2025 Politico headline: Trump on Texas redistricting: ‘We are entitled to 5 more seats’
John Gramlich skeet quoting Trump in NYT today: Trump: “I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is, but it’s not good.”
A sowing/reaping for the ages
The polls are open until 7pm eastern, and same-day voter registration is available if you aren’t registered already.
We will be covering the results at @the-downballot.com
Four Republican districts would become much bluer, going from:
2nd: Trump+0 to Harris+5
1st: Trump+5 to Harris+8.5
5th: Trump+12 to Harris+8.5
6th: Trump+24 to Harris+3
Democrats already could flip the two bluest seats on the current map, but their chances would greatly increase on the new map
Image of a Virginia Democrats' proposed congressional map that is drawn to elect a ten-to-one Democratic majority and flip four Republican seats in 2026. The district lines are displayed over top of a basemap with major roads and cities labeled. The districts are colored by the 2024 presidential winner's margin of victory, with Kamala Harris districts in blue and Donald Trump districts in red. Darker shades represent larger margins of victory. An embedded chart shows the 2024 presidential election results and the adult population racial demographics in each district. Kamala Harris won 10 of the 11 districts, while Black voters would retain their ability to elect their preferred candidates in Districts 3 and 4, which remain safely Democratic.
Virginia votes TODAY on a referendum that would enable Democrats to redraw the congressional map for 2026 in response to new Republican gerrymanders in other states.
The map targets 4 of 5 Republicans & aims to elect a 10-1 Dem majority.
Interactive map+data: davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap...
I don’t think ending judicial review—instead of judicial supremacy—is desirable, but it’s foolish to think a GOP that’s already fully committed to authoritarianism would reciprocate Dem forbearance on court-packing. It’s the “friend-enemy” model of politics that @kjephd.bsky.social often talks about
Also, if the only difference today was a liberal court, GOP support for ignoring rulings & court packing would likely skyrocket.
Dems refusing to pack it won’t stop future court-packing so long as an authoritarian GOP is electorally viable. They’ve already done it first in several states since 2016
This is a snapshot of the failure of MSM and the concomitant ignorance within the American electorate about what is happening in and to their country.
Is the NC Supreme Court erasing its history? I just searched for the 2022 gerrymandering & voter ID rulings. They're not on the website. These were landmark rulings by the Democratic majority. Republicans overturned them in 2023 in an unprecedented power grab. #ncpol www.nccourts.gov/documents/ap...
I decided to write about at each & every one of the 32 states with supreme court elections this year.
Why? On abortion, redistricting, death penalty, & more, these institutions & their elections remain so critical.
So here's everything you need to know. NEW from me:
Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026. Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.
Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics!
Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper.
More soon!
This is exactly right. It’s not a dilemma though. It’s a line in the sand that will at once once collapse what remains of the rule of law and regulatory infrastructure designed to protect the public.
Senate Democrats had stellar fundraising numbers in four states that Trump won by double-digit margins: Alaska, Ohio, Texas, and Florida.
Dems need to flip at least two of them for a majority. Despite the map’s strong pro-GOP bias, Trump’s unpopularity is increasingly making that outcome plausible
What a coincidence: Trump’s DOJ is also targeting counties with large Black and Latino populations.
They’re transparently trying to create pretexts to overturn elections they are likely to lose
Pennsylvania's auditor general, a Republican, audited 210,000+ new voter registrations under Gov. Shapiro's new motor voter system to see if noncitizens were registering to vote.
They found one. One.
And that was because a PennDOT staffer erred. It was fixed before the driver left the office.
The 2024 election had the largest Black-White turnout gap in more than three decades. It's a crisis, my friends.
goodauthority.org/news/2024-br...
Republicans made local elections nonpartisan in Kentucky’s biggest blue county, home to Louisville.
That creates the possibilities of both top-two primary shutouts and Republicans winning races by hiding their party label, though Democrats may still be favored thanks to the national environment
Thanks for the recommendations, folks. I’m going with Foner’s Reconstruction updated edition
Preferably an audiobook
What book or two should I read to follow up on James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom?
I’m looking for a similar narrative style covering Reconstruction from Lincoln’s assassination through at least the 1876 election.
This is both
(1) some of the most important SCOTUS reporting ever, and
(2) far too generous to the Republican justices in framing of many pieces and omissions of Trump-era developments
🤦♂️
Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.
“In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, … he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.”
just looting the US treasury. as one does.
The Republican 5-3 gerrymander proposal is especially deceptive.
It uses language almost identical to the Dem proposal but changes the justification from responding to Trump’s effort to rig the national map to responding to maps from “both” parties.
The GOP has drawn far more districts nationally
The guy running this PAC lost his re-election campaign because voters found out that he'd been sexually harassing a teenager
Read all about the Democratic effort to redraw Colorado’s congressional map here. If one of their proposals qualifies for the ballot and passes in November, the new map would take effect for 2028.
Dems are targeting 3 GOP seats, though Dems also have a chance to flip them on the current map in 2026
Colorado Republican have filed ballot initiatives to thwart a Democratic push to redraw the congressional map in 2028 to counteract GOP gerrymanders.
One GOP proposal would limit mid-decade remaps—but another would gerrymander this blue state to favor 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘴 5-3.
See Dems’ proposed map below
If the Court strikes down VRA districts, the easiest way to undo that damage would be to move to multi-member PR districts, which a future Congress can do by statute. Same or better minority representation results (e.g. black members in the South), no need for it to be explicitly race-conscious.
"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."