The Daily Blast: Trump Blurts Out Vile Plot to Rig Midterms as Crushing New Poll Hits

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

“After the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a new redistricting that gave Democrats' additional”

house seats, Donald Trump celebrated the outcome. In so doing, however, he accidentally revealed that he and Republicans expressly reserve the right for themselves to play by their own rules and regulations in their own favor unilaterally. In truth, the only chance Trump and Republicans have of salvaging the midterms is extreme

cheating, as a remarkable new poll shows. But what are friends of democracy supposed to do in a world where one party is openly rigging the game and the other isn't? Where are these jerrymandering wars really headed?

We're talking this over with Ari Burman of Mother Jones, the great reporter on Boating

Rights. Ari, good to have you on. Hey, Greg, great to talk to you, thank you.

“So in Virginia Democrats had succeeded in passing a redistricting referendum that added”

an additional four congressional seats to the Democratic column. The state Supreme Court struck that down. But instead of talking about the ruling, which is unfortunate, let's look forward, Ari. Democrats will probably still win one or two of those four seats in Virginia. Meanwhile, Republicans are redistricting in several southern states where they might get

it, I don't know, five seats, extra.

Ari, what's the overall math right now?

Can you just boil it down in really simple terms? Well, I would say Republicans are probably going to net about five seats from redistricting at the end of the day, possibly more maybe less, but they're ahead right now in the jerrymandering arms race because of what the state Supreme Court and Virginia did and because of what the U.S. Supreme Court did last week.

What looked like a wash is going to be a small Republican advantage. Five seats, that's unfair, it shouldn't have happened, but that's surmountable for Democrats, right? Yeah, I mean, in a way, the election is definitely surmountable. It just gives them less margin for error in terms of the map.

I mean, they are going to lose one or two seats in Virginia. The map is going to be more difficult for them in Florida because of the new jerrymandering or not insurmountable, but more difficult. And then in some of these southern states, these districts that they've had for decades in certain places like Tennessee, for example, or they broke up Memphis.

These are no longer going to exist, so they're going to have to put Republicans on defense in some new places, and they're going to have to expand the map. Let's talk about what Donald Trump tweeted about the Virginia ruling. He said this quote, "Huge win for the Republican Party and America and Virginia. The Virginia Supreme Court has just struck down the Democrats' horrible jerrymandering

make America great again," close quote. Harry Donald Trump has literally commended numerous Republican states to jerrymander to the maximum extent possible. He's sponsored many primary challengers to Republicans who refuse to go along with that. And here he is celebrating the fact that Republicans get to jerrymander and Democrats don't.

His explicit position is that elections should be rigged in the GOP's favor. You're thoughts on that? I mean, Trump was just celebrating all this week, the fact that he ousted all of these Republicans in Indiana who were opposed to jerrymandering. So it's very clear that under Trump, the Republicans are an openly pro-jerrymandering

party. He's been pushing maximum jerrymandering everywhere and really unprecedented ways.

“And I think with the Virginia Supreme Court ruling showed, and why it made people so angry,”

it feels like there's two sets of rules. It feels like Republicans are passing all of these jerrymandered maps that A are not approved by voters and B are then upheld in court and Democrats introduce a map that is approved by voters and then is struck down in court. So it's a total double standard, Democrats already have to face a higher bar in places like

Virginia and California because voters have to approve their maps. And then even when they're approved in the cases of Virginia, you have courts retroactively throwing out millions of votes in a way that they have not done so far in places like Texas. I want to underscore the double standard here, a little further, Democrats in numerous states now have gone to the voters and put the referendum before them on whether they want

to redraw maps in the middle of the decade. That is a hard thing to do, but they respect the voters enough to go ahead and do that. There you really have this incredibly glaring difference that I don't see how we can continue

No, I mean, you can't make any kind of false equivalents here in Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis openly said that Florida's prohibition on partisan and racial jerrymandering was unconstitutional.

He basically is now daring the courts to strike down what is enshrined in Florida's constitution.

That is far more blatantly unconstitutional than whatever minor tactical errors may have occurred in Virginia and there's obviously debate about whether there were even any tactical errors that occurred in Virginia. You take the fact that Louisiana just suspended an election all together, 42,000 people had already voted and they suspended the elections so they can eliminate possibly one or two majority

black districts. The process has been completely different in all of these red states. They have not only not been approved by voters, but they have broken so many different norms in terms of how they've gone about this process. I mean, look at the backdrop between Virginia and Tennessee this last week.

In a matter of basically three days, Tennessee Republicans dismantled a majority black district

and it existed for decades. In fact, Memphis had had its own congressional districts since 1923. So it had existed for basically a hundred years in its own district, this put it into three. No opportunity for anyone to weigh in. Virginia, this took months, voters had lots and lots of time to weigh in here and to

me, the vote by the voters in Virginia should have been the end of the discussion, right? Like the Supreme Court should have said, even if we have some minor qualms with the process, voters approved it and we are going to defer to the voters. I think that would have been the sound interpretation of the constitution, but also the sound, the sound way of looking at the national environment, which is one party is doing everything

they can to rig the system and the other party has the hand tied behind its back in the effort to try to counteract it and I just don't think that's fair.

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Thank you and enjoy the show. It's absolutely not fair. However, Democrats are still favored to win the house, not that that makes all that okay. A new Maristful has Democrats up 10 points in the generic house ballot matchup 52% to 42% among independence that's 49 to 37, 12 points, 12 points spread among independence. That's indicative of wave stuff. Now, in fairness, the polling

averages averaging all the polls together only have Democrats up five points in the generic ballots. So Marist may be an outlier, but it could also be an early indicator and plus 10 is a bit more consistent with these lopsided dem wins. We've been seeing in special

“elections. What's your reading of the house battle right now and on that front?”

I would lean more towards your interpretation Greg. I think the battlegrounds going to be bigger than people are thinking based on how these special elections are going, based in the fact that Democrats are making inroads in what had been previously red states like Iowa and Ohio. I think that some of these GOP gerrymanders are not as secure as they think in Florida in Texas. Some of these maps were very hastily drawn. Texas, for example, it was

based on Trump's numbers in 2024. Trump has regressed a lot from 2024, particularly among some core supporters like Latino. So I think there's sort of two separate discussions here.

One is, can Democrats still win the house? And I think the answer is yes. And then the second

thing, are we going to have an optimally fair election in November? And the answer is no, because right now we have a situation where so many things that would have previously been

“illegal are now legal. And I think particularly about the fact that all of this mid-decade”

gerrymandering and dismantling about these majority black districts across the South that we're going to see. I mean, southern states are now doing things that would have been illegal under the law at least back to the 1980s and possibly earlier than that. I mean, so we are going back literally 40 years in terms of what is legal under the Voting Rights Act. And I just really

going to mean for representation more broadly. I mean, you could have a situation where yes,

Democrats win the mid-terms, but the same time the mid-terms were a lot less free and fair than they should have been. 100%. So let's look at the out years now. This state of affairs in which one party is openly explicitly, gleefully declaring that it plays by its own rules no matter what it gets to rig elections and the other party doesn't. That is going to absolutely require Democrats to start redistricting more aggressively next cycle in time for the 2028 elections.

I reported recently on a new analysis from verified action, which found that Democrats can net an additional 10 to 22 seats on top of the current map for themselves if they redistrict

aggressively in numerous states. 22 may seem like a lot and a lot depends on how many state

legislative races and state legislative chambers Democrats flip in these elections. But generally speaking,

“that's what's going to have to happen, right? Because the Supreme Court's U.S. Supreme Court's”

ruling is going to open the door to even more jerrymandering by Republicans. Next cycle, Democrats will have to respond and kind, right? Yeah, Democrats have no choice. And honestly, it's about fairness at the end of the day. It's about making national elections fair and the only way the national elections fair are fair is if the parties play by the same set of rules. I think a lot of Democrats were devoted to good government when they got power. I think that was

defensible at the time. But what it meant is that in the lot of states, Democrats are playing

by one set of rules. Republicans are playing by another set of rules. Democrats are bound by things like independent commissions when Republicans can just jerrymander as much as they want. And that is leading to unfair outcomes. It is leading to an unfair race for the U.S. House. And so I believe that Democrats have to maximize their power by whatever means necessary. And they particularly have to look to the state level because that's where all of these battles are being fought. We're going to

hear a lot about the race for Congress this year. And obviously, that's critically important in terms of holding Trump accountable. But at the same time, most of these battles are going to be fought in the states. And Democrats have a tremendous amount of opportunities in a lot of these states. You wrote about it. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada. I mean, there's all of these places where Democrats could potentially get trifectas. And they could redraw the maps

“for 2028. And it requires something of a long-term strategy. And I think about Wisconsin, for”

example, what you wrote about. Wisconsin was the place in the early to mid-2010s where it seemed impossible that Democrats would ever have any power. They were shut out of the governor's race. The states of Supreme Court had a huge conservative majority. The legislature was superjerrymander. It was one party rule, right? Well, Democrats won the governor's mansion. They won a bunch of seats to get a progressive majority in the state Supreme Court. They struck down the jerrymander

to state legislative maps. Now they could flip both chambers of the legislature. That to me is a road map of what Democrats need to do everywhere, which is figure out how to maximize power so that you play by the same set of rules as Republicans do. And let's just be really clear about what the Democratic position actually is because they constantly get accused absurdly of hypocrisy for wanting to jerrymander despite opposing it themselves. Here's the Democratic position.

Neither aside should jerrymander because it's bad. It disrespects the opposition's voters and allows lawmakers to protect themselves from accountability. But even though jerrymandering is bad, if Republicans insist on maximizing it, Democrats have to do the same. Otherwise, they are acquiescing to a system in which one party is playing by a different set of rules. Now people like you and me are good government liberals and so forth had long been kind of hoping that there

is a path to mutual deescalation. These commissions, the whole premise of the commissions is that if you invite Republicans to try and do something that's mutually fair, then maybe it deescalates the hardball on both sides. But they have just said, fuck that, no way. Now they're openly threatening to maximize their own jerrymander's after the Supreme Court ruling. So such hopes

“of mutual forebearance are dead. That's all there is to it. Yeah, I mean, the only way reform works”

is if it's on a national level and applies equally at all states. It can't be a situation where only blue states do it and it's essentially unilateral disarmament. We tried that. It didn't work.

having one arm behind their back. And so I think Democrats have learned this lesson. I still worry

about what in endless cherrymandering arms race will mean. I think it will lead to more partisanship, more polarization, less competition. But the alternative is worse, which is that Republicans just gerrymandering in all these places. They have a perpetual lock on the U.S. House and on state legislatures and Democrats have no way to fight back. So at the very least, I believe that this gerrymandering arms race will incredibly destructive for American democracy has woken Democrats up

to the need to be as aggressive as Republicans in trying to maximize power. And also realizing they can't wait on the courts to save them. The U.S. Supreme Court's not going to save them and even state supreme courts are often major impediments. In Virginia, they controlled the governor's mansion and the legislature, but they didn't control the courts and we saw the

“impact of that. That's why states supreme courts are so important. There's really important”

states supreme court elections this year in North Carolina, in Georgia, for example. And so Democrats, when they think about the states, they also have to think about those places where either governors appoint state supreme court justices or state supreme court justices are elected.

Because that's a critical part of making the system more fair.

Well, I want to bring up something that Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate and Maine tweeted in response to the Virginia ruling. He said this, quote, "I'm old enough to remember when Republicans in Ohio just ignored court rulings repeatedly and did it anyway." Close quote. Now, that's something of a bombshell, I think, Ari, because he's not exactly saying that in Virginia Democrats should simply ignore the courts, but he's floating that as an option,

and I take him to be saying that we are now inevitably going to enter into a period of procedural total war and Democrats have to be willing to do whatever Republicans do in those fights. That's kind of a bombshell, right? From a Senate candidate, a major Democratic Senate candidate. Well, but I think it makes sense because again, Republicans are not found by any kind of norms in this fight. They have not respected any kind of procedural process up to stop them.

When there was a primary in their way, they just canceled the primary, right? When there are laws that were prohibited mid-decade jerrymandering, they just repealed them. When there was state constitutions, they didn't likely just said, let's just say this is unconstitutional.

“That's what they've done in all of these places. So I don't get why Democrats are just going to”

say to the Virginia State Supreme Court, we're going to allow you to nullify a vote that was held

by three million people. The difference here in Virginia is that the voters weighed in, I just,

I keep harping on this process because I think it gives it a legitimacy that doesn't exist in all of these other states. In California, where Democrats were able to add five seats, they also went to the voters. So they keep going to the voters. Republicans don't do that. Let's close on the comment relief. Or maybe it's not all that funny. The SAVE Act is a really disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. Trump and other Republicans have openly and explicitly said they

have to pass the SAVE Act in order to hold power at a time when Trump is really, really unpopular. Listen to GOP Congressman Roger Williams's answer about the SAVE Act. Well, I would hope not. It's pretty easy to vote for something like this. I mean, we want to write people voting. I don't know the Senate acts in different ways from the House. We've passed some good legislation. We've sent it to them. So let's see what they do with it.

So isn't that something? He said we want the right people voting. Again, are we unintentionally revealing your response to that? Yeah. I mean, that's just a dog whistle that goes back. Many, many years. I mean, I can think of so many segregationists in the Jim Crow South saying the

“same kind of thing. We want the right people voting. And I think it's, in this week, in particular,”

just revealing that so many things that we thought were of the past and have come back really with the vengeance. And so I think it's just indicative that when they say they only want certain people to vote, they really do mean it. Yeah. And just to close this out, look, a lot of people will point to these results and say, okay, well, Democrats need to win more than a majority to win the House. So they just have to moderate or they just have to adopt more popular positions, etc, etc.

That type of take, you know, okay. Yes, Democrats have to adopt popular positions. But we don't need to choose between these two things. There should be a two track approach here. One is try to

possible. But on the other, you're going to have to enter into procedural maximalism here. Otherwise,

you perish, isn't that the essence of this? Yeah. I mean, winning elections aren't enough of

“elections, themselves aren't fair. And so I think whatever they can do to level the playing field”

and make it so that both sides are playing by the same set of rules to me that has to be the guiding

light of the Democratic Party going forward. agree a hundred percent. I hope Democrats follow that advice.

“Ari Burman, great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you, Greg. Thanks for”

having me.