You voted. Does it matter?

0:00Astead Herndon:News flash, you can't think about this year's midterm elections or the coming presidential election without thinking about the maps. I know things like gerrymandering can be boring and political gamesmanship can be confusing. But understanding the maps and who gets political power in our country is vitally important to understanding the health of our democratic system. So who actually has power in our democracy and who has power in name only? Let's dig in.

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1:44Astead Herndon:So here's one thing I never understood about the 2024 election. Why did Democrats spend so much time saying they were going to protect democracy? Now, I get it. Donald Trump has tested every single limit of our political system. And of course, the health of our democracy is an important goal. But to say you're going to protect democracy implies that democracy was working in the first place, or at least that it was working until Donald Trump came along. And that isn't true. American democracy is broken. And most of us are written out of the political process on purpose. It's a big reason why Congress passes less legislation than ever.

2:23Astead Herndon:Why the Senate rarely seems to reflect public opinion. Or why presidential elections obsess over the same seven states. Let me explain. I'm going to show three charts in three minutes that help you understand why American democracy needs to be improved, not just protected. And why one person, one vote is more myth than reality. For those listening, I'm going to bring up a couple charts that show the structural health of our democracy or lack thereof. The first is about the Electoral College. Now, everybody knows that the Electoral College is a little messed up. We don't choose the president via direct popular vote.

3:00Astead Herndon:We choose it through this funky system made hundreds of years ago. But did you know that it's not just that the Electoral College causes us to focus on six or seven states for battleground presidential results? It also means that the electoral votes themselves aren't distributed equally. Let's look at the relative voting power by state in the 2024 election. The least populous states, places like Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, all of that has the highest relative voting power, if you think about the population of those states, to their electoral votes. The smallest relative voting power belongs to populous states that don't get as many electoral votes, places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York.

3:45Astead Herndon:The second chart I'm going to show is about the Senate, because I think it takes the last problem and makes it a little more clear. Because the Senate has two senators for every state, it is equally distributed in terms of representation. Right? Wrong. The Senate actually shows how least populous states have more power and the racial and demographic impacts of that distribution. Take a look at this chart that The Washington Post made in 2023. It showed that one person in Wyoming had similar influence in the Senate to 68 people in California, 50 people in Texas, and 37 people in Florida. And it's not just that the numbers don't add up.

4:25Astead Herndon:It's that the type of people changes also. Those 68 people in California who add up to one person in Wyoming, those are three black people, dozens of Hispanic folks, a dozen of Asian folks. That's also true in places like Texas and Florida, which have higher representations of non-whites. Because of the way the Senate's made up, those voices are almost intentionally suppressed. The third chart, which might be the most important, is about how fewer competitive House districts there are overall. In the 2026 cycle, there's only about 30 or so competitive House districts, which is a drastic decrease from 20, 30 years ago.

5:06Astead Herndon:Check out this chart from G. Elliott Morris. In 1976, there were more than 90 competitive House districts. And as recently as 2000, the number hovered around 60-65. That has been cut almost in half by this midterm cycle, and it could get even lower as Republicans go further and further in terms of drawing red districts. Gerrymandering isn't really about the maps. It's about power. Who gets it? Whose voice matters in our democracy? And who's written out of the process? And in the midterms here, especially the maps itself could be more important in terms of determining the November result than the individual candidates themselves.

5:46Astead Herndon:So all of this is important context when we think about the redistricting wars currently playing out in this election cycle, because while Donald Trump's push to get Republicans to do midyear redistricting was unprecedented, it's only possible because the ways both parties have been comfortable with less competitive districts over time. as it suited their partisan goals. And the Supreme Court's recent decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act only makes this stuff more important and adds another wrinkle into an ever-developing story. Amy Walter is here to break all of this down for me. Amy is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report and a PBS political analyst that tracks all this stuff.

6:28Astead Herndon:Amy, thank you for joining us. I appreciate your time. Of course, Ested. Happy to be here with you. I want us to dig into redistricting gerrymandering, all the stuff that makes people's eyes usually glaze over. But I want to start with what we already know. Donald Trump kicked off his redistricting fight by asking Texas Republicans to redraw maps in favor of the GOP, and they complied. Democrats responded by drawing their own set in California. There was a referendum in Virginia to do a similar thing, which passed the public vote, but has since been overturned by the courts. It can be confusing to know with all that's up in the air who's exactly up or down in this redistricting war.

7:06Astead Herndon:Amy, I was hoping you can help us with that. Does one side currently have the advantage? I will try to put this in terms. You went through that so smartly and so quickly, Ested, that I jumped over a lot of stuff. But you got to the to the core of it. And I think that's what I will try to do as well. I think before those two seminal cases, the Virginia Supreme Court case, which you mentioned, that threw out the Virginia map that had passed through a referendum, and the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Kelly, which basically ended out the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, neither side looked like they were going to have an advantage in the redistricting wars.

7:51The back and forth basically was going to turn into a draw. But those two decisions have given Republicans something like, let's give them a four, five, six-seat advantage when all is said and done on the number of seats that they drew in their favor. Now, as you, I think we're going, your next point, you're going to say, okay, but like, how does that actually work? Like, are they definitely going to gain all of these seats? How is that going to work? And so a lot of that is dependent on assuming that Republicans win in all the districts that they redrew. In other words, we talk about Texas, and the number that comes up is five.

8:38Republicans drew five Republican-leaning districts. But there's no guarantee they're going to win all five of those. It's probably as likely that they win just three of those instead of five of those. Florida's the same way. In large part, some of those redrawn districts are in areas that have significant Latino population, which, as we know, moved dramatically in Trump's favor in 2024 from where they voted in 2020. And so if those voters kind of snap back to a 2020 type of scenario where they are voting more Democratic, then those districts will not be as favorable to Republicans.

9:24Astead Herndon:I mean, you're bringing up an important point that the gerrymandering is based on assumption. And that assumption is the last big data point that these elected officials have gotten the previous election. Correct. And this is why what's happening right now is so different is that usually you're drawing these every 10 years with the theory of the case being you want these to last for 10 years, right? Like you're trying to build something that will be able to withstand what you know will be the shifts of - Changes, yeah. Yeah, like all kinds of changes. Who turns out in one election is going to look different from who turns out in another election.

10:04What's going to happen if it's a great year for our party? What is it going to look like if it's a terrible year? Oh, my gosh, a lot of people are moving into our state. Oh, a lot of people are leaving our state. How do we think that's going to impact this? All of those are taken into consideration. This round of redistricting is literally about the immediate. How can I immediately get these seats to perform the way I want them to in this election? And Virginia did a form of that. Now, that map, as you said, has been thrown out, but they drew a lot of districts in order to get 10 Democratic and just one Republican in that state.

10:43They drew a lot of districts that in a better year for Republicans, Democrats might not be able to hold on to those.

10:50Astead Herndon:So I guess my question is, like, we know that it's gotten focused on short term benefit for both parties. We know that Republicans, particularly because of these recent court decisions, are getting a slight advantage probably heading into these midterms. But what have we learned about how far Trump is willing to go to break or kind of push these boundaries? And what have we learned about the GOP's willingness to follow him? Yeah, I think we have a number of examples. Indiana was obviously another place where Republican legislators said, we don't really want to do this right now. But there are other states that quietly shelved redistricting.

11:31Kansas is one that could have redrawn those lines. New Hampshire, again, Republican-controlled. Nebraska, another Republican-controlled state that could have redrawn their lines. So not every state went along. When I first started covering politics instead and started covering redistricting, it was a really parochial exercise. and every state had its own quirks. Like New Jersey, for example, it used to just be known that New Jersey Republicans and Democrats would get together and all agree, right? Like we like this member, let's keep this seat or this person has a powerful post on Ways and Means Committee or something, brings a lot of money to New Jersey.

12:15Whatever it was, we're going to keep these seats. We're going to make these districts a little bit tougher. Usually it was just to protect, it was like an incumbent protection plan. Yeah. Now this has become all completely nationalized and has turned the process from one in which the goal was to basically, yes, maximize the number of districts your party could win, but really to maximize the influence that you, your delegation, could have in Washington. And that's obviously no longer the case.

12:54Astead Herndon:I want to ask about the Supreme Court decision in the Louisiana v. Calais case, which you mentioned earlier. It chipped away at Voting Rights Act protections and federal law and basically gave a green light to some of these GOP redistricting efforts. When we think about the short-term question of November, how much do you see this decision affecting the question of control of Congress? Well, I guess, so let's put it into two categories. One is how many seats actually shift from Democratic held to Republican held. And if we assume that the maps that passed in Tennessee and Alabama, they pass legal muster.

13:32We're still waiting on Alabama. That basically took three black majority districts, two of which were represented by black members of Congress and made them safely Republican.

13:45Astead Herndon:Okay. Three gone, right? So three gone. But you also wonder, to the point of its impact on the sort of environment in November, we already know that Democrats are much more interested and engaged when it comes to voting. They're more fired up. They're more frustrated. And it's just one more way in which Democrats may have something else to fire up their voters. And honestly, this is what some Republicans will say they are worried about, which is, you know, maybe you get three seats, but you've also put a hornet's nest. And it could engage voters to come and turn out who really hadn't felt that interested in voting before this decision.

14:34Astead Herndon:Just a long-term question, though. How real is the threat to Black representation because of this decision? Yeah, this to me becomes the other really interesting question as we go forward, which is how far will Democrats be willing to go to expand their advantage in states where they have majority black or majority Hispanic seats? Yeah. But if you break up those seats, well. Yeah, I want to slow this down because it does feel like an important conundrum that might be in our future. There is the reality of the threat that the Calais decision poses to majority black districts and black representatives, particularly in the South.

15:22Astead Herndon:But in the Democrats' desire to respond to Republican redistricting efforts, the clearest way for them to do so might be breaking up their own black or Hispanic districts to disperse those to make, I guess, lighter blue districts in their cities. Like the incentives could be such that both sides agree that kind of black representation or minority representation is not the priority for them. Right. That they what's the priority is the priority. We need to have as many seats as possible for our party and our party will put the interests of those people first. Yeah. Or is it we need to have more of those.

16:03Astead Herndon:Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of messy. It's real messy. And New Jersey is a really great place to sort of zero in on because you do. You have a majority Black district there. You have a majority Hispanic district there that if you did chop it up and spread it out, could really help Democrats.

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18:48Astead Herndon:I want to think about another question to go back to our kind of original point, which was specific to protecting versus improving democracy. I'm someone who thought that the Democrats really erred in 2024 by talking about the protection of democracy rather than kind of acknowledging some of the shortcomings with our political system and vowing to improve it. I want to kind of put you in that hot seat. If you could pass a law or wave a magic wand that you think would make our democracy more fair, what would it be? Yeah. I don't know that it would make it more fair. I do think at its core, one of the biggest challenges we have is the primary process, right?

19:31Which was designed more than 100 years ago to deal with another political problem we had, which was the sort of back room, smoke-filled room way in which— In the corrupt way, let's be clear, the corrupt way that literally you had people basically picked by a handful of folks, including business interests and et cetera, picking who the nominee would be. And the idea of opening up to the people was that, to your point about protecting versus preserving democracy. Boy, that was a really great way to protect and preserve democracy, right? Making it one that took it out of the hands of the few and put it in the hands of many.

20:19But now the primary process has become as corrupted as it was back then. The amount of money that is coming into these primaries by outside groups, many of whom are attached either to an issue or a corporate interest, is skyrocketing. The people who show up and vote in primaries ideologically are very far left or right. And so that leaves us now in a primary system that is absolutely fundamentally broken. And most of those, if we're going to go back to where we started this conversation instead, with the fact that most people who get elected to Congress are going to be elected in seats that are pretty safely red or safely blue.

21:04Astead Herndon:Yep, yep. The primaries matter more than anything. So how can we reform that is one way I've always thought is having a national primary day. Every voter is allowed to vote in that primary. You don't have to be Democrat or Republican. It's an open ballot, right? Like you pick, all the candidates are on the same ballot. And everybody knows to show up that day, whatever we're going to call it, June 2nd, every year, the first Tuesday in June. I'm not going to say it's going to solve it, but it at least addresses one of the major problems. It also addresses the like kind of constant election cycle that we are increasingly in.

21:42Astead Herndon:between primaries and runoffs. I feel for voters in competitive places who are now kind of like consistently bombarded with an overload of information. A national primary today would fix a lot of that. I'm team, you know, national gerrymandering before. Honestly, I'm team all of the above. You can convince me for a constitutional convention to write the whole thing over. But I think at the basic level, doing something that does give us more of a direct democracy feel, as I think something folks crave. I hear about that. I hear about term limits. I hear about Supreme Court term limits increasingly more.

22:22Astead Herndon:And it just feels like one of those things that comes up from the bottom that you rarely hear from the elected official name. Although, I will say one of the challenges we have in California is a great example of this. I mean, they've done almost everything you could possibly do if you think about academically. how would we solve these problems, right? They have an open primary system. They have a top two. It's very easy to register to vote. They have mail-in voting. They have had so many different reforms. They have ballot initiatives. It doesn't mean that the state is governed better. It doesn't mean that people feel as if, like, wow, government, I'm so glad I'm a part of this.

23:04Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope we got to talk to a Californian

23:06Astead Herndon:who just feels heard. Right. OK, so a gajillion dollars is going to go into this referendum that I'm going to vote on. So I guess I have some power, but like to do what? Yeah. You can create all the reforms you want. But if people feel like the system is broken, they're not going to participate. I guess I want to ask them, what is there like a hopeful democracy spot of joy? Boy, I mean, here in New York, I think ranked choice voting certainly, like, I feel like got some good reviews, has invigorated folks into the process. I think in the mayor's race, you saw different levels of cooperation or things you wouldn't have seen before.

23:48Astead Herndon:Like, to take the California thought, like, if the reforms don't lead to greater participation, like, what overcomes the malaise? I know. Well, one thing would be, like, government actually working. And so that is, but here's where the problem comes. The incentive structure has to change. Right now, if you are a member of Congress who actually just, like, keeps your head down and gets stuff done and, you know, you're not in the spotlight negatively, you're not going to get rewarded for that. Yeah, I'm like, you start the clock. You won't be there long. You do a good job. Like in your real job, like in real jobs, people who do a good job, who show up, who put in the effort like, oh, you can get a raise or you're getting a promotion.

24:36In Washington, that is getting you zero. And so as long as the incentive structure benefits those who make the most noise, do the most damage, refuse to do any sort of compromising, well, there's not much that any sort of reform is going to be able to change. And the people that change the incentive structure are, well, they're us. And this is the circular conversation, right? If you don't like those people, then stop voting for them.