David Daley discusses his recent Nation article, “How the GOP Hopes to Gerrymander Its Way to a Midterms Victory,” given what Trump and Republicans are doing to carve out five new GOP-leaning districts in Texas and what democracy defenders could and should be doing now to prevent the further erosion of our democratic system and ensure the integrity of elections in both the short and long term.
Daley is the author of the national bestseller, “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections,” and Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count,” which helped spark the drive to reform gerrymandering. Daley’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Guardian.
DAVID DALEY: Thanks for having me on, Scott. I especially enjoy coming on after R.E.M.’s “End of the World as We Know It.” I’m not sure anyone feels so fine.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, the “fine” part is in quotes.
DAVID DALEY: I wonder if Michael Stipe wants to have a second shot at the end of that.
SCOTT HARRIS: I think that’s a great idea. I’ll try and get a message to him, but it would be appropriate for our moment. So you wrote in this recent Nation piece, and this kind of sums it up: “Republicans fearful of losing the House next November have embarked on an audacious and anti-democratic campaign to hold onto their narrow house majority by rigging the midterms in advance. Under the state-level initiative, the goal is for Republicans to recast already heavily gerrymandered congressional delegations so as to ensure even greater structural advantage that Democrats may not be able to counter.”
And I think the stakes are high. We’re going to be talking about that you’re warning that it’s not just Texas that’s got all the attention lately that Trump and Republicans are targeting for more gerrymandered seats, but states including Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Kentucky and New Hampshire, possibly. Tell us how many seats the GOP could gain with this unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering scheme.
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, we start with a House that is essentially 219 Republican, 216 Democratic. So three seats ought to be able to flip the House and usually the party that’s not in power at the midterm (elections) gains somewhere between 12 and 20. So Republicans are not satisfied with the three-seat edge they have. They’re looking to pick up about five in Texas. There will be two more coming from Ohio, one from Indiana and Missouri most likely. Ron DeSantis is talking about three south Florida districts in addition to one in Orlando, one in Tampa. Don’t know if he can get all five, but he might be able to.
And then there’s a handful of other states that have been quieter, but could also remap if they would like to and erase the Democratic seat off the board. Kansas has one. Tennessee has one, New Hampshire, Kentucky. So if you add all that up, you’re looking at somewhere between 12 and 15 seats that Republicans could grab. And the thing about that, of course, is every time you grab additional seats, you’re also shrinking the map because there were only 37 districts in the country that were competitive back in 2024. And by competitive I mean within 5 percent. So when you start knocking these competitive seats off the board, it means the Democrats have to really dominate the handful of seats that are left. It shrinks the eye of the needle that they have. An already difficult path becomes that much harder.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, David. Democrats in Texas say what’s going on in their state is racial gerrymandering where seats once held by Democrats and districts with many voters of color under this new scheme to gain five new seats for the Republicans will be gerrymandered out of existence by Texas Gov. Abbott and his legislature. And I’ve heard a statistic, I’m not sure whether this is true or not, but it’s worth throwing out there. I’ve heard that the people in Texas, 60 percent of the population in Texas are people of color and 75 percent of the seats are held by Republicans, not necessarily representing those communities. And I’ve also heard people, some of the legislators who have fled Texas to places like California, Massachusetts and Chicago to deny the Republicans in Texas a quorum in their legislature. Some of them have said, really what’s going on here is Texas creating an apartheid state where people of color will no longer have representation in the state or in the federal legislature. Just comment on the racial nature of what’s going on there, if you would.
DAVID DALEY: Sure. I think that that is certainly a consequence of what Texas Republicans are doing right now. My sense is that this is a pretty pure partisan, their number one goal is wiping Democratic districts off the map, most of the seats held by Democrats in Texas are indeed held by black Democrats, Latino Democrats. These are districts in South Texas or are districts that include Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth.
And what Democrats I think are rightfully worried about is that these districts that have historically been protected by the Voting Rights Act — and this is another conversation we can get into if you’re interested, that is an important part of this — but these districts are going to be sliced and diced in such a way that they no longer actually represent these communities at all. So right now, Houston’s Latino community as a member of Congress, when Republicans do this remapping really what they’re going to do, imagine that Houston becomes the center of a piece of pizza, a big pizza, and you are slicing it up into triangular slices. You’d have a little bit of Houston at the triangular tip of those pizza slices, just a little bit of blue there. But then it would be attached to sort of huge swaths of red going out into rural Republican central Texas.
And so these districts that right now are able to represent someone who actually is from that community would essentially be taken apart, spread across multiple districts and spread across multiple districts where they’re unable to actually win an election and would not exist in numbers that their new member of Congress would really have to pay attention to them at all.
SCOTT HARRIS: Since 2013, the Supreme Court — and this was the Shelby County versus Eric Holder case — the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been dismantling sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the extreme right-wing of the Supreme Court just accepted to hear a voting rights case from Louisiana about the legality of majority-minority congressional districts setting the stage for a further erosion of protections from voter suppression targeting voters of color. You mentioned the Louisiana case in your article. I wonder if you’d expand a little bit on what we know about this case and how it could impact further elimination of protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad we’re talking about this case. I’m glad we’re talking about the court and its role here in really putting the Voting Rights Act through the shredder over the course of the last dozen years dating back to Shelby County. Certainly, the Voting Rights Act is the most consequential piece of American civil rights legislation in our history. This is what makes us a multiracial democracy. The right has been targeting it ever since it was passed. The very first challenge to the Voting Rights Act comes the month after it was passed, South Carolina in September of 1965, saying we’ve fixed all of our problems here. Everything’s good. It took until 2013, it took until (Chief Justice) John Roberts in the Shelby County case ending pre-clearance for the arguments that South Carolina advanced in 1965 to become law. But that’s really what happened. John Roberts in 2013 embraced the arguments that South Carolina advanced 60 years earlier in trying to duck out from under the Voting Rights Act.
And Roberts and this court have over the last 15 years consistently, on voting and election cases, pushed the country further to the right. You can start with Citizens United in 2010, unleashing unlimited dark money from billionaires into our politics. You can jump to 2013 and the Shelby County case. In 2019, is Common Cause versus Rucho, which has special relevance today because this is the gerrymandering case. This is the partisan gerrymandering case from North Carolina in which John Roberts and this court at precisely the moment that federal judges around the country said, “We have the tools to reign in the worst gerrymanders by Democrats in Maryland, by Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina. We can fix this and also, if we don’t fix it, nobody else will because the politicians can’t and won’t.”
And John Roberts looked at this and said, “No” and he went a step further. He said, federal courts can’t be in the business of policing partisan gerrymanders. He closes the federal courts to all of these claims in the future. John Roberts is the father of this moment we are in right now, this chaos that has been unleashed from coast to coast. This all out mid-decade, redistricting war was essentially created by the chief justice who declined to embrace a federal national standard for a national problem knowing, I imagine, that this chaos would reverberate to the advantage of the Republican party and the people who put him on this court.
Now there is one more case coming up, the Callais case from Louisiana. This was a big windup, I’m sorry, but this case has the ability to really end what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts and the conservative supermajority have not left much. There is one remaining piece of Section 2 having to do with majority-minority districts across the South. They are going to rule on the constitutionality of those districts. If, as expected, they find a way to strike that down to say, as they did in Shelby County that things have changed, that these protections are not necessary anymore, It could wipe off the map black districts in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, maybe Georgia. It would give them additional ability to go back into Texas and to eliminate some of these seats. You could see an additional half-dozen seats erased in addition to the dozen that could come off the board right now. So this is really a five-alarm fire that people need to be paying attention to.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, I’m glad you explained it and given the historic context of this, we’re speaking with David Daley on Counterpoint this evening. David is a former editor-in-chief at salon.com and author of the two books, Anti-Democratic Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and Ratf**ked, Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. And we’re talking about one of David’s more recent articles about what’s going on in Texas. The Nation article is titled, “How the GOP Hopes to Gerrymander Its Way to Midterms Victory.” David, just from what you just said about the Supreme Court essentially ending all hearings of cases about partisan gerrymandering, if the Supreme Court further dismantles the Voting Rights Act under this Louisiana case, as you just explained, it appears that the U.S. could be entering a new Jim Crow era. Is that your understanding of what may happen?
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, I don’t think that’s overstatement at all. I mean, the question facing this country has always been whether a multiracial nation could become a multiracial democracy. And it was the reconstruction amendments after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act that sort of put us on the path toward multiracial democracy. But Dr. King talked about an arc of the moral universe bending towards justice, but there have always been hands that would pull the arc the other direction. And that push and pull, that advancement and backlash I think is really the true story of American history. I think a lot of people look at the course of the Voting Rights Act as in this country as one of steady expansion, right? You start with white men of property and slowly extend the franchise. So you could look at it as a narrative that is imperfect but steadily improving.
And what I would counter is that actually every step of that progress has been met by deep, white backlash. And certainly Jim Crow was the backlash to the Reconstruction amendments, 80 years of terror across the South. That was again, and I don’t think people fully understand sometimes our memories and the way that Reconstruction is taught is sometimes so poor that we forget that it’s the U.S. Supreme Court that essentially put an end to the Reconstruction dream. There’s a series of cases in the early 1870s, the Cruikshank case, the Civil Rights Act cases that essentially put an end to federal enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments across the South. And they said, “No, this is going to have to be enforced by state legislatures.” Which, as we all know, the state legislatures across the South had absolutely no interest in enforcing these amendments. And they did not.
They did not for 80 years until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It was terror if you were a black person who attempted to even register to vote across the South, and it was the U.S. Supreme Court that helped make that possible. It’s the Voting Rights Act that put an end to it. And now in these decisions again, it’s that same court under some of the exact same theories, really trying to snuff out what is left of the Voting Rights Act. If you look at what John Roberts is saying in these cases, if you look at Shelby County, he is really saying, “How much longer do we need to have this? It’s like things have changed. We can’t have special protections forever.” It is almost word for word what the justices in the court were saying back in the 1870s when they were saying the Civil War has been over for six or seven years now. Do we really still need these protections? Laughable then? Laughable now.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well, David, I wanted to ask you about what Democrats can do to counter this gerrymandering scheme in Texas and all these other states you talked about earlier. But before we get there, I wanted to ask you about, when we talk about the Supreme Court and they’re running in the other direction from reinforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, what possible legislative reforms are available to really bolster our electoral system and fairness and making good on the promise of a multiracial democracy? And I did want to mention back in 2022 there was an effort to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They were both defeated by a filibuster in the Senate in 2022. The filibuster is certainly hard to get through, but what in your mind, what reforms could actually prevent this degradation of our electoral system?
DAVID DALEY: Well, I think we should begin with reforms of the U.S. Supreme Court, the idea that in a representative democracy that any nine people have this sort of lifetime power to serve as a super legislature above us all. And Abraham Lincoln and his first inaugural says, if I paraphrase that, “If the people turn all of their power over to a U.S. Supreme Court, they have ceased to be a free people.” And I fear that that’s the moment that we are in. A larger court is an important place to start. A term-limited court. A court that actually has an ethics standard. A court that has radically less jurisdiction over various topics, I think would all be important places to begin.
I think if we want to end gerrymandering, the best way to do so is through a more proportional House. I think Jamie Raskin and Don Byer have the best proposal, something called the Fair Representation Act that would create multi-member districts that are then elected with rank choice voting. So you eliminate the power of district lines to choose winners and losers, and you actually have a proportional vote with seats awarded on the basis of votes within every district. Makes every district in the country a swing district that elects Democrats, Republicans, maybe even independents and third parties. Probably the best way to open up that system.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Well, I did want to get to the question a lot of people are asking now is that many Democrats feel they unilaterally disarmed when they put in place these nonpartisan citizen commissions to draw up congressional and state district maps every 10 years. But you’re not very optimistic that Democrats can fight back given the promise from Gov. Newsom in California to redistrict and “fight fire with fire.” You talk about states like New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and Oregon. Many of them are talking about fighting back against this Republican mid-decade gerrymandering attempt. But tell us what is possible and the reason you are pessimistic that they can succeed in matching the Republican gerrymandered scheme seat by seat.
DAVID DALEY: It’s a basic question of mass. It’s just opportunities and targets. Republicans have a lot more opportunity, a lot more targets, and it would be easier for them to take those seats. I mean, I’d push back a little bit on the idea that Democrats unilaterally disarmed. I think that the California Commission worked out pretty good for Democrats. They’ve got a 43 to 9 advantage there off that commission map. I mean, Arizona went first in drawing these lines. The commission in Michigan broke a two-decade Republican gerrymander there. So these commissions have been good for Democrats in many places as well.
What happened to Democrats is that they fell asleep on the importance of redistricting back in the 2010 election and you can trace much of the position that they’re in now to that because gerrymandering is so powerful that once you have taken over these state legislatures that draw these lines, it’s really hard to kick you out of office.
So Republicans controlled, I think the number is 19 states and 177 seats for Congress in 2021. And then they later added the North Carolina delegation onto that. So an additional 14 seats. So Republicans got to draw 191. Democrats got to draw something like 49 seats in seven states. So they just lacked the opportunity where Democrats had the opportunity, they certainly used it. They drew a 14-3 map in Illinois, 7-1 in Maryland. They took additional seats in Nevada in New Mexico and Oregon. But now as you look at the map, they could probably squeeze five more out of California if they are successful in convincing the legislature and then the people to go along with suspending that in the constitutional language of the commission. None of which I think is automatic, but then they just don’t have anywhere else to go.
Oregon, the governor, there today said she’s not going to do a mid-decade redistrict. Maryland. The state court has already stopped Democrats from drawing an 8-0 map. Illinois. That 14-3 map pretty gerrymandered. I think it would be tricky to get an extra seat. How does that map? I’m not even sure it’s worth trying. It would probably backfire. So that leaves you with New York where the Democrats, again are talking tough, but they can’t change the constitutional language there until 2028. So they’re out of opportunities and targets. They’re talking about fighting fire with fire, but they’re holding a birthday candle.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Wow. Well, on that sour note, I will ask you one last quick question because I only got a minute left. But in your view with this effort, a gerrymandering by the Republicans and the Democrats unlikely to match them seat for seat with the gerrymandering scheme, what’s at stake for democracy in this election in 2026 in your view?
DAVID DALEY: I think Democrats have control of the House. They are able to be a brake on this sort of rush towards authoritarianism that we have seen. I don’t necessarily have the most faith in the Democratic party or their ability to stop authoritarianism, but I do believe that if they are successful in taking back this chamber, you are able to at least be a blockade on some the worst things. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has moved a lot of the power that Congress has to spend money and the like over to the executive branch.
But let’s keep in mind, because I’m sure Donald Trump has kept this in mind. The power to impeach begins in the House and we all know what the Senate looks like. But I think as Donald Trump attempts to push all of these states to do mid-decade redistricting to keep himself in power, he is very aware of the subpoena power, the investigatory power of Congress and ultimately the power to launch a third impeachment.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, David, I want to thank you so much for joining us and explaining a lot of these very important and complex issues, and I hope we can call upon you again as things progress in this kind of morass of fights going on across state borders with these gerrymandering schemes. Is there a website you want to direct our listeners to that would be useful on following these issues?
DAVID DALEY: These issues? You can always track us at Fair Vote, fairvote.org and you can find “Anti-Democratic” and “Ratf**fed”. I think we all know what it means, but we will keep your license for your evening. You can find those at your local bookstore or wherever it is you buy books online.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right, David, thanks so much.
DAVID DALEY: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
