HAYDENVILLE — David Daley has been up at the crack of dawn most days over the last several weeks — a strange phenomena for a gerrymandering expert whose knack for the subject is usually called upon once a decade.
He wakes up, goes down to the living room in his Haydenville home, gets on Zoom, and in a matter of minutes he is on an international stage as he goes live on CNN. The rest of his day is followed by interviews on PBS, NPR, and other major news sources, in addition to having his op-eds included in the country’s most prestigious newspapers.
“I’m not used to getting up at 6 and doing TV hits pretty much all day long,” said Daley, having a coffee downtown on Thursday, less than 24 hours after the Texas House of Representatives approved a bill to redraw the state’s congressional maps. The overnight vote passed 88-52. To become official, the Texas State Senate will need to approve the bill before sending it on to Republican Gov. Greg Abbot.
President Donald Trump pushed for the redistricting plan, which could give Republicans five more seats in Congress.
The past weeks have been replete with protesting by Democrats, many of whom say they are “waging war” and will gerrymander in retaliation in states with a Democratic majority. The stakes couldn’t be higher since the Republicans hold a slim majority in the U.S. House, at 219-216, which is why Trump put pressure on Texas to give his party more cushion in the legislative branch.
But the truth of the matter is, says Daley, “Democrats are talking about fighting fire with fire and they’re holding a birthday candle.”
Democrats are talking about fighting fire with fire and they’re holding a birthday candle
Dave Daley
Democrats may be trying to do an eye for an eye, but at the end of the day they’ll be the only ones blind.
Daley, a senior fellow of the nonpartisan FairVote that advocates for just elections, authored the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count,” which has been credited with sparking the modern drive to reform redistricting and end partisan gerrymandering. The book is also the basis for the award-winning documentary, “Slay The Dragon.”
“Democrats have nowhere to go after California. Michigan has an independent commission, you can’t touch Michigan. You have Democratic governors in Illinois and New York talking a very tough game — they can’t back it up,” he said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she’ll be on the front lines of the gerrymandering war, but she can’t touch its maps until 2028 according to the New York State constitution.
“She’s engaging in a war she can’t fight for two years. That’s not the best political strategy,” he said.
Illinois also won’t have much luck in the fight, as the Democrats already control 14 of the state’s 17 seats in the U.S. House. So at the very best, that would mean gaining three seats. And according to Daley, “I’d be really surprised if you could squeeze another seat.”
In Maryland, the state Supreme Court already blocked the attempt to redraw their lines. The governor of Oregon has already put a halt to redistricting.
These scenarios lead Daley to infer: “The Democrats are out of targets. They’re out of ammo. They’re going to lose if they see this as retaliatory. They can’t gerrymander their way out of the gerrymandering problem.”
Daley warns that if the current situation looks like a gerrymandering “Armageddon,” get ready for a gerrymandering “apocalypse” after 2030, because Republicans have all the leverage when it comes to district lines.
“Republicans can keep going after Texas … Ohio, Florida, Missouri, and Indiana have already said they intend to draw new lines,” he said. “Republicans could even go to New Hampshire, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia.”
The stakes are so high for Democratic leadership to gain a majority in Congress because of the powers they’d receive, and Trump is hyper aware of this, which motivated the gerrymandering Texas ahead of next year’s midterms.
“Trump knows very well what happens when Democrats control the House,” he said. “They not only block his legislative agenda, but it opens up the possibility of congressional investigations, subpoena powers, even impeachment. So there’s a real determination to try and hold on to the chamber.”
And Daley said it may not be the answer many want to hear, but regaining the House is the only way out of the current predicament for Democrats.
“I don’t see any way out of this for them other than winning elections in the swing states that remain,” he said. “It’s a really unsatisfying answer for a lot of people who want to fight back.”
Political ‘moneyball’
The story of how we got here begins with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
“In 2008, the nation elects Barack Obama president. And you go back and look at that night, and you’ve got the smartest minds in American politics talking about how Democrats were going to have a generational coalition — that American politics would be transformed by what Obama had built,” said Daley, who’s book Ratf**ked chronicles the story.
While Democrats basked in the moment of history, Republicans were focused on becoming a consequential party. The route to power for them was making an impact by stockpiling seats in state legislatures, which have power over district lines for Congress.
During the 2010 census year, Republicans picked up 110 seats in state legislatures, giving them power over 190 maps. Meanwhile, Democrats could only draw about 40 seats — a huge edge for Republicans when 218 is needed for a majority in the House.
The result? When Obama was up for reelection, his super majority in both the House and Senate crumbled.
In 2012, “We had an election where 1.4 million more voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates. But because of redistricting, Republicans held the House 234 to 201, and essentially Obama’s second term ended on the night that voters awarded it to him.”
The tools that Republicans used to get to where they are today are analytics, similar to the book and movie “Moneyball,” in which the baseball team the Oakland A’s used analytics to keep up with big market baseball teams since the franchise had one of the smallest budgets in the major leagues.
“The computer technology, data, and mapping software that draws these lines has become so precise — the power to draw district lines has become the power to choose winners and losers,” said Daley.
The result is something like inside-out version of representative democracy, in which politicians choose their voters, rather than voters choosing their leaders.
For this reason, Daley said it should be clear how vital the topic of gerrymandering is for the future of free and fair elections.
In fact, the idea of redistricting itself, “ironically enough is about fairness,” he said.
Redistricting occurs every 10 years based on Census results to ensure that there is an equal population in every district. Redistricting only becomes gerrymandering when politicians draw and twist the boundaries for political advantage, said Daley.
Each state has different standards with redistricting, which allows certain states to play with their lines mid-decade, although redrawing the lines are mandatory in all 50 states following a Census.
Daley is opposed to gerrymandering on both sides of the aisle.
“Whenever you have a national congressional matter, actions by any one state ripple outward and affect everybody,” he said. “So Texas, by artificially boosting Republicans hopes of keeping the house, this affects far more than just voters in Texas, which is why California has been so determined to respond and try to counteract this in the middle of the decade.”
According to Daley, “We’d be much better off if we had a national standard and a national solution to a national problem.”
However, the problem is that the Supreme Court stepped back from the issue of gerrymandering in 2019.
“John Roberts, back in 2019, says that gerrymandering is just politics as usual — nothing for the courts to do here,” said Daley.