Speaker 1: Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week we get
Speaker 1: into the redistricting weeds with real clear politics Sean Trendy.
Speaker 2: Let's dive in.
Speaker 1: Well, we just had primary super Bowl. Six states, including
Speaker 1: the nation's largest California, un voted on Tuesday night. And
Speaker 1: what did we learn. Well, first of all, we are
Speaker 1: learning even as you're listening to this, something we already knew,
Speaker 1: which is that California's vote counting system is outmoded, behind
Speaker 1: the times, and utterly unfit for purpose. The fact that
Speaker 1: we have five million votes counted as of the Wednesday
Speaker 1: when I'm recording this, but there's probably three to four
Speaker 1: million and they're not even sure left to count and
Speaker 1: it will take them weeks to do that. It defies belief.
Speaker 1: The fact is that there are countries that don't count
Speaker 1: all of their votes on election night, but there are
Speaker 1: good reasons for it. In New Zealand, they have special
Speaker 1: ballots that have to be collected, and they count everything
Speaker 1: except those special ballots and then account them all once.
Speaker 1: In Australia they get their vote counting done in about
Speaker 1: two weeks, and it's a smaller percentage of the vote
Speaker 1: of late arriving male ballots or early cast ballots that
Speaker 1: hadn't been tallied on election nine. Now, the fact that
Speaker 1: California takes so long is just unbelievable, and at some
Speaker 1: point one has to think that if you can't perform
Speaker 1: your self, reform will be forced upon you. And so
Speaker 1: what that means is that in California at least there
Speaker 1: are races that we won't know for a week or
Speaker 1: so who's going to make the final two in terms
Speaker 1: of getting to the general election, because they have an
Speaker 1: all party primary, and you can have two Democrats or
Speaker 1: two Republicans or even independence. And this may happen in
Speaker 1: a key congressional district that Kevin Kiley, who is a Republican,
Speaker 1: well he was a Republican, he switched to being an independent.
Speaker 1: And as we speak, Kevin Kylie is in first place
Speaker 1: in the sixth Congressional district and a Republican who spent
Speaker 1: almost no money but was the only person on the
Speaker 1: ballot with a Republican after his name is in second.
Speaker 1: One expects that because of the large number of ballots
Speaker 1: that are out and the fact that many of them
Speaker 1: are likely to tilt Democrat, that the highest ranking Democrat
Speaker 1: will probably pass the Republican and get in the race
Speaker 1: against Kylie. Probably not be a case where Kylie slips
Speaker 1: out of the race entirely, but the fact that we'll
Speaker 1: have to wait two maybe three weeks before we.
Speaker 2: Know this is.
Speaker 1: One of the strangest and most unacceptable things about California voting.
Speaker 1: But what we know from California is that the fear
Speaker 1: that Democrats had that there was going to be a
Speaker 1: lockout ended up being fictional. Steve Hill will probably finish
Speaker 1: second again because of the tilt of late arriving ballots
Speaker 1: that tend to be more Democratic in that state. He'll
Speaker 1: probably finish second to Chavier Bashera, but will also probably
Speaker 1: be Tom Steyer. As I'm recording this, Hilton has about
Speaker 1: a four hundred thousand vote lead over styr Stier has
Speaker 1: been getting under twenty percent of the vote. Even with
Speaker 1: a Democratic lead. There's no reason to think that Stire's
Speaker 1: suddenly going to overtake bsher and become the choice of
Speaker 1: all these voters who voted late, which suggests that he'll
Speaker 1: narrow the gap, but he probably will not win the
Speaker 1: remaining three to four million votes by the fifteen percent
Speaker 1: margin that he would need over Hilton to surpass him,
Speaker 1: particularly since he's been getting under twenty percent of the vote. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: it justifies belief that his margin would go his share
Speaker 1: the vote would go up so much and Hilton's wuld
Speaker 1: declined so much that there would be a fourteen point
Speaker 1: differential over the remaining vote.
Speaker 2: So we're going to.
Speaker 1: See whether or not a Republican can win in California.
Speaker 1: Common wisdom holes that he can't. I would say, as
Speaker 1: much as I personally know Steve and like and respect him,
Speaker 1: I would give him a minimal chance. But the fact is,
Speaker 1: and this is a little known fact unless you stare
Speaker 1: at polls all the time. But of course that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons you listen to this podcast because I do,
Speaker 1: is that majority of Californians say they're unhappy with Governor
Speaker 1: Newsom's performance and that they're unhappy with the direction of the
Speaker 1: state is going on. It's not a huge majority, but
Speaker 1: that would be Hilton's angle, is to say, you know
Speaker 1: you're unhappy one change, why don't you elect a real
Speaker 1: change agent, probably enough to maybe have him do better
Speaker 1: than a Republican might ordinarily do even in a bad
Speaker 1: year for Republicans, which is what this is shaping up
Speaker 1: to be. But at least he gets the one on
Speaker 1: one chance to make his case that he wants and
Speaker 1: that is something that the primary has made clear. So
Speaker 1: other than that, what do we have we learned? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing I'd say we've learned is that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is not invincible. That in Iowa, Donald Trump came
Speaker 1: in at the last minute to endorse a Congressman, Randy Fienstra.
Speaker 1: There has been a poll that came out that had
Speaker 1: Fienstra behind a farmer named Daklahn, and Trump came in
Speaker 1: with his full and complete and total endorsement for Fienstro.
Speaker 1: And since Iowa has early voting, but it's not a
Speaker 1: huge early voting, I think most observers and I count
Speaker 1: myself as one, thought, Okay, well, Fienstree may be behind
Speaker 1: by a couple of points, but you should expect Republicans
Speaker 1: to hear the endorsement and get in line as they
Speaker 1: have everywhere else and back Fienstrom. In fact, you found
Speaker 1: the opposite. In fact, in a number of counties as
Speaker 1: you looked, Fienstro did better in the early voting than
Speaker 1: he did in the election voting and long beat him,
Speaker 1: not by very much. It was by about under a point.
Speaker 1: But it is telling that President's endorsement did not.
Speaker 2: Carry through.
Speaker 1: And why do I think that might be? Well, as
Speaker 1: I say in my newsletter, Margin of Victory, which comes
Speaker 1: out every Wednesday morning through the Washington Post, but you
Speaker 1: don't have to be a Post subscriber to get it.
Speaker 1: Just sign up and you will get it. Lon ran
Speaker 1: a campaign where he wasn't trying to be more Maga
Speaker 1: than now. His campaign. Go to his website and he'll
Speaker 1: be talking about local issues. He talks about Maha, he
Speaker 1: talks about ending reducing rates of cancer, he talks about
Speaker 1: preventing out of staters from buying Iowa's farmland. In other words,
Speaker 1: he had a very very unique Iowa focus identity, and
Speaker 1: it proved to be persuasive to a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And I think that's an interesting counter cultural, counterintuitive factor,
Speaker 1: which is that so many Republicans are running as more
Speaker 1: Magi than Now or running as Magalite. And it may
Speaker 1: very well be that if you've defined that you're playing
Speaker 1: the Maggie game, and the Maga Master lays down the
Speaker 1: laws to which of the contenders he likes, that the
Speaker 1: Maga Master wins the Maggi game. But if you're not
Speaker 1: playing the Maggie game, maybe you can win the bigger game.
Speaker 1: It'll be interesting to see whether other candidates begin to
Speaker 1: try and do that, which is to think outside the box.
Speaker 1: Of course, it has to be authentic and it has
Speaker 1: to be real. Zachlon has a very persuasive biography as
Speaker 1: somebody who came from a farm, longtime family farm. The
Speaker 1: family had to sell and after he made his money,
Speaker 1: he went back and bought the family farm. So he
Speaker 1: has a very authentic Iowa story to tell. I don't
Speaker 1: think you can make a silk out of a sow's ear,
Speaker 1: But for people who can find something that's unusual and
Speaker 1: different and sell that to Republican voters, it may very
Speaker 1: well be that there's room even in this Republican party.
Speaker 1: But as it is, all we know is that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump took his first loss in his endorsement. He won
Speaker 1: many other endorsements. His endorsed choice in Montana won easily
Speaker 1: defeated the secretary of State and a former state senator
Speaker 1: to get the nomination in the Montana's first congressional district.
Speaker 1: But the fact is the king can be beaten, and
Speaker 1: zach Long perhaps has given us a Roadmack. What's the
Speaker 1: other thing that we've learned along. What we've learned is
Speaker 1: that the civil war or the insurgency in the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party between an establishment and the progressives is nowhere near
Speaker 1: in them. You had battlefront after battlefront, and in most
Speaker 1: cases the establishment candidate came out on top. But of
Speaker 1: course the Democratic establishment candidate tends to be on the
Speaker 1: left anyway. And so when you had somebody like Karen
Speaker 1: Bass defeat Nithia Rahman's battle to win a spot in
Speaker 1: the runoff in LA's mayor race, it's not because Karen
Speaker 1: Bass is some screaming centrist. It's that she's liberal enough
Speaker 1: or progressive enough to prevent a progressive from unseeing her.
Speaker 1: But what we're seeing is, first of all, progressives do
Speaker 1: breakthrough sometimes. The Bernie AOC choice defeated the establishment choice
Speaker 1: in Montana one, which may be disturbing to Democrats because
Speaker 1: that is the more democratic seat and it is just
Speaker 1: democratic enough that this is a way year they can
Speaker 1: think about carrying it. It's the sort of seat that
Speaker 1: John Tester, for example, could have carried, or Steve Bullock
Speaker 1: could have carried. But you're not running John tester or
Speaker 1: Steve b Look, now you're running AOC Bernie left wing
Speaker 1: candidate in that seat. You had a case in New
Speaker 1: Jersey where Adam Hammawe is the nominee and the putative
Speaker 1: congressman in his very safe Democratic seat in central New Jersey, Trenton,
Speaker 1: Princeton and some areas going into the southern parts.
Speaker 2: Of the Newark area.
Speaker 1: And he's a person who was endorsed by Bernie Democratic
Speaker 1: Socialists AOC, and it wasn't really closed. You know, he
Speaker 1: was the only candidate who ran well in all parts
Speaker 1: of the district. He got twenty eight percent of the vote,
Speaker 1: nearly double what the second place candidate. That's a thirteen
Speaker 1: way primary, and one guy got twenty eight percent of
Speaker 1: the vote, but nobody else there wasn't even a strong challenger.
Speaker 1: So the fact is that you've got examples where the
Speaker 1: establishment candidate did well, but you've got these examples where
Speaker 1: the progressors breakthrough. And another example is in California where
Speaker 1: you had a progressive backed challenger, Randy Viegas, who is
Speaker 1: not yet clear he is running against State Senator jez
Speaker 1: Meet Baines to take on David Valadeo in California's twenty
Speaker 1: second district he has had, but there's so many ballots
Speaker 1: out he could lose that lead. And of course, again
Speaker 1: in a moderate too moderately conservative, but Democratic leaning farm area,
Speaker 1: the argument would be, you'd rather face as a Republican
Speaker 1: valade would clearly rather face the extremists than the person
Speaker 1: who can't be as caricatured in an ad. And then
Speaker 1: you had the eighty one year old Doris Matt Suey,
Speaker 1: who is right now leading with about a third of
Speaker 1: the vote, and it looks like she will face another
Speaker 1: Democrat in the general election, a young Sacramento City councilwoman
Speaker 1: who is running as an unabashed progressive as well as
Speaker 1: being somebody who is forty years younger than the incumbent,
Speaker 1: and may very well win in the fall. But at
Speaker 1: the very least, even when the establishment wins, they have
Speaker 1: to look over their shoulder and see where the progressives are.
Speaker 1: Because even when the progressives are losing, as they have
Speaker 1: in most of their challenges, they're running strongly. It's not
Speaker 1: like you can say, well, here's this DSA back candidate
Speaker 1: and they get eight percent of the boat. There are
Speaker 1: a couple of examples of that there was, but you
Speaker 1: see many more examples of a progressive candidate either winning
Speaker 1: or coming close or doing and getting doing well. And
Speaker 1: when you have that consistent fire, even victories by the establishment,
Speaker 1: if they're unimpressive, victories means that they escape not by
Speaker 1: the skin of their teeth, but they escape without ease.
Speaker 1: And every victory for an insurgent encourages more insurgents. The
Speaker 1: fact is Homawe was endorsed by virtually every member of
Speaker 1: the squad. Chris rab Even, who had been elected or
Speaker 1: nominated and will be elected in November in the most
Speaker 1: democratic seat in the country in Pennsylvania, was also a
Speaker 1: squad endorsed candidate, and he endorsed HOMOWI. When you take
Speaker 1: a look at who's being ded the squad or squad
Speaker 1: adjacent people are going to be doubling this time in
Speaker 1: the House. And that's even under a worst case scenario.
Speaker 1: For that, there's so many progressive challengers that are on
Speaker 1: the ballot in the next month well have much better sense.
Speaker 1: So if the Democratic establishment wins three quarters of these battles,
Speaker 1: I guess that's a good sign for the Democratic establishment.
Speaker 2: But for people who.
Speaker 1: Had virtually no representation in the House of Representatives ten
Speaker 1: years ago. To be adding two five eight members to
Speaker 1: their ranks every two years is a sign of particular growth.
Speaker 1: And this is going to be particularly important going to
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight because you look and then it was
Speaker 1: one name I haven't mentioned. I'm going to mention him now,
Speaker 1: and that's Roe Connell. Rocanna is a congressman from the
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. He originally ran as a business friendly candidate,
Speaker 1: but once in office, became one of the nation's leading progressives.
Speaker 1: He has been active nationally. You will see Rocanna's endorsement
Speaker 1: behind virtually every progressive challenger in the country, and that
Speaker 1: means he's been rumored to want to run for president,
Speaker 1: and he is making the sort of moves one would
Speaker 1: expect if one is going to run for president, and
Speaker 1: he's making friends across the country, just as you would
Speaker 1: need to if you're planning is to run for president.
Speaker 1: When I take a look at the Democratic primary, I
Speaker 1: look at the three people leading every pole, Kamala Harris,
Speaker 1: Gavin Newsom, and people to judge, and I see people
Speaker 1: who are generally trying to straddle the lane between center,
Speaker 1: left and left. And that's probably the name strategy. But
Speaker 1: I've been following politics all my life, and typically the
Speaker 1: surprise candidate in the raids is the candidate who captures
Speaker 1: the imagination of what I call the unserved constituency. That is,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people in a party, but they
Speaker 1: don't have anyone who's competing for them. They will flock
Speaker 1: to somebody who competes for them.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was somebody who ran that to the nomination
Speaker 1: because there was a massive unserved constituency that we would
Speaker 1: now call maga. It was this accumulation agglomeration of economic
Speaker 1: populace and cultural nationalists at the time, and he wrote
Speaker 1: it to victory. Mike Huckabee and Rick Santoum wrote the
Speaker 1: Evangelicals to victory. When everyone was trying to be some
Speaker 1: sort of Tea party person or or moderate moderate business
Speaker 1: establishment or Republican. Howard Dean ran up almost looked as
Speaker 1: the in November of two thousand and three by being
Speaker 1: the Then we would call it the liberals, but now
Speaker 1: it would be the progressive wing running. As he said
Speaker 1: that I'm running as the Democratic for the democratic wing
Speaker 1: of the Democratic Party, and he captured the imagination or
Speaker 1: people wanted full throated liberalism. Well, there's a significant constituency
Speaker 1: that wants full throated progressivism. That's what we're seeing every
Speaker 1: primary or we have that challenge. And how the Democrats
Speaker 1: navigate this in twenty twenty seven and they'll run up
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty eight is going to be fascinating and
Speaker 1: potentially determinative of the outcome. Millions of things determined the
Speaker 1: presidential election outcomes, but this is probably one of the
Speaker 1: known unknowns that is least discussed. And every week when
Speaker 1: there's a primary, we get scorecard as to who's ahead
Speaker 1: and what the strength of the insurgency is.
Speaker 2: And let me tell you, the insurgency is not going
Speaker 2: away any terms.
Speaker 1: Well, twenty twenty six mid term cycle may be known
Speaker 1: for a lot of things. That may be known for
Speaker 1: a blue wave, that may be known for an incredible
Speaker 1: Republican co recovery after they looked like they might be
Speaker 1: hit by a blue wave. But what it will certainly
Speaker 1: be known for is the at least in the last
Speaker 1: few decades, unprecedented scope and sweep of mid decatal redistricting.
Speaker 1: And here to talk to us about that and talk
Speaker 1: to us especially about how we can draw districts so
Speaker 1: that we don't have partisan jerry mandering skewing the House
Speaker 1: is redistricting expert and political analyst Sean Trendy, who is
Speaker 1: the senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics. Sean, welcome
Speaker 1: back to be.
Speaker 2: On the polls.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Well, most people know you through your political analysis. You
Speaker 1: know you do write and have written for many, many years,
Speaker 1: excellent pieces at RCP and also with your visiting scholarship
Speaker 1: or professorship.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure scholarship.
Speaker 1: You're the visiting scholar since you have a PhD at
Speaker 1: the American Enterprise Institute. But you have drawn plans and
Speaker 1: you were one of the two architects of the reinstated
Speaker 1: Virginia Plan that those of us in the Commonwealth of
Speaker 1: Virginia will be voting under in the ELECTIONSYS November. Can
Speaker 1: you tell us a little bit about your experience and
Speaker 1: first how you came to that position and secondly how
Speaker 1: you approached the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun actually,
Speaker 3: but it was eye opening because you know election Twitter,
Speaker 3: I did a lot of what they do right, just
Speaker 3: drew maps. I was like, hey, look you can do
Speaker 3: this or this or why did those fools do this.
Speaker 3: It's a nothing to sit down and get into the
Speaker 3: nitty gritty of how a district will actually be drawn
Speaker 3: when you know it's going to actually be used in
Speaker 3: an election. And we were fortunate because we were insulated
Speaker 3: from political concerns, so we didn't even have to deal
Speaker 3: with like, you know, Representative Bubba who wants his cousin's
Speaker 3: gas station in this district just because and.
Speaker 1: Just to jump that's because you were appointed along with
Speaker 1: the Democrat Bernie Groffman, to be the two special Masters
Speaker 1: by the Virginia State Supreme Court once every other avenue
Speaker 1: of redistricting had been exhausted in inability to do anything.
Speaker 3: That's right, The Virginia Constitution now has an independent commission.
Speaker 3: It deadlocked, and when it's deadlocked, it throws it to
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court. Well, the Supreme Court justices didn't want
Speaker 3: to draw the maps themselves, and so they had each
Speaker 3: party nominated a special Master. The first thing, well, the
Speaker 3: nominated three in the court selected one from each. Listen,
Speaker 3: the first thing they told us is, okay, you are
Speaker 3: no longer the nominees of the Republican or the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3: You are special Masters of the Commonwealth in Virginia, and
Speaker 3: so we sat down and the first thing we would
Speaker 3: have wanted to do would have been to, you know,
Speaker 3: do a complete VRA analysis Voting Rights Act, which is
Speaker 3: a very complex, time intensive analysis, and as it turned out,
Speaker 3: we just didn't have time to do that. We were
Speaker 3: appointed shortly before Thanksgiving and we had to draw something
Speaker 3: like one hundred and seventy districts, get public comment, and
Speaker 3: draw them again. So, long story short, we took that.
Speaker 1: Because you weren't just doing congressional district right, the legislature
Speaker 1: at both houses of the legislature as well, that's.
Speaker 3: Right, the state Senate, which is forty in the state House,
Speaker 3: which I think is one hundred, Yeah, it's one hundred.
Speaker 3: North Carolina is one hundred and twenty. So so it
Speaker 3: was a challenging task, but we started. We said instead,
Speaker 3: and I'm given how things went, I'm glad we did this.
Speaker 3: We said, I bet that if we constrain ourselves to
Speaker 3: good government traditional redistricting principles, we're going to draw a
Speaker 3: map that maybe has a touch of a Republican bias,
Speaker 3: but not much of one in Virginia, and that is
Speaker 3: still going to elect a lot of minority members to
Speaker 3: the state legislature, and so it was a pretty straightforward
Speaker 3: set of guidelines we had. We said, we aren't going
Speaker 3: to split counties more than we have to. When we
Speaker 3: go into a municipality, we're going to draw within that
Speaker 3: municipality before we exit it. We're going to fill it
Speaker 3: up before we exit it. So don't split towns and
Speaker 3: cities unless you have to. We made a rule that
Speaker 3: we weren't going to cross the Blue Ridge more than
Speaker 3: we had to, because A it's kind of a community
Speaker 3: of interest in the Shenandoah, and b that was kind
Speaker 3: of a trick that the parties had been using for gerrymandering.
Speaker 3: It's heavily Republican, so you can either make blue districts
Speaker 3: red using it, or you can make red districts blue
Speaker 3: by diluting it. So that's how we approached it, and
Speaker 3: it worked out great. We ended up with good looking districts.
Speaker 3: The the basic Republicans and Democrats liked it. The partisans
Speaker 3: on either side didn't like it. But that's a feature,
Speaker 3: not a bug, and it's it's a it's an illustration
Speaker 3: of how this sort of conception that you have to
Speaker 3: draw extreme gerry manders to kind of make up for
Speaker 3: you know, if you if you use kind of good
Speaker 3: government principles, you're going to skew the maps so badly
Speaker 3: that you're either not going to get minority groups or
Speaker 3: you're gonna get too many Republicans or Democrats. It's just,
Speaker 3: at least in Virginia just wasn't true. We ended up
Speaker 3: with pretty good maps.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I read a column of the bull Disclosure supporting your
Speaker 1: plan when it was drafted because I liked it so much.
Speaker 1: And for people who don't listen to every episode, I
Speaker 1: learned the black arts and cage and had my own
Speaker 1: experience with the redistricting in nineteen eighty three when I
Speaker 1: was the prime architect of a effort to replace the
Speaker 1: Democratic Garry Mander by a ballot initiative. I drew the maps,
Speaker 1: and the Supreme Court, on a six to one vote
Speaker 1: decided that we could not get to the vote of
Speaker 1: the people. And I want you to guess the partisan
Speaker 1: balance of that court, and.
Speaker 3: I got on Lemon say, six to one.
Speaker 2: Well, bingo, bingo.
Speaker 1: An experience I have never forgotten, but it was one
Speaker 1: of the things on the partisan aspect of it is
Speaker 1: I believe and I'm doing this for a memory, is
Speaker 1: that this was the sort of map that if you
Speaker 1: looked at the twenty twenty presidential results, Joe Biden would
Speaker 1: have carried roughly around fifty five or fifty six of
Speaker 1: the one hundred House of Delegates seats, which and he
Speaker 1: got about fifty five or fifty six percent of the vote,
Speaker 1: and it would have carried six of the eleven congressional seats,
Speaker 1: and Glenn Young Kim would have carried the majority of
Speaker 1: delegate seats when he won the state. And you did
Speaker 1: it without looking and of course everybody has a rough
Speaker 1: sense of the partisan nature, but you didn't without looking
Speaker 1: at the details of politics in the sense of, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is we have to move this place in this
Speaker 1: way so we can get one extra marginal district. That's correct,
Speaker 1: isn't it that you didn't You didn't make those political ajustments.
Speaker 3: So the first time, the first lines that we drew,
Speaker 3: we did draw a line to politics. And then the
Speaker 3: way that worked was we opened it up for public comment.
Speaker 3: And what we were worried about, and there were a
Speaker 3: few instances where we got taken in, but what we
Speaker 3: were worried about was people coming in and saying, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I think you need to do this because
Speaker 3: it keeps the berry farm together. And it turns out
Speaker 3: that if you keep the berry farm together, it flips
Speaker 3: the partisanship of the district. And so like, there were
Speaker 3: some people who insisted we needed to draw a community
Speaker 3: of interests that took like the colleges in Roanoke can
Speaker 3: link them up with Virginia Tech and one in uh
Speaker 3: I can't. There's another one along the way. And if
Speaker 3: you did that, lo and behold, you get another Democratic district. Well,
Speaker 3: we weren't going to do that. We knew we had
Speaker 3: a balanced map, so we did pay attention when we
Speaker 3: redrew to whether we were being you know, whether someone
Speaker 3: was using it as a pretext to get another Democratic
Speaker 3: or Republican district. But at its fundamentals, you're right, we didn't.
Speaker 2: So what does that tell us?
Speaker 1: What does your experience tell us about what single member
Speaker 1: districts can be drawn as, Because one of the things
Speaker 1: my experience is in following this is that if you
Speaker 1: can have compact if you only look at something like
Speaker 1: compactness and don't look at other factors, you can draw
Speaker 1: compact looking districts that are in fact, a disguised gerrymander.
Speaker 1: But if you look at all these other things like
Speaker 1: counties and regions and so forth, it's much harder to
Speaker 1: do that. What should redistricting look like when it's not
Speaker 1: simply a naked exercise and power?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I would modify that a little bit. There
Speaker 3: there are states like Wisconsin where basically all the Democrats
Speaker 3: now are in Milwaukee or Madison. Yeah, and so it's
Speaker 3: going to have a Republican lean, but it's counterbalanced by
Speaker 3: states like Massachusetts or California, where the Democratic coefficient coalition
Speaker 3: is incredibly efficient, and you would get that leaning democratic.
Speaker 3: So it mostly counterbalances.
Speaker 2: But when we're talking about congressional districts on the.
Speaker 3: National level, that's right, that's right. But I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people who get involved in these debates lose
Speaker 3: sight of some foundational questions. You know, why do we
Speaker 3: have single member districts in the first place, and what
Speaker 3: are they supposed to represent? Because my basic response to
Speaker 3: everyone who's like, well, that map is politically unfair, is well,
Speaker 3: if you want it to be politically fair, there is
Speaker 3: a well known system of elections beloved across the world.
Speaker 3: It's called proportional representation, and if you really care about
Speaker 3: making sure the districts are balanced, you don't want districts
Speaker 3: who want proportional representation. The reason that we have single
Speaker 3: member districts in my view, and this is why I
Speaker 3: think Compactinson Counties and things like that are important. The
Speaker 3: reason we have single member districts in my view, is
Speaker 3: an understanding that place matters, that there are aspects of
Speaker 3: representation that go beyond partisanship. You know, most people, their
Speaker 3: interaction with their member of Congress is, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 3: I have an overseas trip and I just realized that
Speaker 3: I needed to get a passport for my kid. Can
Speaker 3: we get this expedite? And so you call the member's
Speaker 3: office and they have a staffer who's dedicated to this
Speaker 3: kind of stuff and gets done what needs to get done,
Speaker 3: and that matters. You know, the needs of someone in
Speaker 3: downtown Columbus, what they need from the government is different
Speaker 3: than what someone from you know, rural from suburban Ohio needs,
Speaker 3: which is different from what someone from rural Ohio needs.
Speaker 3: And a representative and we think of the big especially
Speaker 3: if as partisans, people think of the big ticket votes.
Speaker 3: How do you vote on abortion rights or gay rights,
Speaker 3: or or you know, trans rights or social security reform.
Speaker 3: But there is so much that goes on at the
Speaker 3: federal government beyond those type of big picture issues. Now
Speaker 3: the response to that is usually well, yeah, but people
Speaker 3: mostly vote for the party. Now, look at what's going
Speaker 3: to happen. Probably maybe I should say now to Susan Collins,
Speaker 3: look what happened to John Tester, And it's like, well,
Speaker 3: that's been the rule for twenty years. And the fact
Speaker 3: that that's been a norm for twenty years doesn't mean
Speaker 3: we should jettison a system that has existed for two
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty or two hundred and forty at this point.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's just these kind of foundational representative representational
Speaker 3: things at work, so long as you are actually drawing
Speaker 3: those compact, reasonably shaped districts.
Speaker 1: And also respecting things like city boundaries county boundaries. Like
Speaker 1: I said, you can draw compact districts, but if you
Speaker 1: draw compact districts and you're splitting a minuscule city five
Speaker 1: different ways, you're probably doing it for political purpose rather
Speaker 1: than trying to find a good government reason to take
Speaker 1: a seventy thousand person city and give them virtually no
Speaker 1: ability to elect a representative on their own.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny. So for the longest in Ohio,
Speaker 3: Republicans split Columbus down the middle, and people were apoplectic
Speaker 3: about it. Everyone knows it's because Columbus was more democratic
Speaker 3: than everything else, and so if you split it, you
Speaker 3: got two Republican districts. Well, so, starting I think in
Speaker 3: twenty ten, Republicans created a Democratic district in Columbus and
Speaker 3: people lost their minds again because at that point, Franklin
Speaker 3: County become blue enough that if you split the city
Speaker 3: of Columbus you would get two Democratic districts. And it's
Speaker 3: just like, okay, what, what's the actual principle here, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, the actual principle is we want Democrats, just
Speaker 3: like it's we want Republicans in other states. But I
Speaker 3: agree with you. I think I think they have it
Speaker 3: right right now, which is that the city of Columbus
Speaker 3: has unique needs and it doesn't need to be in
Speaker 3: a district with you know where I live in in
Speaker 3: you know, Lewis Center, or least of all, with the
Speaker 3: rural areas. So I think they got it right.
Speaker 1: I Mean, one question I've wondered is I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: how to constrain gerrymanderin. I wonder whether or not the
Speaker 1: idea that metropolitan areas are de facto communities of interest
Speaker 1: because you can keep Columbus. But then if you're taking
Speaker 1: the north side, because Columbus is larger, as you know,
Speaker 1: Columbus is larger than it needs to be for one
Speaker 1: congressional district, and there's impacted non totally surrounded or non
Speaker 1: city populations within Columbus, I believe, And so what you
Speaker 1: do with the Franklin County outside of them. Republicans of course,
Speaker 1: will split up the Franklin County places so that some
Speaker 1: of it get attached to Republican rural areas one hundred
Speaker 1: miles away. What about adding to the traditional criteria that
Speaker 1: metropolitan regions have their or metropolitan areas have their own
Speaker 1: community of interests, so that you can't take suburban Columbus
Speaker 1: that's left over after the after you make the one
Speaker 1: city and then add it to all these rural areas.
Speaker 1: You kind of have to try and well, maybe added
Speaker 1: to suburban Delaware County or whatever else is in the
Speaker 1: nonpartisan defined metropolitan area. And that would be another way
Speaker 1: to limit jerrymanderer's ability to create political outcomes by ignoring
Speaker 1: real communities of interests.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that gets into the rule that Bernie and
Speaker 3: I had, which was you can't leave a county until
Speaker 3: you filled up the county, and you can't leave a
Speaker 3: municipality until you filled the municipality. And so the idea is, okay,
Speaker 3: you would draw that Columbus district. Then you would start
Speaker 3: drawing the second district in Franklin County, and you would
Speaker 3: have to start it in whatever's left over in the
Speaker 3: city of Columbus, and then you'd have to fill up
Speaker 3: Franklin County before you could go into any of the
Speaker 3: adjacent kinds. At that point, you're going to have another
Speaker 3: democratic district, you know. And so maybe if you're feeling
Speaker 3: really aggressive, you go into Pickaway County, which is kind
Speaker 3: of rural to the south, and you get some rural
Speaker 3: areas that way. But you know nothing. What I think
Speaker 3: people don't get is that nothing is going to get
Speaker 3: rid of jerrymandering because people are smart, they're clever, they'll
Speaker 3: always find a way to get around a rule. The
Speaker 3: idea is to cabinet in. The idea is to say okay,
Speaker 3: like people are going to be putting thumbs on the scale.
Speaker 3: What we don't want is what happened in California or
Speaker 3: Illinois or Texas. You know, these kind of oddly shaped,
Speaker 3: stretched out jerrymanders. And so that's I think the way
Speaker 3: to do it, and you can put some notion. The
Speaker 3: community of interest thing gets a little tricky because it's
Speaker 3: such a malleable standard. I do think if we're going
Speaker 3: to do that, it needs to be a clearly defined thing,
Speaker 3: such as you can't leave, you have to treat un
Speaker 3: metropolitan areas is defined by the sense is this the
Speaker 3: same way as you would a municipality or something to
Speaker 3: that effect. As long as the clear, clean, straightforward rule,
Speaker 3: I am on board.
Speaker 1: Now again, the partisan could argue that you know all
Speaker 1: this stuff about place, I hear you, or I hear you,
Speaker 1: but the way our country is right now, we should
Speaker 1: sacrifice the advantages that come from place for the advantages
Speaker 1: that come from balance between the competing factions. How you
Speaker 1: would you respond to somebody who would say, who would
Speaker 1: make that argument?
Speaker 3: Well, like I said, I think, I think first off,
Speaker 3: if you're a partisan, then this jerry mandric debate is
Speaker 3: kind of like if you're that partisan. This gerrymandering debate
Speaker 3: is kind of beside the point. But the reason that
Speaker 3: place is so important. There's actually a concept in geography.
Speaker 3: If you take a spatial statistics class or get into geography,
Speaker 3: the first things you learn is called Tobler's first law
Speaker 3: of geography, and it basically it's straightforward. It's it's that
Speaker 3: everything is related, but things that are closer to each
Speaker 3: other are more related than things that are far apart.
Speaker 3: And that's what place is getting to and what I
Speaker 3: think single member districts are supposed to encapsulate that. Look,
Speaker 3: you know, this is making sure that, to the best
Speaker 3: of our ability, that people who are more or less
Speaker 3: similarly situated are put in districts together. That has a
Speaker 3: partisan valance to it as well. You know, it helps
Speaker 3: ensure that you're not going to have people, to the
Speaker 3: extent we can do it, We're not going to have
Speaker 3: people along the Ohio River in a district that is
Speaker 3: actually governed by the city of Columbus and vice versa.
Speaker 3: Make sure the people in the city of Columbus aren't
Speaker 3: really governed by people in Appalachio along the Ohio River.
Speaker 3: And I think that is something that should appeal to partisans, frankly,
Speaker 3: because you're going to set up some swing districts this
Speaker 3: way naturally, but you're also going to ensure that like
Speaker 3: these red rural areas get represented by one of their own.
Speaker 1: And that's in fact what jerrymandering does. I mean when
Speaker 1: you take a look at all the extreme forms of
Speaker 1: jerry manner, when you take a look at the reason
Speaker 1: you have these oddly shaped districts and fingers is to
Speaker 1: try effectively to disenfranchise a class of voters which often
Speaker 1: not only have partisan concerns, but have these regional concerns.
Speaker 1: In Illinois, you've got a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: governed by Chicago and Chicago suburbs and not as many
Speaker 1: as their population would entitle them to who are in
Speaker 1: the rural regions in the outstate. And in Texas you
Speaker 1: have the reverse, you know, which is that a lot
Speaker 1: of urban people are being governed by Republican suburbanites as
Speaker 1: opposed to having as many districts as they would if
Speaker 1: they weren't being chopped up and ferried out to rural
Speaker 1: and suburban areas that will elect Republicans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the same thing with in Virginia, the map
Speaker 3: that was ultimately struck down by their state Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: There are people in the literal mountains, you know, probably
Speaker 3: should have gone over with West Virginia in the Civil War.
Speaker 3: But like rural super rural mountainous areas, there weren't a
Speaker 3: district that was going to be controlled by voters in
Speaker 3: one of the five slices of Fairfax County. You know,
Speaker 3: I just don't. I'm not. I'm not as offended by
Speaker 3: that as some just because I know what's going on
Speaker 3: on a national scale. But from a good government perspective,
Speaker 3: that's not how it's supposed to work. There was a
Speaker 3: district that was like the Shenandoah Valley and mountain areas,
Speaker 3: and then there was like Southwest Virginia got some of
Speaker 3: those mountain counties as well, and so everyone got represented,
Speaker 3: got represented by someone I shouldn't say everyone, but like
Speaker 3: most people got represented by someone who at least had
Speaker 3: a clue what their non partisan goals were or needs were.
Speaker 1: And we had gary Mandering or jerrymandering has been with
Speaker 1: us since the early days of the Republic. It's called
Speaker 1: jerry mandering because of Elbridge. I was taught by an
Speaker 1: Englishman that it's pronounced with a hard gie gary. But
Speaker 1: to the governor of Massachusetts who created a combination of
Speaker 1: counties that resembled a salamander, and hence it was labeled
Speaker 1: the Gerrymander. But even back then you did not have
Speaker 1: you know, let's take a little bit of New York
Speaker 1: and string it out to rural Long Island.
Speaker 2: Back when it was Rhode Island rural.
Speaker 1: You had all counties that are added, or you had
Speaker 1: whole cities that were added, and that in itself necessarily
Speaker 1: limited the partisan impact that those crude nineteenth century jerrymanders
Speaker 1: could actually have.
Speaker 3: That's right, I mean I think we should. You know,
Speaker 3: Ohio had a whole I don't want to be pollyannish
Speaker 3: about this, because Ohio had a whole county requirement. And
Speaker 3: we actually redrew our maps four times in the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 3: and it was little like you know, one party took
Speaker 3: over the legislature, readrew the congressional district, then another party
Speaker 3: won the legislature, redrew all the maps. So we've been
Speaker 3: here before, and they were pretty they were reasonably effective
Speaker 3: at what they did, but you know, nothing like what
Speaker 3: you you have, not on a scale. I shouldn't say
Speaker 3: nothing like, but on a scale, not on a scale
Speaker 3: of what you have today and what you can accomplish
Speaker 3: when you're drawing maps, especially with one person, one vote
Speaker 3: separating you from any realistic ability to keep county lines intact.
Speaker 3: And so you just have more degrees of freedom when
Speaker 3: you're drawing maps today. But once you start slapping on
Speaker 3: those constraints, like I said, you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 3: do Illinois, and you wouldn't be able to do what
Speaker 3: Texas did, and you wouldn't be able to do what
Speaker 3: California did. Now does that mean you're going to get
Speaker 3: to perfect one to one correlation between presidential vote share
Speaker 3: and districts carried by parties? Probably not, But again that's
Speaker 3: as far as I'm concerned. Once you opt for single
Speaker 3: member districts, that's a subsidiary consideration.
Speaker 1: Now, there are two things that other countries that have
Speaker 1: single member districts use that have a further impact in
Speaker 1: some sense on both proportionality of the vote and constraining
Speaker 1: Gary Manderin. And that is, first of all, they have
Speaker 1: a wider variance that you will tend to see that
Speaker 1: Australia or Britain don't have the narrow one person, one
Speaker 1: vote that says you have to be as near as practical,
Speaker 1: they'll allow you a five percent variance, and that's used
Speaker 1: to keep cities in town or wards intact. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that on both England and Australia do is
Speaker 1: they don't draw their districts on the base of population.
Speaker 1: They draw their districts on the basis of eligible elector,
Speaker 1: so you have one elector one vote, not one person
Speaker 1: one vote, which of course, and they both have substantial
Speaker 1: immigrant populations and that has an effect, which is to say,
Speaker 1: highly populated areas with a lot of immigrants don't have
Speaker 1: as many representatives per population unit as citizen drawing districts.
Speaker 1: But of course the immigrants can't vote. So in America,
Speaker 1: where we have the one person, one vote rather than
Speaker 1: one elector system, you have massive imbalances between the number
Speaker 1: of eligible voters in a congressional district. You know, between
Speaker 1: take a look at some of the immigrant heavy areas
Speaker 1: in the Central Valley that cast like one third as
Speaker 1: many votes as heavy citizen areas. And then you of
Speaker 1: course got the question of children, which you know, last
Speaker 1: time I checked, children can't vote if you have high
Speaker 1: senior areas. High senior areas have more votes per representative
Speaker 1: than areas with high numbers of fans. Is because the
Speaker 1: kids don't vote, but they're still being allocated district What
Speaker 1: do you think about one or both of those to
Speaker 1: be added to the traditional systems to further permit or
Speaker 1: constrain caring meander.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, as you know, for state legislatures, we have
Speaker 3: that variance, and the bottom as far as I can tell,
Speaker 3: hasn't fallen out from democracy, especially if you were to
Speaker 3: part with a strict criteria that you can't split counties
Speaker 3: or municipalities more than you need to, right, because that
Speaker 3: kind of helps do away with the concern well, what
Speaker 3: if you underpopulate the democratic districts or overpopulate the Republican
Speaker 3: ones or whatever. Like, If you're going to vary from
Speaker 3: the one person, one vote criteria has to be for
Speaker 3: a good reason. So yeah, I think I think the
Speaker 3: strict one person, one vote is actually kind of silly.
Speaker 3: I get the motivation for it, but the truth of
Speaker 3: the matter is a congressional district in Rhode Island right
Speaker 3: now has about five hundred and fifty thousand people. Congressional
Speaker 3: district in Delaware has about nine hundred thousand, almost a million.
Speaker 3: We don't have strict one person, one vote. We know
Speaker 3: that the census numbers aren't one hundred percent accurate, so
Speaker 3: it's just a legal fiction. So yeah, I would one
Speaker 3: hundred percent be in favor of adding like the plus
Speaker 3: or minus five percent variants. As for doing it on
Speaker 3: the basis of electors or citizens or you know, whatever
Speaker 3: other basis you can imagine. Yeah, I'm completely I shouldn't
Speaker 3: say completely that I see the argument, and I would
Speaker 3: probably be favorably inclined to our because you do get
Speaker 3: these kind of rotten boroughs where you know, a large
Speaker 3: portion of the electric just is an allowed to vote,
Speaker 3: And I can there are plenty of good philosophical reasons
Speaker 3: not to wait the representational aspect of democracy towards the
Speaker 3: people who have actually made permanent commitments towards the country
Speaker 3: and become citizens. But my feelings on that aren't as
Speaker 3: strong as the one person, one vote, because I do
Speaker 3: think Robert Borke in Tempting of America actually had I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously it's a controversial book, but I think his narrative
Speaker 3: of he was on the commission for Connecticut drawing maps.
Speaker 3: In the first one person, one vote reapportionment, he said,
Speaker 3: it was a nightmare. Like all these things that we
Speaker 3: wanted to consider and had historically considered, we no longer
Speaker 3: could because we were chasing down the rabbit hole of
Speaker 3: getting the population balanced. And I think in a lot
Speaker 3: of perverse ways, the Supreme Court enabled the gerrymandering that
Speaker 3: we have today by taking away a lot of the
Speaker 3: constraints we had on what you could do with one person,
Speaker 3: one vote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the thing is that in one sense, the
Speaker 1: one person, one vote responded to very real problems, you know,
Speaker 1: like the county system in California, where Los Angeles County,
Speaker 1: of multimillion people sent one member of the state Senate
Speaker 1: and a tiny little county or a couple of counties
Speaker 1: combined into one district I had under one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people and had the same representation, Or the state of
Speaker 1: Tennessee that hadn't redrawn its lines in fifty years, so
Speaker 1: that it was meant to prevent cities and their growth
Speaker 1: from dominating the royal areas and the legislatures. But it
Speaker 1: strikes me that you could have gotten rid of those
Speaker 1: imbalances or those injustices without jumping to the one person,
Speaker 1: one vote standard that then becomes ridiculously rigorously applied, at
Speaker 1: least at the congressional level, so that you have a
Speaker 1: false equality that anyone who knows anything about the census
Speaker 1: knows is absolutely fictional.
Speaker 2: From the moment that it's wrong.
Speaker 1: What would you what would you say could be done
Speaker 1: or should be done? Now, some of this stuff is
Speaker 1: Supreme Court's ruling, So it's almost like the Court if
Speaker 1: you were, you know, if you could be jerrymandered into
Speaker 1: being five of the nine justices and write your own
Speaker 1: majority opinion, Sean, what would your majority opinion that would
Speaker 1: establish fair redistricting guidelines if we're going to have single
Speaker 1: member districts actually look like?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think.
Speaker 2: You know I would.
Speaker 3: I would allow deviations from one person, one vote, so
Speaker 3: long as those deviations clearly served some other purpose. So
Speaker 3: one thing that happened when Bernie and I were drawing there,
Speaker 3: there's actually kind of north of the Rappahannock, east of
Speaker 3: the Blue Ridge, there's like a square of counties, and
Speaker 3: if you add them all up, it is almost perfectly
Speaker 3: four districts. It is off by two hundred people. And
Speaker 3: yet we had to go like, find a collection of
Speaker 3: census blocks in Albemarle County that added up to two
Speaker 3: hundred people. So it's just ridiculous, like especially since the
Speaker 3: district's probably the day those districts go into effect because
Speaker 3: of population shifts, they're going to be off by more
Speaker 3: than two hundred people. So you know, you can deviate
Speaker 3: from one person, one vote as long as it's for
Speaker 3: something like you can show like, okay, I'm keeping these
Speaker 3: cities hole in order to do this, okay, And then
Speaker 3: it would be the municipal and county splits rule. Once
Speaker 3: you start drawing in a municipality or a city, you
Speaker 3: have to finish drawing in it, and once you start
Speaker 3: drawing in a county, you have to finish drawing it
Speaker 3: before you can proceed to the next county over. And
Speaker 3: then a compactness criteria. The compactness criteria are tough because
Speaker 3: you know, we have these various measures like RIAC and
Speaker 3: Polsby Popper, but they don't really mean anything, Like a
Speaker 3: ReOC scorer of point three doesn't tell you much. But
Speaker 3: I would spend some time figuring out exactly how I
Speaker 3: wanted to do that. To give map dars some real guidance.
Speaker 3: It might even be an arbitrary number, like your RIOC
Speaker 3: has to be greater than point three, or you can't
Speaker 3: have a deviation of more than fifteen percent in your district.
Speaker 3: ReOC scores absent some compelling reason. But I think you
Speaker 3: do need some sort of compactness definition in there to
Speaker 3: keep people from doing what Elberts Jerry did or Gary
Speaker 3: and stringing together towns in a salamtar. But I want
Speaker 3: to emphasize even that would be better than what we
Speaker 3: have today, where you can just kind of draw, like
Speaker 3: a semiconductor, a string of census blocks to cut through
Speaker 3: an area to get you over to some more democratic votes.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, No, I mean on Dave's redistricting app. I've
Speaker 1: resisted the temptation to break the tracts into Gary manders.
Speaker 1: Don't do that, so you can. You've got them splitting
Speaker 1: precincts and using census blocks and using it as what
Speaker 1: we call them, the business transportation to get you where
Speaker 1: you wanted to be.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Sean, where can my listeners follow your work?
Speaker 3: So there's a couple of places. I'm on Real Clear Politics.
Speaker 3: You can find me on Twitter. It's just sean trendy
Speaker 3: straightforward Twitter handle. You can find me at American Enterprise Institute.
Speaker 3: And finally, if I can advertise myself a little bit,
Speaker 3: you can find my stuff on the Stubborn Thing podcast
Speaker 3: via AI with my co host j cost And.
Speaker 1: What does Stubborn Things address as its regular topic or
Speaker 1: does it have a focus or a theme that animates
Speaker 1: the discussions?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Jay and I both have PhDs, but both
Speaker 3: of us believe that that's one of the least interesting
Speaker 3: aspects of our biographies. Not that a not to dismiss
Speaker 3: a PhD, but some people with those degrees think that
Speaker 3: it makes them to be all end all. We like
Speaker 3: to look at these big historical and policy questions, drawing
Speaker 3: upon our understanding of the literature, but letting our actual
Speaker 3: kind of basic political knowledge and just common sense sometimes
Speaker 3: guide the discussion. And so that's our goal. Sometimes we
Speaker 3: do better than others, but we enjoy it.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: It's aum's wonderful. And one of the things I know
Speaker 1: you're doing is going down and ranking presidents historically. And
Speaker 1: I see you've gotten to Herbert Hoover and I'm looking
Speaker 1: forward to Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nick and James Earl Carter,
Speaker 1: and George W. Bush, who I personally was one of
Speaker 1: the four worst presidents in American history.
Speaker 2: But I think I'm an outlier.
Speaker 3: Not as much as you would think.
Speaker 2: Spoiler alert, Well.
Speaker 1: Good, I won't be completely exiled from polite company well sewn.
Speaker 1: As always, I learn a lot when I talk with
Speaker 1: you and listen to you, and I'm glad that you
Speaker 1: were able to make time for my listeners to learn
Speaker 1: from you, and I look forward to having it back
Speaker 1: on Beyond the polls.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. That's it for
Speaker 2: this week.
Speaker 1: Next week we'll take a look at the Republican Senate
Speaker 1: runoffs in Alabama and Georgia with Cook Political Reports Jessica Taylor.
Speaker 1: Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we
Speaker 1: journey beyond the polls.