← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Steinman Jr. At the Bulwark. I'm joined by Sarah Longwell, our publisher. We are here to talk about the news, shock news this morning that the Supreme Court of Virginia has struck down the redistricting law that was passed by voters in Virginia just a short while ago. The practical implications in Virginia is that a potential gain of four House seats for Democrats has now been reversed. They're going back to those maps that existed prior to the redraw. Democrats could still net two seats because of circumstances, but they ain't getting the four seats, likely not going to get the two seats. It's going to take a pretty strong election year. And you got to consider it, Sarah, with all the other things happening currently in the south where Republicans are redrawing about four states to eliminate VRA districts and you are looking at a very bad news cycle for House Democrats. But how bad is it?
- [00:55]
B
I don't think it's so bad that Democrats aren't still favored to take back the House. I mean, I just think that the overall environment is such that Democrats are still likely to pick up enough seats to win. It's just more like they got to really run the table now. Like it's not, there's not a lot of room for error. And you know, in it is really deflating for Democrats who, I think, you know, Virginia was just a place where Democrats really figured out how to stand up to Trump kicking off this redistricting fight right in Texas. And Trump has been from the start this, this redistricting has been about the fact that they know they're likely going to lose Congress. Trump doesn't want the oversight that comes from a Democratic Congress. He wants to do anything he can to avoid that. So they did mid cycle redistricting, which is very unusual in Texas, which off a sort of a chain reaction. So then California passed a referendum saying that they were going to redistrict to pick up a couple more Democratic seats. And for a long time it looked like the whole thing, when all was said and done was basically going to leave us with much stupider maps overall, like much more gerrymandered across a whole bunch of different states and then was going to be about a wash when it came to maybe even a little bit of a Dem pickup. If you were able to get Virginia where they were and you didn't have all of these new states in the south, like rushing, because they are, I mean, in, in, in Louisiana, they literally stopped the primary. Governor Landry stopped the primary. So that they could redistrict and then reallocate the maps going into that election. And so it is extremely bad that this. And these are all court decisions. Right. The reason that this. In Virginia, what happened is they basically said that it was unconstitutional on procedural grounds. They're saying that Democrats, when they did this, it's. I don't know if you want me to run through the. All the specifics.
- [02:55]
A
I can go through it. I study. Go ahead.
- [02:57]
B
Well, you do it.
- [02:58]
A
So the democratic process in Virginia required the General assembly to vote on a constitutional amendment in two occasions. One was prior to an election and one was after an election. And what happened was, is that they voted prior to the election to have this redistricting referendum, but they started that voting after early voting had started for the cycle. So they started the early voting in September. They had this general assembly vote in October. The election for governors and the state legislature was in November. And then they voted again on the popular referendum a couple weeks ago. What the court said was, no, no, no, you can't have that first vote for this constitutional amendment after early voting in the election had started. So procedurally, this was done in without compliance to the state constitution. Ergo, the whole thing is null and void. And we have to go back to those original maps. Did I do a good job?
- [03:57]
B
You did a great job. That's exactly right. I think we should just both stipulate, as I have to do on my podcast, the illegal news all the time. Neither of us are lawyers.
- [04:05]
A
Married to one.
- [04:06]
B
Yeah. Does she have a quick opinion on. On whether or not the Supreme Court in Virginia, which is a majority Republican court or Republican appointed court, whether or not this was a. A fair decision or a not fair decision, Because I just. I don't feel like I'm in a. In a position to evaluate that at the moment.
- [04:25]
A
I haven't texted her, but she's not also an election lawyer, so I wouldn't really trust her judgment.
- [04:30]
B
Anyway, I don't know if you have an opinion on the quality of the decision. I just know from a political standpoint. Yeah. Not only is it deflating from one of the biggest stands that Democrats took, because we have to understand, $64 million was spent by Democrats to flip these seats. Like, they poured a ton of resources into it. And Abigail Spanberger basically used all of her political capital from her big win in Virginia to sort of gut this thing out and push it through. And they let people vote was a referendum on the ballot. And so people voted on this, and it passed narrowly. But and not by any, not the same margin that Abigail Spamberger won the state. But it did pass. They got it through. I don't think they saw this coming. Like, it's clear that they did not think there was going to be a legal challenge. And so I think Democrats were really caught off guard when suddenly there was a legal challenge only to have their big victory overturned.
- [05:31]
A
Yeah, I would just clarify on that. They probably anticipated a legal challenge, but I think they were caught off guard because the state Supreme Court did not intervene prior to the voting. Right. So they, you know, they, the state Supreme Court in theory could have said, no, we're going to stay the vote because this is. Has some legal, legal ambiguity and you shouldn't go forward. And once they didn't do that, there was the presumption that, well, if they were comfortable with the vote, they would be comfortable with the results. The actual, the, the Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court did address this in their decision not to get too into the weeds. They basically said, we are prohibited from addressing the legality of the vote itself until after the referendum took place. So therefore, they did not weigh in in advance. But it did legitimately did catch some Democrats off guard, even though there was an anticipation that eventually the state Supreme Court was going to have to weigh on it.
- [06:21]
B
I don't want to sound defeatist on it, but it is, it is a huge setback for Democrats. And in this redistricting battle you just now do have, and this is sort of the big takeaway, you now have a lopsided where the Republican states down south, like Louisiana and some of these other states, Tennessee, are drawing out the Democratic districts as we speak for the 2026 cycle. And the big get of Virginia is off the table for the 20. Now what happens?
- [06:50]
A
Again, we're not lawyers here, so who knows? But those states in the south are getting legal challenges to what they are doing. But the expectation is that, well, first of all, state courts aren't going to intervene, but that the Supreme Court won't intervene either. Question is, how narrow was the ruling basically gutting the vra? And would Tennessee's new map, for instance, which just decimates Memphis, would that fall out of compliance with the very narrow Section 2 of the VRA? I'm not a lawyer. I have no clue. But the popular opinion is that the Supreme Court will not intervene. They'll allow these things to go through, and you're going to have something akin to like a plus 9, plus 10 Republican gain when all the redistricting is done.
- [07:31]
B
Wow, that's actually bigger than I thought. Plus nine, plus ten.
- [07:34]
A
What did you think?
- [07:35]
B
I think it was more like plus four.
- [07:37]
A
No, maybe that's optimistic. I know Amy Walters has been talking about it and she looks at the atmospherics and the trends and she thinks a lot of these districts that for instance in Texas. Right. Like she thinks some of those districts are not going to flip Republican.
- [07:50]
B
Right. And that I would say that's been my takeaway too. Right. Is that that in their intention of gerrymandering. Right. Because this all comes down to what is the environment like. And even though they've redistricted these places, they haven't necessarily been able to redistrict all of them to such a degree that they are still unwinnable, many of them are still winnable. And so if the environment is favorable enough to Democrats, if they are mad at Trump, enough about if, you know, Republican enthusiasm is super depressed because of prices, because of gas prices, because of the war in Iran, because they haven't released the Epstein files, because Trump's focused on the ballroom like he's at 30, you know, 5%. Like that is an enormous advantage for Democrats. And so the question is then with Republicans rush to do this gerrymandering and it is a Plus 9 pickup if you assume 2024 outcomes. What is it though with 2026 in that environment? And so.
- [08:47]
A
Right.
- [08:47]
B
I think maybe it's somewhere between 4 and 9. I don't think, I don't know that. I think they get a full nine or ten, but maybe they do. Right.
- [08:54]
A
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- [10:12]
B
No, I still don't think it's too much. I'm going to break it down. Republicans and Democrats. So Republicans were maybe going to pick up between seven and 14 seats. Okay. Depending on how the election shakes out in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, Florida and Tennessee. All right, that was theirs for Dems. It was anywhere between four and nine pickups in California and Utah, which are the two that I think still stand.
- [10:39]
A
Although I will just caveat that the Utah Republicans are trying their best to reverse engineer this.
- [10:44]
B
That's right.
- [10:44]
A
And may be successful. We just don't know.
- [10:46]
B
We don't know. But it was really the Utah and then Virginia would have added another four seats right to the Dem map, pushing that number between 8 and 13. So this is what I mean where it was somewhere, it was originally kind of somewhere between 7 and 14 for Republicans and 8 and 13 for Democrats. You were going to end up in kind of a, in kind of a wash territory. But now you've got seats outstanding that we don't know about in Mississippi where they called a special session. Right. To try to redraw it in South Carolina where their proposed new seats already passed the state House. Alabama where the governor called a special session. And then Louisiana where the Supreme Court overruled their map. So now without the four seats from, from Virginia you end up with only the 4 to 9 for Dems, but you've still got the 7 to 14 for Republicans plus whatever they pick up from these new states. And so that puts, that's, that's the differential. But now, now the question is, is like can you go to New York and, and squeeze more seats out of New York which is probably.
- [11:51]
A
That's a 2028.
- [11:52]
B
So yeah, that's not for this cycle.
- [11:54]
A
Yeah, it, let's talk quickly about 2026 and then we'll go to 2028. So like if you look at the sort of prognosticators and the statisticians out there, like the Laksha Janes, you know, they're still saying their maps are, and I'm just looking at on Twitter right now, they still think Dems are in position to get something like 225 seats. They think you know, it's a 75, 25 proposition that they win the House. And this is after this morning's news. I think that's because there's a bunch of Republicans who are in Trump plus six, plus eight districts who could be knocked off.
- [12:28]
B
That's right.
- [12:29]
A
And then it becomes a question of, okay, well, if Democrats can just eke out a majority, I mean, frankly, if you're being honest about it, that's all they need. They just need a majority. It doesn't really matter the margins for now. It becomes a lot difficult to sustain that majority, though, in 2028 when you're not in a climate like 2026. And so the path for Democrats here is eke out a majority in 2026 and then, frankly, for being honest about it, go to the mats on certain states with redistricting between then and 2028. Virginia could and probably will go again because they just have to sequence it correctly.
- [13:05]
B
So the states that Democrats have to work with is New York going into 2028, Colorado, Minnesota and Oregon. But like, just think about this. This that means that we are in this hot war of gerrymandering for the next three years where everybody's going to redraw their maps, maps into absolute, like spaghetti line oblivion with everybody doing sort of maximalist constitutional hardball to try to eke out as many seats as possible
- [13:34]
A
in terms of sort of Democratic ID at this moment. Obviously a lot of anxiety and depression over what happened this morning. People who are looking to saying, how is this possibly fair that we vote for something, it passes and state supreme court says no, meanwhile, there's no votes happening in Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. It's just gerrymandered state houses taking these acts and they get carte blanche to do it. I get the frustration, even though I know it's more nuanced than that. But, you know, how. How should they interpret this? And what's the. Maybe the better question is how should Democratic leaders channel how they feel?
- [14:09]
B
I mean, look, I've seen already online a couple people say, like, well, we need to get into sort of if a version of if you can't do this the legislative way, if the will of people is subverted, then, you know, we've got to go to different means, essentially, meaning violent, revolutionary means. And I'm against that. I'm against that. Here's the thing. Obviously, I'm against that because I appreciate
- [14:33]
A
you saying it, though. Thank you.
- [14:34]
B
Yeah, there is a. Yeah, there is. The fact is the election in November is coming up and so you do have a voting opportunity to win this. Like the response from Democrats should be to make people as angry as possible that Virginia was struck down and to say the only way we do we fix this is with overwhelming force in the election. Overwhelming voting force in the election. Like Democrats are going to have to turn out at just incredible levels. And so now it comes from, comes to a place of this is how I interpret it. They hoped by playing constitutional hardball back, standing up and fighting. Right. Which I think voters in the Democratic Party desperately wanted right now and really appreciated that didn't work. So there's no other option but to vote in overwhelming numbers. And so the Democratic Party is going to have to help voters understand you can't just, you can't just rely on the environment now. You have to have an enormous organizing effort, an enormous turnout effort, an enormous paid advertising. Anything you can do to help people understand the war that's been waged against voters in order to get Donald Trump his extra seats.
- [15:51]
A
Yeah, well it would have helped if they had $64 million that they spent on Virginia to spend that.
- [15:56]
B
I know this is what one of the reasons people are so frustrated and that the reason it is so deflating. They fought hard for this and they did it the right way by trying to persuade the public. And so it is deeply. I understand, I understand. Not only do I understand people's frustration, I feel the same frustration. You don't want to see Trump basically prevail. Like, like what was what the, the way that we were feeling before is like Trump kicked off this insane mid cycle redistricting. Democrats met that force with force and they wasn't going to get away with it. Right. He wasn't going to succeed in and tipping the scales. And now Republicans do have a much bigger structural advantage than they did 24 hours ago and, or, and a week ago.
- [16:38]
A
Yeah, and it could get worse depending on what these other states do. Just a shameless plug. The other component here is longer term, which is what you know, now that the south is basically all but a handful of districts for Republicans, like what do Democrats possibly do just from a sort of party apparatus and a candidate to candidate apparatus to actually win in those locations? Is it even possible? Lauren Egan is tackling that question in her Sunday newsletter. The opposition like what would a Democrat, a successful Democratic candidate look like in this post VRA world in the South? I don't know what the answers are. I'm eager to see what she gets in her reporting. But you guys can sign up for that by subscribing to the Bulwark. Her newsletter comes out on Sunday. And then, of course, subscribe to our YouTube page, which you're watching right now, probably. It's great content just like this. Sarah, thanks for doing this. I know. But you and I got a live show coming up in a couple weeks.
- [17:31]
B
Going to San Diego.
- [17:32]
A
We're going May 20th in San Diego, May 21st in LA. For folks who want to see this act on the road in California, a state that did do redistricting and that which has stood up so far, buy tickets@the bullwork.com events and hopefully we'll see you there. Take care.