some sort of effort by Republicans to steal it.

5:20But I think that is also a step too far in terms of if the House had been decided by one or two seats, if the Senate had been decided by just one seat, I still all the experts who I talk to still think this would have been a very different story from the president. Well, let's talk about two races that are not yet decided in the Senate that will not decide the balance of power because that was decided early in the night. But we're still waiting on results in Alaska and Mississippi. be. And I'm just going to say now that the time is 1242 p.m. on Friday, November 6th, because things could change after we tape this.

5:56What is the status there? And let's just start with Alaska. Sure. So roughly 75 percent or so of ballots expected to be counted in Alaska seem to have been counted at this point. And the Democrat running in that Senate race, Mary Peltola, has a very, very small lead under a thousand votes. That said, the votes that will be counted in this election have not all been received by election officials yet. In Alaska, voters have until November 13th, if they have their ballot postmarked, to get that ballot to election officials. November 18th for people who are overseas. So it's going to be still a couple more weeks before election officials even know the universe of ballots that are going to be counted.

6:33And then you add in on top of that, that Alaska is one of the few states in the country that has ranked choice voting. And that ranked choice tabulation, assuming Peltola or the incumbent Dan Sullivan, do not reach the 50 percent threshold, that tabulation for ranked choice voting doesn't even happen until November 18th. So we're going to be waiting a little while. And we should explain for people maybe who are tuning in from outer space that Alaska is not a laggard. They just have a very challenging geography there. And there are people who live in small villages that are hard to reach. And that's one of the reasons it takes so long to count.

7:07Exactly. The postal system has been in the news a lot this year for the delays across the country. nowhere more than Alaska, where to get anywhere, you often have to get on an airplane, right? And so that just means it takes a while to get ballots to where they need to go. Let's turn to Mississippi and a race that was not on many people's bingo cards because it is such a red state. And now it is looking like it is also a flip. What's the latest there, Miles? Votes are still being counted there as well. Another situation where we don't know how many outstanding ballots there are. And there's been a bunch of different answers on the universe of ballots left to count.

7:44The campaign for the Democrat running in that race, Scott Colombe said on election night, they thought there were something like 15 ,000 provisional ballots outstanding left to count. The state GOP chair said it was more like 20 ,000 ballots left to count. If you count the unaccounted for mail votes, which Mississippi is similar to Alaska, there's this grace period where voters have a couple extra days if their ballot is postmarked by election day to get that ballot to election officials. And so it's very unclear how many votes there are left to count. And there is a huge number of provisional ballots where literal election officials, county election officials are having to go one by one with these provisional ballots and decide, was this person eligible to vote or not?

8:22And that process is time consuming. I think the date that everyone should have circled is Tuesday, which is when ballots need to be received by election officials to be able to be counted. And that's the deadline for people who had issues. Maybe they forgot their ID when they went to vote last Tuesday. They have until this upcoming Tuesday to be able to cure those issues. So by Tuesday, we should have a better sense of the universe of votes. Is it normal for counting votes to take this long in Mississippi? Taking this long is not really the issue. What is not normal is how little transparency into the process there has been.

8:55And part of that is that Mississippi is one of the most bottom-up states, which means counties have a lot of power in how their elections run to the point that the state Secretary of State there, who's a Republican, Michael Watson, said this week, he didn't even know how many provisional ballots were outstanding in Mississippi at this point. And so I've been talking to experts this week, and it's really a sign that Mississippi has not been a battleground state. They have not been a state that is kind of in the spotlight the way your Georgias and Michigans have been. I would say if this exact scenario were happening in Arizona or Michigan or Georgia, we'd probably be seeing press conferences three times a day.

9:29There would be data coming out. There would be live streams of vote counting. None of that is happening in Mississippi right now. Wow. All right. Before I let you go, Miles, I want to ask you both. Democrats have won Senate seats in Texas and Iowa and South Carolina and Kansas and Ohio. And is this a realignment of the political map? Like, are we going to have to go to a lot more states in the next couple of years? I think this is a realignment. Now, how durable a realignment is, unclear. But the fact that the Trump coalition crumbled and the Democratic wins were so deep, so broad, this is the kind of midterm election that becomes a precursor or a predictor of what's going to happen in the next presidential election.

10:13And all those little red arrows that showed almost every county in America going red in 2024, well, they have changed direction and now there are a ton of little blue arrows. And what's so important and what makes a real realignment, at least for now, is that this is not just about the Senate and the House. This is about governor's races up and down the ballot. And governors are really important for presidential elections because they have campaign and political infrastructure. And they can really make a difference. And you now have governors in the extremely big, important electoral college states, Ohio, Texas.

10:50Then they've also got New York and California. So the Democrats, all of a sudden, after looking like they could have been teetering on the edge of extinction, are super competitive. I, looking ahead to 2020, am a little bit more skeptical, I think, because we were already seeing signs the last few years that midterms off-year elections were becoming big advantages for Democrats who are becoming the party that wins among sort of college -educated voters, high-income voters, the voters who typically vote in every single election. This election was a very high turnout midterm. Don't get me wrong.

11:22Second highest turnout midterm in the last hundred years. That said, the turnout rate was still under 50 percent. And so I'm curious to see if 2028 is a high turnout election and you bring some of these low propensity voters back into the fold. These are voters who Donald Trump was able to win over in 2024. Are they necessarily Republican voters? I think that's an open question. Do they only turn out for him, which certainly was his thesis or at least his excuse? Totally. But I just think the electorate is going to look pretty different than what we saw this midterm year. So I would hesitate to go to too many conclusions.

11:54OK. What was the highest turnout midterm in the last 100 years? 2018, I believe. It was the other Trump. Basically, Trump is a turnout machine. For both parties, as we've said before. Yeah. All right. Well, Miles, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Tam. Let's take a break and we'll have more in a moment. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. On the latest episode of Sources and Methods, a blue tsunami, earthquake, avalanche, Democrats swept the midterms. What does this mean for President Trump's ambitions overseas? And why is Iran paying such close attention to the changeup on Capitol Hill?

12:34Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the national security podcast from NPR. On the next through line from NPR, the surprising story behind the discovery of insulin. led by a failed Canadian surgeon. The best way to describe it would be a reluctant hero. It's a story rife with personal grudges and many, many dogs. Listen to NPR's ThruLine in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I interviewed John Tutoro, and he was great talking about learning to be a pickpocket for his new movie and how growing up in a volatile home helped him as an actor.

13:16My brother said to me once, I've given you a lot of material. And I said, you know, you're really right. You're right. I said, but at a high cost. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you listen to Fresh Air. Welcome back. And now with us, NPR voting correspondent Ashley Lopez. Hey, Ashley. Hey there. Ashley, I'm hoping you can help us wrap up one of the main storylines that we had going into this election. the use of partisan gerrymandering, President Trump asked Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to make them safer for Republicans to win, to make more Republican seats. Most of the votes are now in.

13:55Was this a success? No, it was not. It was largely a failure. I mean, this does sort of depend what state you're looking at. I will say, like in Louisiana and Tennessee, which redrew their maps, that looked to maybe help them a little. But I think Republicans were trying to create an edge for themselves in an environment where no edge could really be had. Yes. I mean, they drew a bunch of Trump plus 10 seats and that was not enough. Yeah. No, not in a plus like, what, 15 environment? I think that's, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that happened here. It depends also, you know, what states we're talking about.

14:32Like, I think And Texas is a good example of like – I think it might have even hurt them in Texas as opposed to like even give them a little bit of a help. But we can talk more about that later. But, you know, state by state, there are some outliers here. But it looks like mostly it did not help. And in some cases, it backfired. Yeah. It didn't just merely fail. You know, gerrymanders that don't work are sometimes called a dummy mander. I've heard this one called a moronmander because in some cases, if they had just left the maps alone, they would have done better based on the turnout here. Yeah.

15:05So a good example of a place that could be a demimander, which is a place that people had warned before. It was the first state that took President Trump's request seriously and changed their maps. That was Texas. If you look at what Texas Republicans did is they made some big assumptions that some of the voters, particularly Latino voters in South Texas, would turn out for them again. And so they drew the maps assuming that those voters would support them. And they gave them a lot of influence and a bunch of seats down there. In the past, when Latinos were more solidly blue, I remember when I first moved to Texas, the maps down there, Latinos were packed into those South Texas seats or cracked into different places.

15:49Like they were messing with those votes, sort of assuming they were Latinos. In this case, they were assuming a bunch of those people were Republicans and it backfired because the reaction to the Trump administration's immigration policies and economic policies led to, in some cases, something like 30 point swings in just this voting group. And so they lost big and they lost big across the map there. Look, Latino voters were angry like every other voter about costs, but they were particularly angry about immigration and the way that Donald Trump went about his mass deportation program. They wanted the border to be secured.

16:22They wanted legal immigrants to come over. But when they saw their communities decimated, small businesses didn't have any employees because people were afraid to come out of their houses. They saw families being broken apart. They said enough. And it turns out they're the most important swing group of this election. And I think they're going to stay that way. I don't think that they're now signed up for Democrats for here to eternity. They are the most important swing in American politics right now. You know, and I got to say in the analysis of coming out of this midterm, I think that point isn't made enough, which is that Latinos, especially in a place like South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, they see how much immigration and a strong economy are linked.

17:03You know, if you don't have enough people to build houses, to run businesses, this is an economic crutch that you cannot get out of. I had a Republican operative in Texas tell me, like, the miracle of the Texas economy, the story that no one told you is that pinning it all together at the bottom were immigrants. And Republicans did not learn the lesson of a state like Texas and instead decided, like, they're going to blame immigrants for everyone's economic woes. And it backfired because there are generations of Texans who are Latino and they have the right to vote. And, you know, we don't want to go back too far into the sands of time, but there was a Republican governor of California named Pete Wilson.

17:44And this is when California turned blue. He had Prop 187, which was an anti-immigrant proposition, and it spectacularly backfired and I think laid the groundwork for why California is so reliably blue to this day. And if you look at the map now, there is not a single red district along the U.S.-Mexico border. It is all blue all along South Texas. Yeah, the last few cycles, you know, there was at least one race that was like it was one of those districts that they sort of like cracked and packed the Latino vote to have some of the more rural voters out west. It was one of the more competitive districts.

18:24It was sort of swing every couple of years. But now, I mean, you know, I think Mara is right that like it does, you know, we don't know what the future holds. But the assumption that these voters are now like Republican or really anything at this point besides just mad is a tough assumption. And it's going to be hard to draw maps to that to that effect. Well, OK, so here's a crazy idea. Is there any chance that, I don't know, Democrats have taken control of Congress? Everybody, at least voters, think all of this gerrymandering is insane. Is there any chance of like bringing back bipartisan commissions to draw district lines or does the arms race just continue forever?

19:07Well, there's a third option. I mean, they could bring back bipartisan commissions. They also could just decide not to do mid-cycle redistricting because that was the big norm that was broken. And they're usually – when things come to some kind of a truce, it's because both parties have – see it in their interest. And right now, the Democrats did their mid-cycle redistricting in retaliation for Republicans. In other words, Republicans started this. I don't know if Democrats are going to want to do this again and again on their own. Maybe we're just come to the ceasefires happen when both sides are exhausted.

19:40That might be where we're at. Yeah, but Republicans did it. Democrats in California responded. They were quite successful. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I think something that hasn't come up a lot is that voters seem to punish Republicans more for redistricting than they are Democrats right now. Now, a good example is in Missouri, the legislature asked voters to approve their 2025 map that created one more seat for Republicans. Voters said no. And then in Maryland, there was also a ballot measure asking them to allow lawmakers there to create one more seat for Democrats. And that passed. So this was started by Republicans.

20:16Actually, to be fair, this was started by the Supreme Court. I feel like it's always important to point out that the Supreme Court created a situation where states can partisan gerrymander to their heart's content. And yeah. Donald Trump started it, too, by asking Republican legislatures to do this. But he couldn't have asked if it wasn't a possibility. That's true. So the question now is like, you know, it's like what Maura's saying, like, how are you going to read the results of this election? And what lessons are you going to draw from it from your perspective? Because if you're a Democrat, sure.

20:45Like, why not? Why not at this point? If you have trifectas you've never had before and you probably can't rely on in perpetuity, you know, like one of the states that I visited before the election was Arizona. And counting is not done there yet, but they look like they're headed to have a Democratic trifecta. And everyone there, the open secret is this will not last more than a couple of years. So might as well redistrict as far as you can. Look, this is the problem. When norms are broken, it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Donald Trump played a kind of political hardball that Democrats weren't willing to do.

21:18But once he did it, they were going to retaliate in kind. And the question is, do they want to initiate more hardball or just do it as a response to the Republicans? We don't have full results in Tennessee yet. We are still waiting on the count in Tennessee 4. But here's a state where they did redistrict to try to make more Republican seats. They seem to have succeeded. But then a Republican incumbent whose district got less Republican looks poised to lose his seat. And so when you have incumbents losing, that makes incumbents unhappy. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is usually what redistricting is for, is to say it like to sort of protect your incumbents.

22:02But the problem is, is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party took it a step further. They're like, oh, we want to like grow the map. We want to like use it also as an umbrella, you know, to protect us from this like coming tsunami, which you can't like you cannot predict that kind of stuff. I'm sorry. Like we have really good technology and really good information now about, you know, voters in each and every little corner of the country. But nothing, nothing could protect you from an environment like, you know, for Republicans like this midterm cycle. And this environment was not predicted.

22:35In other words, everybody knew it would be a tough cycle for Republicans. That's why he asked them to create more Republican leaning seats. But no one predicted the extent of the wave. Well, I mean, when they started redrawing these lines, there was no war in Iran. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to take one more quick break and then it's time for Can't Let It Go. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley. And we are here with a new show to tell you all about it.

23:14That's right, Kevin, on our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry. You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Terry Gross. Listen to Fresh Air for thoughtful questions, like when I asked Steven Spielberg about porn titles. When John Waters was on our show, he said his favorite was shaving Ryan's privates. Did you know about this? No, not until this very moment. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. This message comes from Xero.

23:52That's Xero with an X, a simple but powerful platform built for small business owners that makes managing business finances easier from day one. Learn more at Xero.com. And we're back and it's time for Can't Let It Go. That's the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Mara, I will let you go first. My can't let it go this week is Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world, at least on paper. He spent about half a billion dollars to help Republicans keep control of Congress. It didn't work. One explanation of what half a billion dollars is this year would be roughly equivalent to someone on a$100 ,000 annual salary saving every single penny of their salary for 4 ,400 years.

24:42That is what Elon Musk can do. And he's intervened before with money in elections and not won. But he actually had a sense of humor. And after the election night, he tweeted on X, his social media platform, quote, data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now. Now, I don't know if he was referring to the fact that there was an anti-data center move and that he won't be able to build any. Or was he talking about going into space himself and living on a data center? I don't know. But the other thing he said that I thought was pretty funny was he said – Out in space, they can't vote against data centers.

25:20You know what? Elon, go for it. Yeah. As soon as the results were coming in, he said, quote, guess my election interfering space lasers didn't work this time. So that just shows you we've been talking all along about the two opposing forces of this midterm, the environmental, organic things like public opinion, the unpopularity of the incumbent, voters sour on the economy versus all the structural advantages that Republicans had. We thought gerrymandering was one. Oops, never mind. But the other one was money. They just had so much money. And we know that something like 93 percent of the candidates that spend more money over the last 20 years have won.

25:59Money usually is pretty dispositive, but it wasn't. And Musk is the poster child for the failure of big money to control an election. He spent that money without breaking a sweat. It was like change in the couch cushions for him. And I saw another comparison that he spent more in this election than George Soros has spent in his entire life and that he could continue to spend this much every single election without breaking a sweat for the rest of Elon Musk's life. My other fun fact of this election is that Rick Jackson in Georgia, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, lost, spent like$250 million of his own dollars.

26:38It turns out you can't buy a governor's seat either. Yeah. Ashley, what can't you let go of? OK. Also going to keep on the theme of elections. So this is technically my first. No, it is my first election. My first big election in the district living in Washington, D.C. But I did spend election week at night or whatever in in Texas. I was covering races there. And I got to say, it was really interesting to have conversations with people about D.C. elections versus basically the rest of the country. And then it came to me like, oh, what was on the ballot in D.C.? Oh, actually, the most consequential thing I voted on was a foie gras ban.

27:19It's so crazy to me. Like, that was really the thing of most consequence. OK. That was the mayor's race. We have to explain this. There was a ballot measure on the ballot in Washington, D.C. saying, should Washington, D.C. ban foie gras from restaurants? And foie gras is made from basically like overfeeding. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to, like, minimize that. Like, look, I'm a vegetarian, haven't eaten animals in like 20 years. Like that, you know, it is what it is. This is more about like this is the most consequential thing besides that mayor's race in D.C. And it was so funny to talk to people in Texas about that.

27:57They're like, does D.C. not have like problems? Well, the thing that's amazing is that it shows it shows that even the left can be completely toned down. And they were really. I mean, even the left, of course the left. But this was the election that supposedly put the left in a closet and said, please, let's focus on what people care about, not all these other weird issues like force-feeding geese. Anyways, very funny. It was like – because obviously this wasn't like national news or anything. So it was like very interesting to just have these conversations with people in like the rest of the country who had like very momentous sort of things to vote on.

28:35Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's no funding to enforce the foie gras ban either. Not yet. All right. I will go last because I'm the last one remaining. I'm sticking with the Elon Musk theme. He posted on X at 1.30 in the morning. Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory, Texas, around the middle of next year to make room for increased cyber cab production. I think that the ugliest vehicle in the history of vehicles, the rolling dumpster, is being phased out. The Cybertruck. I think the Cybertruck is going to be no more. Well, you know, those eyesores that were made, though, are still going to be on the road, unfortunately.

29:19So the cabs aren't going to look like a Cybertruck, I guess is what I'm talking about. I've seen them on the road, and they're like little golden Teslas. Okay. They're not like Cybertrucks. Yeah. I think I've seen those too, actually, as I think about it. You know, the Cybertruck was so ugly that all Cybertruck owners had to go out and get a wrap for their Cybertruck to try to make their Cybertruck look interesting. Oh, gosh. Lack of interesting was not the problem. I mean, just to make it not look like a... A fridge? Yeah, a fridge or a dumpster or like, choose your boxy, ugly, metallic machine.

29:58Yeah. Okay, that's all from us for today. A quick reminder, new episodes of our show come out every weekday afternoon, usually between 4 and 5 p.m. Eastern. If you want to hear them as soon as they come out, follow us in your podcast app of choice. On Apple, that means looking for the big plus sign on our show page. On Spotify and the NPR app, there's a big follow button to mash. Our executive producer is Mathani Maturi. Casey Murrell edits the podcast. Our producer is Bria Suggs. Special thanks to Dana Farrington and Ben Swayze. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.

30:34And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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