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We've Been Rat Fucked, and We've Had Enough - Dave Daley was the Editor In Chief for Salon magazine. He also wrote an incredible book titled,
“Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy” Ratfucked reveals the attempt to control elections through gerrymandering, ultimately attempting to, regardless of the candidate, allow 1 party to dominate a regional election based upon party and not the candidate. Le'ts make the middle SEXY!!! Dave, Pete A Turner and Dr. Richard Ledet discuss how our politicians have pulled our country apart, by creating "landslide" districts. #ratfucked #politics #party #democrats #republicans #elections #voters #voterrights Haiku We have been Rat Fucked Get your paws off my freedom Re-district, time NOW Dr. Richard Ledet DeVone Boggan Roger Clinton |
Transcription
Jon Leon Guerrero 0:00
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is David daily. In his career Dave has been the editor in chief of salon com, the CEO and publisher of the Connecticut news project and a writer for The Hartford Courant, where he helped identify Mark felt as the Deep Throat source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone details, and he's been on CNN and NPR. He is now a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the humanities and the Grady school of journalism at the University of Georgia, senior fellow at fair vote, and the author of rat fucked The True Story Behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy, which is the most detailed most informative and undoubtedly the scariest source of information on gerrymandering available now.Transcription
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is David daily. In his career Dave has been the editor in chief of salon com, the CEO and publisher of the Connecticut news project and a writer for The Hartford Courant, where he helped identify Mark felt as the Deep Throat source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone details, and he's been on CNN and NPR. He is now a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the humanities and the Grady school of journalism at the University of Georgia, senior fellow at fair vote, and the author of rat fucked The True Story Behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy, which is the most detailed most informative and undoubtedly the scariest source of information on gerrymandering available now.Transcription
Jon Leon Guerrero 0:00
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is David daily. In his career Dave has been the editor in chief of salon com, the CEO and publisher of the Connecticut news project and a writer for The Hartford Courant, where he helped identify Mark felt as the Deep Throat source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone details, and he's been on CNN and NPR. He is now a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the humanities and the Grady school of journalism at the University of Georgia, senior fellow at fair vote, and the author of rat fucked The True Story Behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy, which is the most detailed most informative and undoubtedly the scariest source of information on gerrymandering available now. Also, to me, the most accurately titled book on our reason elections and voting policies. He's a frequent lecturer on the topic and the recent related court cases. And on ranked choice voting, which he very effectively argues, is the way to elect candidates to represent our citizenry with wide majority support. And speaking of support, hey, do us a favor and support the break it down show with a five star rating on iTunes or Stitcher I Heart Radio or automatic or wherever you listen to us? And be sure to subscribe if you're listening on YouTube and hit that notification bill. Random like MC Hammer. So positive review, five star rating, whatever you can do for us. Give us a hand, please. This episode is co hosted by the always insightful Dr. Rich le de who for our newer listeners is a frequent contributor to all of our missions, and to this show. He's associate professor of political science at Troy University. And we're always lucky to have his input on the machinations of government, justice and society. He is our brother, we love them. And if you're a longtime listener, you do too. If you're just joining us, you're about to and you should go back and listen to his previous appearances with us. And we think you're going to love our guest today on the break it down show for the first time and certainly not the last. Here's Dave daily,
Joel Manzer 2:22
Lions rock productions.
Jay Mohr 2:27
This is Jay Mohr.
Unknown Speaker 2:29
This is Jordan. Dexter from the
Unknown Speaker 2:31
Navy Sebastian youngsters, Rick Marana
stewart copeland 2:33
This is Stewart Copeland,
Skunk Baxter 2:35
and this is a skunk Baxter
Unknown Speaker 2:36
Gabby Reese is Rob bell. This is Johnny Andre
Pete Turner 2:39
and this is Pete a Turner.
Dave Daley 2:43
Hello, I'm David Daley. I'm the author of read fuck while your vote doesn't count and you are listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:51
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Dave Daley 2:57
Yeah, this is awesome. So one of the things that of folks don't know realize that oftentimes Dr. Le de who's my co host today, there's big rich, we talk quite frequently about governance and how to state build and all of these things, because that's what we do as academics as we figure out how to, I guess you would just say nation build. And inevitably, in every single one of these conversations, and this means hundreds of hours of conversations. Dave's work from Rafa comes into our conversation. And since it's super relevant currently with the Supreme Court ruling this past month on gerrymandering, and how to deal with it. And also, I get to be fair, let's just say this to Dave, Dave writes for salon and they're known to be left leaning. But really what we're talking about here, though, is a system of gerrymandering that everybody seems to leverage when they can, and it does kind of it definitely does rat, fuck us. So rich, and I thought we would bring the master on and get into the conversation of what the heck is going on and talk about his new book look on rig that's going to come out here in the fairly near future. So I'm going to kick it over to rich and let's get going.
Rich Ledet 4:05
Anyway, like Dave and I were talking but just before Pete started recording, I teach state local politics. And I've done some research in there, I've got a couple of published papers, I looked at corruption, not necessarily voting, I've used I've used this work in, in my class in my course, because while he's got the ability to tell a story, like only a journalist can, you know, so you can read the academic literature on gerrymandering, or gerrymandering, however you want to say it. And while it interests me as a PhD in political science, it very well may not interest you. So David Bailey comes along and writes this book, red fox, and even while I, first of all, it gives me the chance to say read thought in class. You know, so anytime I got an excuse to drop an F bomb, long as it's in the context of the course, and what we're discussing, it's fine. But he writes this book. I think, other than, you know, I see this as a big problem for representative democracy, something Pete and I've talked about on the show before, man, it's just really mean, it's evil. It's just nasty. it distorts our ideas of democracy, I believe. But what is done in rat fox is really bring to the reader, just men that it's common sense. This is from a journalist perspective, so the writings clean, but there's a lot of context. So that's my intro. Dave, take it, man, what you got for us?
Dave Daley 5:33
Yeah, you know, I mean, I was the editor of salon for many years. And what kind of blew me away was, like, 2013 or so. And it seemed like every day, we were covering some kind of new madness in Washington that seemed entirely new to me, as someone who'd been writing and covering politics for a long time. You know, I mean, it wasn't enough to have a couple of votes to try to repeal Obamacare, had to be 50 of nuts. I grew up in Connecticut, you know, I don't want to walk into, you know, a wade into gun control or anything. But you know, I mean, I thought that after, you know, Sandy Hook, it seems, maybe it was a moment, there was a way to have a conversation about some of these things. And, you know, that didn't happen. And there's, you know, government shutdown after government shutdowns and the extremism and the dysfunction and the gridlock and the brokenness, just it made me ask a really simple question, which was, if Democrats won the white house in 2012, and took the senate back, what happened in the house? How did we get this body and I didn't realize at the time that the democrats had one 1.4 million more votes than Republicans for the house in 2012. And while of course, we don't elect the house via, you know, national popular vote, we don't elect much of anything national popular, but it's still really rare for there to be that disconnect between the power popular vote and control of the body. And I didn't realize it, you know, Pennsylvania, a blue leaning state, bluish purple sent 13 republicans and five democrats are that Ohio, which we always think of as this bellwether, you know, it was a 12 for republican delegation, you know, Michigan, was nine, five, North Carolina 10, three, and I came across something called Red map. redistricting majority project, I found their webpage, which is still up, if you search for red map annual report, you can find it and it was, you know, a real low key webpage look like it had been designed on a Commodore 64. But what it revealed was something completely different in high tech. It was republican strategists patting themselves on the back for this strategy in 2010, of taking over state legislators, investing just a little bit of money in the state races, winning the chambers so that they would have the power to draw the next decades maps in 2011. And then they were crowing about how those maps that provided them a firewall in 2012. And I said, Wait a second, I write for, you know, a left leaning publication. I've never even heard of this. You know, I read the newspaper every day. Now what is this? And it was not being covered the entire sort of, you know, the political science world was not super interested in gerrymandering, I think they thought it was kind of old business and they show you their charts, going back to the, you know, 1950s and suggest, you know, polarization really hasn't changed at all over all this time. And the journalism world is interested in the new idea, the kind of Malcolm Gladwell ism that, you know, allows you to kind of think differently, and they were all enraptured by this book called that the big sort, which suggested that we hit all, you know, sort of ourselves political leaning, and gerrymandering was kind of uncool or I went back into the office, and I said to the, the writers and the editors who worked for me, I was like, you know, I think it might have something to do with gerrymandering. And they looked at me with just pity in their eyes. I was, I was so uncool for talking about gerrymandering, that they were like, no, it's the big sort of, how did the liberal media miss this vast right wing conspiracy?
Rich Ledet 9:23
They go, it wasn't fast.
Dave Daley 9:26
Well, you know, I mean, it wasn't even really a conspiracy. I mean, lays it out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2000. The liberal media and the Democratic establishment fell asleep. They never imagined that this was even possible, then you don't imagination to even see it.
Rich Ledet 9:49
Exactly. And this is, and I'm man, I'm jumping so far ahead of to talk about but you know, it's what you just said. It's, yes, the democrats do credit party totally dropped ball. And what they, I guess forgot about is, you know, yeah, all politics is not local. But man, a whole lot of it still is local. And if you don't pay attention to what's happening at the local in the state level, you know, this is one reason I like to assign your book in my class, because, you know, hey, we're experiencing some of the consequences, by the way, of what happened in 2010, as a result of the Democratic Party not investing itself at the state level. This is why state politics is important. What's going on in Washington is obviously very important. But I mean, yes, you got a town council, you've got school boards, but you've also got this thing in your state capitol. And if you don't participate in elections, if you know, let your voice be heard some kind of way that these are the consequences. And for me, the consequences aren't necessarily although we see things heavily skewed, I believe, favoring the Grand Old Party. Right now, I don't see this as a partisan problem. This is a problem for us as American citizens. This is representation problem. And this should bother Democrats, this should bother Republicans. But I guess it doesn't really bother republicans right now as much because it's favoring them, possibly.
Pete Turner 11:16
Hey, this is Pete real quick, I just want to let you guys know, we are proud to announce our official support of save the brave, a certified nonprofit 501 c three, with a charter of helping veterans with post traumatic stress. Here's how you can help go to save the brave, calm, click on the link on the website. And my recommendation is this subscribe, give them 20 bucks a month, you've got subscriptions that you can turn off right now that you're not using that are $20 a month, swap that out, get involved. Let's help each folks out.
Rich Ledet 11:44
I don't see this as a partisan problem. This is a problem for us as American citizens. This is a representation problem. And this should bother Democrats, this should bother Republicans. But I guess it doesn't really bother republicans right now as much because it's favoring them. Possibly.
Dave Daley 12:01
Yeah, there's a lot there to comment on. That's, I mean, I think you're right about a lot of that. Absolutely. I mean, gerrymandering creates a fundamental skew in our politics. So you kind of severs the bond between the voter and his or her elected representative. And you draw districts that insulate those members from the ballot box, they don't have to be responsive to you, the districts that are drawn to automatically elect a member of one party or another, it shifts the election that matters from the general election to the party primary. And a party primaries tend to be, you know, low turnout, sleepy summer months, that attract only the kind of most 10 or 15%, of the most hardcore partisans who tend to be more extreme, you wind up with, you know, more extreme members of either side packed into districts that that they can't lose elected by a small percentage of the electorate. They get to their state capitol, and they're incentivized to behave in ways that essentially, you know, guard against another primary challenge. They don't have to listen to anybody else. And what you end up with is more extreme legislation that even if citizens of the state disagree with there's very little that they can do about it, you know, I mean, abortion, again, it's not a topic I necessarily want to, you know, dive into, and what if, you know, you're
Pete Turner 13:34
saying you're against it? No, we're just telling jokes. That's all Dave Sorry,
Dave Daley 13:45
go. Exactly, you know, abortion jokes, you know, you see in Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia, where these kind of most restrictive prohibitions have been enacted this year. These are insanely gerrymandered states in which the state legislature is able to pretty much do whatever they want to do, without fear of being defeated at the ballot box. There are polls that all of these states that, you know, clearly show that the citizens even in Alabama and Georgia are against this legislation, it doesn't matter, because in 2016 81% of Georgia, State House districts lacked a major party, challenger, because the districts were drawn so severely to favor one side or the other, and 2018, he got a little bit better with about 67%. That's not good. You know, it's not good for democracy. It's not good for policy that represents people, it's not good for people feeling as if there's even a reason to turn out and go to the polls. The thing that I think is so different about this moment than perhaps gerrymander said the past is that the technology that was used to create the is Jerry matters and the data that's available, and the nature of this polarized moment. And the sophistication of the computer mapping software that is used, the speed and the precision that skilled operatives can draw maps with is unlike any other moment. I mean, here we are, in 2019. And these maps, and all of these states have held strong throughout a pretty good democratic year in 2012, and a really good democratic year 2018, and kind of a, an all over the place here in 2016. In the states that were fundamentally most affected by the toxic partisan gerrymandering that followed 2010 talking about the republican gerrymandering in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the democratic gerrymander in Maryland, they have all held strong, the one
Rich Ledet 15:52
in Maryland's pretty bad, it looks pretty screwed. I'm looking at it right now. But you know what, you can't just look at the one in Maryland and say, but look, the democratic do it, too.
Dave Daley 16:01
You know, I agree.
Rich Ledet 16:03
No, I'm not saying you're saying that. But you know, you just hit on something that and I don't want to put words in your mouth. But did I hear you kind of hit that it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is, in some of these districts, the way they're drawn? Have a D or an R behind their name, it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is, is that accurate? And I don't want to, because Did I hear you say that or not? I don't think
Dave Daley 16:27
I said exactly that. But I think that is true. I mean, in these polarized tons, yeah, will tend to vote for whoever the D or the R is. So when you draw a district that is heavily weighted towards either the D or the art side, the winner of the party primary is odds on to be elected from that district and might not even face and opponent in the general election in a lot of these districts, you know, both for the statehouse as well as for Congress,
Rich Ledet 17:02
because that that's actually jogging my memory a little bit to one of the arguments, actually, from the right, that I heard against this idea of using the the efficiency gap, I believe it is or the using that formula. And I don't know too much about the formula. But one of the arguments against that was it doesn't take into account that maybe the democrats aren't running good candidates,
Dave Daley 17:24
which well, maybe they're not running good candidates, because they can't win the district. So nobody wants to spend 18 months running and nobody will donate to that camp.
Rich Ledet 17:35
I think it's laughable, you know, argument, but you
Dave Daley 17:38
know, I really, it's not a horrible argument. It's just not true. You know, I mean, like, it could be Yeah, you know, I mean, like, okay,
Rich Ledet 17:48
and it certainly doesn't take into account like the context of elections, and also the very nature of the system, that you're explaining the very nature of the system, that rat fact helps explain. And that's a system that can be changed, it can be drawn different, it can be treated differently, because not every state does it this way.
Dave Daley 18:10
Let's ask some of these obvious questions, then. Because Yeah,
yeah, we've gotten in the weeds fast. Right, right. Right. So let me pull
us out of the weeds. And let me ask some of these. So one of the things people often complain about is term limits. And my response normally is vote your person out, just in their term, but people don't want to do that. They don't want to lose their person. Because that's not how we play the game. And then is it possible that we could just self select into districts and district caps out of out of whatever 10,000 people? I mean, because you do want to be represented by your person? I mean, if we're going to do a direct representation, is that a better way to do it? Or do we just lay a grid over the entire nation and say, You fall into grid 20,217? And that's your grid, every systems exploitable? Every parties exploited this system? What the fuck do we do?
Man, you're going to push me even further into the ways that you are pulling us out of the waves? Um, you know, I think the trick there is that we don't live in neat grids. Right, right. And most states, with the exception of like Iowa, you know, aren't neat grids. So, district thing is, as long as we're going to have a districts and as long as we're going to have single member, winner take all districts, you're going to have this problem. So we either think about single member winner take all which I would love to do, but that pulls us even further into, into the weeds probably takes into the forest, or we think about ways they we district better, and perhaps take it out of the hands of those who have the most conf conflicted sense of it, and stop the people from drawing the lines who are also trying to, you know, choose their own voters as we, as we so often here, but I think that something has happened that we have to grapple with in a representative democracy. And that is that we have a two party system in which the demographics have been moving against one of the two parties. So in 2008, Barack Obama is elected president and people say, Boy, the country is changing. And it's it's changing and becoming more colorful and diverse in ways that will probably benefit the Democratic Party for the next 15 to 20 years. And republicans looked at this and they said, Yeah, you're you're right, you know, they, they did an autopsy. And they said, we have to figure out ways to, you know, talk to the, you know, growing new communities in this in this in this country, and to communicate that we're listening to them, and we have ideas to, you know, make their lives better, and that our policies would would work for them. And then there were also these strategists who are saying, Ah, that's not going to be the way we do this. We could do something else, we could change the rules of the system, we could change the very maps themselves and district ourselves into power, do that for at least a decade, on perhaps during that time, some of those growing new communities start doing better. And as people improve economically, they started voting for Republicans, and perhaps, if we can fake our way through the 2010, is based on disrupting, we get to the other side of this, and we don't have to really change that much. And that was the strategy that they went with and double down on. And it's fundamentally anti authoritarian. And it's done devastating things to our politics over the course of the last decade. And what we see now in the fight over the citizenship question, and seems to me to be a pretty clear republican strategy to try to shift redistricting and 2021 to citizen voting age population, rather than total population and state legislators is growing effort to change the rules to keep a shrinking section of the country in charge. And that calls into question the very legitimacy of the system itself. And it puts a lot of constitutional pressure on that system. And I don't know how long it functions before. People, you know, I'm not suggesting people are trying to be in the streets. But you know, I do wonder how long you can go, in which the side with more votes continuously doesn't hold power in state legislatures in Washington, in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, until the very system, legitimacy gets questioned. And I think a Frankenstein's monster was really unleashed on our politics in 2010. And we are living with the consequences of it, I can
Rich Ledet 23:29
hint at what's going to continue to happen, people will continue to be to feel disenfranchised, they will continue to feel like their voices are not heard, they will continue to feel like something you said you felt when you first started with the red flag project, which is we don't see anything happening. You know, that's what's going to continue to happen, and people are going to continue to lose a sense of efficacy. And right now you got a situation this is for all my partisan friends out there listening, you got a situation where the republican party has made it look like they're a lot more popular than they really are. And we are seeing the results of some of that in, you know why there's no movement on the immigration and why we want to build a stupid wall instead of actually fixing it, because that's a simplistic solution there. For any listeners, it's too simplistic. There was a bipartisan consensus on this issue. There was very recent,
Dave Daley 24:21
I think there still is I think that our system is, you know, there's a bipartisan consensus on a lot of things, even these things that we think are so hot button and controversial, whether it's health care, ration, until we bring back wishing lots of things. And we've simply changed the rules of the electoral game in such a way that we can't bring those solutions forward and they can't win.
Rich Ledet 24:53
But you know, when I when I talk about things like that, you know, I do live down here in Alabama, when I talk about things like that I get called a little tarde. Yeah. And I get told, you know, I get told things about, you know, trickle down economics and about, you know, about the right to life and all this bullshit that aren't reality from what I see, you know, but we have politics that's driven by an extreme. And you can have an extreme on both ends. I just, of course, name on the right right now. I want Pete to jump in. Because Pete has been making an argument that part of our problem is we need to make the middle sexy again.
Pete Turner 25:30
Hey, this is Pete Turner from lions rock productions, we create podcasts around here. And if you your brand, or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me, I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable, that scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown show. com Let me help. I want to hear about it.
Rich Ledet 25:52
I want Pete to jump in. Because Pete has been making argument that part of our problem is we need to make the middle sexy again.
Dave Daley 25:59
Huh. Yeah. And this is one of the things that I did I wanted to say was, every party thinks they have a mandate. Right. And so we'll go back further back like President Bush, the younger, at his second term beginning is like I've got a mandate to fix up security. Everybody claims they have a mandate. Right. But the reality is hard to make that mandate pay off for a variety of reasons. We've had gridlock since not since President Obama. But before President Bush and the last term of President Clinton, we've had gridlock has been relatively normal. It's gotten worse, it's gotten more cataclysmic, but I think a lot of our problem is that we're too focused on which party is winning or dying, or whatever it is, and less on how do we gather people to because we have an immigration problem, we can disagree on the means and the ways but we have an immigration problem, and it's not going to get better, we're not going to get rid of ice and customs. You know, we have to have some kind of control over the insanity. But also, I like to think of integration like a funnel, we want to bring a whole lot of people in, but then it gets choked down real fast, because we don't provision the processing of people through so they're encouraged to go around the funnel, because that's what desperate people do. But people were like, forget it. The other thing I wanted to say and put this into the conversation is regardless of party, there are 10s of millions of people that are going to disagree. On no matter what we do 10s of millions of people, maybe even 100 million people in this nation, I feel disenfranchised I vote but I choose to exercise my rights by being more involved by having these conversations by you know, getting on different committees and doing things because I value my rights. And that's how I can actually influence something because I don't feel like a candidate hardly ever comes along that represents what I think is okay, so how do we make the middle sexier so we can encourage some other people to run because if I ran for First off, I'm completely unelectable, let's just be honest about that. But apart from my past poor decision making. There's not a guy like our lady like me, who's in the middle of like, stoked to run like, yeah, I'm gonna run independent. And I'm not saying we need because I've been to Iraq, and we don't want 55 different political parties, because everybody's pissed off. They have the magic of having a balance, we have three different documents that protect three different kinds of freedom, we seem to keep it mostly in inside the bounds of some kind of sanity, although we do run up against the wall and drag the ship down the side of that insane barrier. But, Dave, what do we do? How do we balance and get more folks in the middle where we can say, let's figure out how to reduce gun violence in schools? Let's figure out how to deal with immigration. Let's, by the way, Social Security is still a problem. Let's figure out how to deal with that. You know, we seems like we have this panic wheel that we spin and go. Now we're worried about abortion, not that abortion is done an important topic, but we spin the wheel and we spin the wheel and we spin the wheel. And at some point you you know, we all get fatigued and all of this stuff.
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I mean, I think one of the things that redistricting in such an extreme way has done, it's gotten rid of the middle. You know, I mean, if I could point if only I had my charts with me, that would make the middle sexy. Again, if you look at what's happened to our congressional districts over the last 20 to 30 years, but what's accelerated in the 2000s, in the 2000, and 10s, is that there are more and more districts than ever, that are called landslide districts that were won by a Team Blue Team Red by upwards of 25%. And there are fewer and fewer of the competitive swing seats in the middle that are within 5% that are actually able to kind of swing one way or the other. And as that has happened, what you've seen in the voting records is you used to, there used to be democrats who were more conservative than some Republicans and some Republicans who are more liberal than some Democrats, and those were kind of the centrist bridge builders in the middle, who could be elected from some of those of those seats, and those people are gone. Because that those districts are gone, you know, they didn't disappear. Because that they don't exist anymore, they disappear, because they were, you know, an animal that lived in certain terrain, and they can't live in other
Rich Ledet 30:32
the environment is as no shapes for them, that they draw
Dave Daley 30:40
certain environment, and that environment doesn't exist anymore. So they are extinct. And we made them extinct. They don't have to be politicians in all of these states made decisions when they were drawing these districts that led to the extinction of these folks. And so, I think we have to take some responsibility for that we can solve that through, you know, more responsible a district thing that does a better job of paying attention to actual criteria of holding together communities of interest and actually representing the will of the voters and being attention to competitiveness and continuity, and all of these, you know, important factors, or we can try to get around that by using tools like ranked choice voting, um, you know, I mean, imagine if we had, you know, a system in which four or five parties could run, but you actually had a voting mechanism, that meant that the winner was always going to have more than 50% of the vote. So if you could put an end to pluralities, which is something ranked choice would do. I mean, say you combined ranked choice with, you know, larger multi member districts, which you know, works really, really well in states around the country and countries around the world, you know, and those bodies, you get rid of the power of those individuals specific lines to sort of control destiny on and then you actually empower voters in such a way that you would see republicans elected from the northeast, and democrats elected across the south, all kinds of third parties and centrists and in places where, you know, that was possible and of interest, it just seems like there's, we have to be creative in this moment. You know, I mean, we talked about states being, you know, laboratories for a democracy, it seems to me like they become meth labs of democracy, of late, maybe what we have to do is kind of become creative again, and, you know, open ourselves up to some ideas, and new systems that actually encourage the building of Coalition's and majorities and then allow those majorities to actually have a majority of seats again,
Rich Ledet 33:12
well, I would like to see a little more actual competition instead of some of this fake competition that we're talking about. And I guess one thing that I find really, I'm sitting here laughing, to myself just so ironic that some of the same people who really, really like competition in their markets, they don't really like it in their politics, you know, that they've rigged the politics to get rid of the competition. And it's this very lack of competition within our politics that allows the extreme So hey, all you people on the right, you really want to know, you look at the AO seas of the world and your left wing extremists, guess what, there's more on the way, because the right wing extreme has been created. And the same tools that have been used to create what we're seeing right now. You know, the modern day culture warrior movement, and you know, this pelvic politics for us that we're seeing instead of fixing damn infrastructure, figuring out what to do with education, the environment, immigrations, stupid wars, etc, etc, the stuff that we really agree on. So by the way, keep pushing it, keep pushing it right wing, because the left wing backlash is going to be even more organized. And you helped write the books. So you know, it's coming. And it's coming quick, because the youth, this demographic shift that the old, white male intelligentsia that runs the Republican Party, they fear it, well, they're not going to be able to stop it, they can control it for a little while. But I don't like this, because we have a system that that needs to kind of ebb and flow. And it doesn't need, we don't need to be walling up all of this competition and politics.
Dave Daley 34:46
And that's what district thing is done. It's taking the ebb and the flow. And, you know, our politics should Evan flow. You know, I mean, those voters in Wisconsin, in 2008, 10, elected republicans in a republican landslide. So those Republicans should have had the ability to govern, except one of the things they did in 2011 was they drew the maps that entrench themselves in power for a decade. And when in 2012, voters came out and said, You know, we're not so in love with what you did in the last couple years, we'd like to go another way, nothing changed. So it should have flowed back the other way in 2012. And then in 2014, a big republican year should have won it back. And they would have under, you know, competitive maps. And in 2016, which was kind of all over the place, it would have been a pretty competitive year, probably in Wisconsin, right? The presidential was was 17,000 votes or something. And then 2018, when 200,000 more people go for the Democratic candidates than the Republican candidates, it would have gone the other way. Instead, there's 200,000 people, a majority of 200,000, people still lead to Republican majority in the Wisconsin assembly of 6336. And democrats picked up one seat, and that puts a lot of pressure on a system, I think, then there's nothing you can do to change it, boy, that that starts to sound more like, you know, it's not it's not a
Rich Ledet 36:17
democracy, like we think of democracy. And I've, I am steeped in the PhD version of democracy. But there's the also the democracy that we as American citizens think of, right? It's not just an academic level,
Dave Daley 36:31
and it's not the debate of it's a republic. or this or that it's a majority of people ought to be able to reflect their will at the ballot box. And that that ought to mean something. And when it doesn't mean anything anymore, that's not really what we've come to expect.
Rich Ledet 36:51
And when you look at some of the NAT, like, look at national politics, those things that went down in Wisconsin, the bad Well, good example of a bad thing, but they are now sending more republicans from what's really a purple state, mind you, they're sending a lot more Republicans to deal with national level issues than they should be. And that's, that's twisted, because now our national politics is looking like it's a lot more. And that's Yeah.
Dave Daley 37:21
Wisconsin only sends an eight person delegation. So it's, you know, it's five, three. So Wisconsin is not as twisted as, as Pennsylvania, which had been 13, five Ohio, 12. for Michigan, which for a long time was nine five, but I mean, I think the best example of this is North Carolina, on you know, it pretty competitive state. It goes back and forth, the Democratic and Republican governors, but it was, you know, 10, three, for a long, long that there's the open seat because of the voter fraud in 2018, but has been 10. Three for, you know, a long time. And it's not just that it's a 10. Three skew. It's the kind of 10 three, you know, it's it's the it's the kind of representatives that a gerrymander district creates. And my favorite example of this is Mark Meadows, who represents the western part of North Carolina is the 10th or the 11th. And I'm blanking, it's one of those two. So the western mountains of North Carolina on are pretty conservative. That's where Eric Rudolph went to hide, except you've got the biggest city in the western part of the state is Asheville, which is completely hippie liberal, you know, so it's an interesting electoral cluster, right? How do you represent that part of the state and throughout the 2000s, it was a swing district that went kind of back and forth, there was a Republican, and then you had one of the most conservative democrats in the house, former football player named Heath Shuler, who represented that district for a long time. And when the Republicans took over in in 2011, they were determined to draw a 10 three map I mean, David Lewis, the state rep. In charge of District thing there has famously said I want to 10 three map because I don't think I can draw on 11 to map. So they crack Asheville in half. That's how you do it, you know, there's two ways of gerrymandering, there's a cracking and packet and impact, you can either pack all the other side's votes in as few seats as possible, or you can crack them in half and just dilute them enough so that they can't elect a member and, and what they did in Nashville was they kind of drew a line right across the middle of the city. They said, half of you hippies over here, other half of you hippies over there,
Rich Ledet 39:34
now you're voting with the conservatives. And
Dave Daley 39:36
now you got Patrick McHenry representing half of you and Mark Meadows representing the other half, you know, good luck with that. And that always wins. I mean, metals have been a sandwich shop owner in western North Carolina. And he runs on a platform of sending Barack Obama back to Kenya or wherever it is, he comes from, you can go on YouTube and find his campaign rallies. They're amazing, you know, and Mark Meadows represents Asheville, this kind of hippie vegetarian enclave in the mountains, and they can't do squat about it. Mark Meadows doesn't like john banner anymore than he likes. Brock Obama, it's meadows, who goes to Washington forces, the 2013, shut down polls, the parliamentary motion of vacate the chair that that leads to painter stepping down and paul ryan coming in. He's now the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, which is probably the most powerful caucus in the house when the republicans were in power. So it's fundamentally skewed, not only the nature of representation, but the kind of member who can get elected, and then how they behave. Once they get to Washington,
Rich Ledet 40:53
it's really open the door for people that aren't states, women and statesmen, you know, people who I think, have a fundamental lack of understanding about how our political system supposed to
Dave Daley 41:04
work, they go to represent a small sliver of the population rather than everybody and the system is set up in such a way that they're able to do that and get away with it.
Rich Ledet 41:16
Well, and they want to go in advance specific issues. But you know, under this overarching ideological agenda that they feel is correct, when the vast majority of American citizens aren't so neatly, you know, put into these ideological boxes,
Dave Daley 41:31
whether on the left or the right,
Rich Ledet 41:32
no, no, I'm pretty damn liberal when it comes to domestic stuff. But you catch me in a foreign policy discussion to the right of john bolton. So, you know, we're not so neatly stacked, but man, it really looks like our representation is it's not the way it's supposed to be doesn't work.
Dave Daley 41:51
Hey, Dave, how does California or the other hippie know good liberal states do in terms of their own internal gerrymandering, because there's a lot of conservative folks, hell, we have a whole state here in California, the state of Jefferson or Jackson, where the hell it's called, you know, where it's very, very, very conservative. So how do the more liberal states perform in terms of how they district?
Yeah, I mean, California, turned it over to an independent commission back in in 2010. And that commission is not a pretty reasonable job. It's funny, I mean, the democrats and the republicans fought against a lot of ways. Um, I mean, Nancy Pelosi, put, you know, millions into, into trying to stop this. California is this weird, fascinating beast. I mean, in the 19, in the 1980s, they had a congressman, Congressman Burton, who was always the guy who essentially drew all of the maps, and he just had this intuitive computer brain to be able to do this. And he would call the district's his contributions to modern art. And they would essentially take care of all of the incumbents and more Democrats than Republicans, but it was a real kind of incumbent protection scheme, he would, you know, draw a nice, safe district for his brother that would connect these communities that only had, you know, water between them. And he draw this and be like, hope my brother knows how to swim. You know, and in 2000, I mean, Karl Rove and Nancy Pelosi had a conversation, and they said, well, as long as it gets divvied up in this number, and it protects all of our people, we don't really care what the individual lines look like, as long as it's, you know, make it be 3524, or whatever the actual number was. And there were reformers in California who were driven nuts by this on that there's actually a story of the California legislature had finally agreed on a redistricting proposal that would take this out of the hands of the politicians. And as the story goes, as they were walking the bill from the Senate to the house to file it, oops, we lost it couldn't be found? Well, I guess what the try again, next session, guys, you know, so it's crazy. And so so finally, in 2010, that they passed this independent commission. And, you know, I'm a California republican party has gotten probably a little bit more extreme than the republicans in the state on and I think that there were a lot of Republican moderates in California who were hoping that this would pass, thinking that it might kind of pull the republicans back into a more moderate place, which is why shorts and Egger was behind it, and why kind of some of the republican money got behind it. It didn't exactly turn out that way for them, I think. But it's a pretty solid commission in that it requires Democrats, Republicans and independents, it requires them to sort of tour the state and, and do hundreds of meetings and listen to a lot of concern about kind of what a community of interest is kind of what ought to be held together. And then they have to draw maps that everybody agrees on. So the democrats and independents can, you know, team up together and, and screw the republicans or the Republicans, the democrats can team up and screw the independence, but you have to have a super majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents, if you want to pass a set of maps. And then at the end of the process, it's this, the, the group has to actually justify all of the choices that they made, and the lines that they drew and explain why they did it. So I think that's a, you know, a pretty good system. You know, it's it's not perfect, it's not foolproof, there's, you know, been stories written about, you know, various ways that, you know, Democrats may have tried to, again, that system, there will always be efforts to kind of game the system, anything is political is disrupting, is going to be gamed, but it's Can you set up enough kind of, you know, tests and traps along the way that try to force some some fairness onto the process. And I think that there are clearly ways to do that. And a lot of these commission states are starting to kind of figure out what they are. Anytime you come up with a couple of those things. Of course, the politicians figure out what they are, and then they figure out how to game the next time. So you have to be responsive and ready to kind of move on it
Rich Ledet 46:32
and let the governor appoint the people on the commission. session, nobody gets Yeah, he's on the commission. But it's still a it's a good first step, I think, because what it does is it takes all of the drawing all of the power to draw away from the same people who are in those districts representing those districts.
Dave Daley 46:53
Like there are awful commissions out there, right. I mean, I'm sure the commission in Arizona is five people and the democrats appoint to the republicans appoint to and then there's one fifth person who comes through the state of appellate court, a personnel process, who's supposed to be an independent, who's supposed to have the job of keeping all of this partisanship in check. And in reality, both sides do is they try to sneak in that system.
Rich Ledet 47:21
I want that job. Yeah.
Dave Daley 47:23
You know, I mean, like, that's a lousy condition. There are conditions in New Jersey and Washington state that are essentially incumbent protection boards. Those aren't commissions that work on. And to get back to the question you asked me before I launched on a 10 minute, soliloquy about the the California commission. But yeah, I mean, a Democrat, you know, I mean, I'm talking to you from the People's Republic of Massachusetts, which, you know, has, has got a republican governor, but hasn't elected a republican to the House of Representatives in you know, 20 years. Right. And it's a nine oh, state. And that's, you know, that's a bullshit, I think, is the technical term. And some of the problems that the republicans have up here in New England where they I don't think they have a single member of the House. There may be one, not from Rhode Island, not from Connecticut, not from Massachusetts, not from Maine, not from Vermont. Maybe it's a split delegation in New Hampshire. I don't, I don't know, you know, some of that is that the party has gone too far. Right. Some of it is that we've polarized so much that no one's willing to consider another candidate. But I mean, I grew up here in the age of, you know, Lowell weicker and Jacob Javits and sort of, you know, the idea that there were, you know, centrists and a good minded independent folks of both parties who people kind of stood up and voted for, and we've distributed a lot of that intention out of our politics.
We're coming up on the end of the hour here, and I just wanted to save this thanks for coming on, man. Because this, you know, there are these things that we can deal with, you know, we can improve our state commissions, we all want to be represented better. What are the things that were just taught me about democracy is that you don't get what you want, you get what you can tolerate. And you participate in in voting sorry, everybody, that ain't good enough, like you have to do more, if you want to get more of your way. Voting is everybody's decided for you. And you're left with these two or three choices. So get in front of that process by getting involved. And I promise you, the government does want your involvement. There's ways to volunteer, you can go get on someone staff. So let's just say that, first of all, but in terms of redistricting and gerrymandering, this is not a left or right owned problem. It's everybody. I mean, we have to deal with these things as a body and make the sexy middle happen so that people can do things. And though Dave works for a hippie, no good publication, like salon, you didn't hear all that come out of his mouth, what you heard was a reasonable person who wants us to be represented more fairly, by who we all are in our specific area. And I've got all day for that, you know, so let's stop getting distracted by which party we're dealing with. And let's start to understand each other a little more and hear from one another. So we can understand, like, you may be pro life, maybe you are against murdering babies, I've got time for you to say that. I've totally have time for that. I also have time for a woman to say I want to take care of my own body. I don't want the government doing it. I don't know what the answer is. There's a moral conundrum there. But I'm okay with the conversation. As long as we're actually having a conversation. If we're just yelling at each other, everybody shaking their fists, then I'm just gonna get in the middle and wait for everybody to chill out and kind of meet in the middle and figure out what we can solve whether it's immigration. I mean, gosh, I thought abortion was done. But apparently, we're still having that conversation, on and on and on. Right. So these conversations are great. And Dave, I really appreciate how you handle everything, because it's reasonable. And that's what I'm looking forward is how do we have reasonable conversation so we can see the light of somebody don't have to agree when rich and I were in Afghanistan running around, we see the culture, we don't have to, you know, love it, but we have to abide that it exists for a reason. So there's a whole lot of us, there's over 300 million of us. And there are more people coming here all the time. So we're getting more diverse, not less, and it's well past time that we start to slow down and and listen to one another. And maybe we can't solve problems today. But we can if we start listening and looking for the simplest things that we can do.
Rich Ledet 51:34
You know, Pete The other thing, too, that I to jump on that try to close up close this out, is there was a couple of issues that came up during this conversation, abortion gun rights. And Dave was quick to say, Hey, I don't want to go down there. That's not necessarily an issue based current political issue based conversation. I mean, gerrymandering is an issue, but the conversation we're having is about the structure. And it's about the way that system that we all benefit from, you know, left wing, right wing, it doesn't matter. We're all in the same boat, man. You know, so what we're having a conversation with, we're having a conversation about the structure, and the structure is rigged right now. And and what that means is the outcomes are not fair to the most of us. And that's really what I think the most simplistic conceptualization of what democracy like, well, what people want out of democracy is some kind of fairness. You know, so we'll see, maybe the Supreme Court will take this up in 30 years, I don't know, again, take it up again. But, you know, we're talking about the structure of our system. And this is why this is not a republican or democratic problem. This is a United States citizen issue. And if you care, doesn't matter how you feel about abortion, or gay rights or guns or doesn't matter. What you need to be concerned about is that your system is producing unjust outcomes, because it's got input that are flawed and biased, is because there's this problem with the structure that we the voter, I think we let this happen to begin with, you know, and that's my critique of American political culture for right now. I wipe my hands.
Pete Turner 53:16
Any final words? Dave, it's up to you to close this out.
Dave Daley 53:19
That's a lot of pressure. I'm, since I've been so reasonable all this time, maybe I should be less reasonable. Do it man. Here's my concern. And I agree with much of what you said here. But I think that we are, I think we're entering a more dangerous moment than that. And I think that the system is rigged, and that the inputs are the problem. And that, for a long time, this has been both the democratic and the Republican Party problem. What I worry about is that we've politicized the very nature of a democracy issues. And I think that that is really, really dangerous and ugly, and can't lead us in a good way. And what we've seen gerrymandered legislators do is make it harder for people to vote and that, yeah, Republicans on and I think I can say Republicans, because then 24 of the 25 states that have been doing this, that's who did it. So you know, I'm not trying to pick on either side, it's just it's just that's kind of that's been the strategy.
Rich Ledet 54:39
Simply speaking man, you could say that
Dave Daley 54:42
on, you know, is, is try to put up barriers between people and the ballot box in any number of ways. That can be voter ID that can be eliminating days of early voting, it can be you know, closing precincts, again, can be any number of, of these things. And it leads to situations in which people are trying to hold back the will of the people in artificial ways. And that just, you know, you saw it in 2018. Um, and, and that's what the new book is, is about, it's about kind of all of these citizen movements around the country, behind, you know, non partisan issues behind redistricting behind, you know, felon voting rights in Florida, which I think is one of the most amazing, I mean, that's, it's one of the, you know, great civil rights stories of our time, you know, 1.4 million people give them their right to vote back and Florida after finishing up their prison sentences, getting their civic voice back and 64% of Floridians. So Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, in a year that Republicans elected republican governor and a republican US Senator, you know, everybody kind of got behind this idea, because they all knew somebody who had been in that in that position. And all 1.4 million of these people weren't Democrats. You know, it was not a partisan scheme. It was it was a fairness scheme that almost two thirds of people backed, and then a gerrymandered legislature. Guts it and essentially adds a poll tax. Yeah, takes it away. You know, you see in Missouri, you see in Michigan, where citizens, you know, I mean, Missouri is a red state and the Michigan's kind of a purple state and the citizens in both of those places tried to solve the redistricting through independent commissions and, and various means, and the legislators in both states come back, you know, weeks later, and that's how little these gerrymandered legislators have to care about what 60% of their citizens want to do is they just come back and they try to override it and got it. We're heading into a dangerous anti majority Attarian place. And if we can't find a way to make these small d democracy, issues matter to everybody. Again, I don't know how we talk about the bigger problems if we can all agree on the need to have our voices heard, and for elections to fundamentally
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Hey, this is john Leon Guerrero. Our guest today is David daily. In his career Dave has been the editor in chief of salon com, the CEO and publisher of the Connecticut news project and a writer for The Hartford Courant, where he helped identify Mark felt as the Deep Throat source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone details, and he's been on CNN and NPR. He is now a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the humanities and the Grady school of journalism at the University of Georgia, senior fellow at fair vote, and the author of rat fucked The True Story Behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy, which is the most detailed most informative and undoubtedly the scariest source of information on gerrymandering available now. Also, to me, the most accurately titled book on our reason elections and voting policies. He's a frequent lecturer on the topic and the recent related court cases. And on ranked choice voting, which he very effectively argues, is the way to elect candidates to represent our citizenry with wide majority support. And speaking of support, hey, do us a favor and support the break it down show with a five star rating on iTunes or Stitcher I Heart Radio or automatic or wherever you listen to us? And be sure to subscribe if you're listening on YouTube and hit that notification bill. Random like MC Hammer. So positive review, five star rating, whatever you can do for us. Give us a hand, please. This episode is co hosted by the always insightful Dr. Rich le de who for our newer listeners is a frequent contributor to all of our missions, and to this show. He's associate professor of political science at Troy University. And we're always lucky to have his input on the machinations of government, justice and society. He is our brother, we love them. And if you're a longtime listener, you do too. If you're just joining us, you're about to and you should go back and listen to his previous appearances with us. And we think you're going to love our guest today on the break it down show for the first time and certainly not the last. Here's Dave daily,
Joel Manzer 2:22
Lions rock productions.
Jay Mohr 2:27
This is Jay Mohr.
Unknown Speaker 2:29
This is Jordan. Dexter from the
Unknown Speaker 2:31
Navy Sebastian youngsters, Rick Marana
stewart copeland 2:33
This is Stewart Copeland,
Skunk Baxter 2:35
and this is a skunk Baxter
Unknown Speaker 2:36
Gabby Reese is Rob bell. This is Johnny Andre
Pete Turner 2:39
and this is Pete a Turner.
Dave Daley 2:43
Hello, I'm David Daley. I'm the author of read fuck while your vote doesn't count and you are listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:51
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Dave Daley 2:57
Yeah, this is awesome. So one of the things that of folks don't know realize that oftentimes Dr. Le de who's my co host today, there's big rich, we talk quite frequently about governance and how to state build and all of these things, because that's what we do as academics as we figure out how to, I guess you would just say nation build. And inevitably, in every single one of these conversations, and this means hundreds of hours of conversations. Dave's work from Rafa comes into our conversation. And since it's super relevant currently with the Supreme Court ruling this past month on gerrymandering, and how to deal with it. And also, I get to be fair, let's just say this to Dave, Dave writes for salon and they're known to be left leaning. But really what we're talking about here, though, is a system of gerrymandering that everybody seems to leverage when they can, and it does kind of it definitely does rat, fuck us. So rich, and I thought we would bring the master on and get into the conversation of what the heck is going on and talk about his new book look on rig that's going to come out here in the fairly near future. So I'm going to kick it over to rich and let's get going.
Rich Ledet 4:05
Anyway, like Dave and I were talking but just before Pete started recording, I teach state local politics. And I've done some research in there, I've got a couple of published papers, I looked at corruption, not necessarily voting, I've used I've used this work in, in my class in my course, because while he's got the ability to tell a story, like only a journalist can, you know, so you can read the academic literature on gerrymandering, or gerrymandering, however you want to say it. And while it interests me as a PhD in political science, it very well may not interest you. So David Bailey comes along and writes this book, red fox, and even while I, first of all, it gives me the chance to say read thought in class. You know, so anytime I got an excuse to drop an F bomb, long as it's in the context of the course, and what we're discussing, it's fine. But he writes this book. I think, other than, you know, I see this as a big problem for representative democracy, something Pete and I've talked about on the show before, man, it's just really mean, it's evil. It's just nasty. it distorts our ideas of democracy, I believe. But what is done in rat fox is really bring to the reader, just men that it's common sense. This is from a journalist perspective, so the writings clean, but there's a lot of context. So that's my intro. Dave, take it, man, what you got for us?
Dave Daley 5:33
Yeah, you know, I mean, I was the editor of salon for many years. And what kind of blew me away was, like, 2013 or so. And it seemed like every day, we were covering some kind of new madness in Washington that seemed entirely new to me, as someone who'd been writing and covering politics for a long time. You know, I mean, it wasn't enough to have a couple of votes to try to repeal Obamacare, had to be 50 of nuts. I grew up in Connecticut, you know, I don't want to walk into, you know, a wade into gun control or anything. But you know, I mean, I thought that after, you know, Sandy Hook, it seems, maybe it was a moment, there was a way to have a conversation about some of these things. And, you know, that didn't happen. And there's, you know, government shutdown after government shutdowns and the extremism and the dysfunction and the gridlock and the brokenness, just it made me ask a really simple question, which was, if Democrats won the white house in 2012, and took the senate back, what happened in the house? How did we get this body and I didn't realize at the time that the democrats had one 1.4 million more votes than Republicans for the house in 2012. And while of course, we don't elect the house via, you know, national popular vote, we don't elect much of anything national popular, but it's still really rare for there to be that disconnect between the power popular vote and control of the body. And I didn't realize it, you know, Pennsylvania, a blue leaning state, bluish purple sent 13 republicans and five democrats are that Ohio, which we always think of as this bellwether, you know, it was a 12 for republican delegation, you know, Michigan, was nine, five, North Carolina 10, three, and I came across something called Red map. redistricting majority project, I found their webpage, which is still up, if you search for red map annual report, you can find it and it was, you know, a real low key webpage look like it had been designed on a Commodore 64. But what it revealed was something completely different in high tech. It was republican strategists patting themselves on the back for this strategy in 2010, of taking over state legislators, investing just a little bit of money in the state races, winning the chambers so that they would have the power to draw the next decades maps in 2011. And then they were crowing about how those maps that provided them a firewall in 2012. And I said, Wait a second, I write for, you know, a left leaning publication. I've never even heard of this. You know, I read the newspaper every day. Now what is this? And it was not being covered the entire sort of, you know, the political science world was not super interested in gerrymandering, I think they thought it was kind of old business and they show you their charts, going back to the, you know, 1950s and suggest, you know, polarization really hasn't changed at all over all this time. And the journalism world is interested in the new idea, the kind of Malcolm Gladwell ism that, you know, allows you to kind of think differently, and they were all enraptured by this book called that the big sort, which suggested that we hit all, you know, sort of ourselves political leaning, and gerrymandering was kind of uncool or I went back into the office, and I said to the, the writers and the editors who worked for me, I was like, you know, I think it might have something to do with gerrymandering. And they looked at me with just pity in their eyes. I was, I was so uncool for talking about gerrymandering, that they were like, no, it's the big sort of, how did the liberal media miss this vast right wing conspiracy?
Rich Ledet 9:23
They go, it wasn't fast.
Dave Daley 9:26
Well, you know, I mean, it wasn't even really a conspiracy. I mean, lays it out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2000. The liberal media and the Democratic establishment fell asleep. They never imagined that this was even possible, then you don't imagination to even see it.
Rich Ledet 9:49
Exactly. And this is, and I'm man, I'm jumping so far ahead of to talk about but you know, it's what you just said. It's, yes, the democrats do credit party totally dropped ball. And what they, I guess forgot about is, you know, yeah, all politics is not local. But man, a whole lot of it still is local. And if you don't pay attention to what's happening at the local in the state level, you know, this is one reason I like to assign your book in my class, because, you know, hey, we're experiencing some of the consequences, by the way, of what happened in 2010, as a result of the Democratic Party not investing itself at the state level. This is why state politics is important. What's going on in Washington is obviously very important. But I mean, yes, you got a town council, you've got school boards, but you've also got this thing in your state capitol. And if you don't participate in elections, if you know, let your voice be heard some kind of way that these are the consequences. And for me, the consequences aren't necessarily although we see things heavily skewed, I believe, favoring the Grand Old Party. Right now, I don't see this as a partisan problem. This is a problem for us as American citizens. This is representation problem. And this should bother Democrats, this should bother Republicans. But I guess it doesn't really bother republicans right now as much because it's favoring them, possibly.
Pete Turner 11:16
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Rich Ledet 11:44
I don't see this as a partisan problem. This is a problem for us as American citizens. This is a representation problem. And this should bother Democrats, this should bother Republicans. But I guess it doesn't really bother republicans right now as much because it's favoring them. Possibly.
Dave Daley 12:01
Yeah, there's a lot there to comment on. That's, I mean, I think you're right about a lot of that. Absolutely. I mean, gerrymandering creates a fundamental skew in our politics. So you kind of severs the bond between the voter and his or her elected representative. And you draw districts that insulate those members from the ballot box, they don't have to be responsive to you, the districts that are drawn to automatically elect a member of one party or another, it shifts the election that matters from the general election to the party primary. And a party primaries tend to be, you know, low turnout, sleepy summer months, that attract only the kind of most 10 or 15%, of the most hardcore partisans who tend to be more extreme, you wind up with, you know, more extreme members of either side packed into districts that that they can't lose elected by a small percentage of the electorate. They get to their state capitol, and they're incentivized to behave in ways that essentially, you know, guard against another primary challenge. They don't have to listen to anybody else. And what you end up with is more extreme legislation that even if citizens of the state disagree with there's very little that they can do about it, you know, I mean, abortion, again, it's not a topic I necessarily want to, you know, dive into, and what if, you know, you're
Pete Turner 13:34
saying you're against it? No, we're just telling jokes. That's all Dave Sorry,
Dave Daley 13:45
go. Exactly, you know, abortion jokes, you know, you see in Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia, where these kind of most restrictive prohibitions have been enacted this year. These are insanely gerrymandered states in which the state legislature is able to pretty much do whatever they want to do, without fear of being defeated at the ballot box. There are polls that all of these states that, you know, clearly show that the citizens even in Alabama and Georgia are against this legislation, it doesn't matter, because in 2016 81% of Georgia, State House districts lacked a major party, challenger, because the districts were drawn so severely to favor one side or the other, and 2018, he got a little bit better with about 67%. That's not good. You know, it's not good for democracy. It's not good for policy that represents people, it's not good for people feeling as if there's even a reason to turn out and go to the polls. The thing that I think is so different about this moment than perhaps gerrymander said the past is that the technology that was used to create the is Jerry matters and the data that's available, and the nature of this polarized moment. And the sophistication of the computer mapping software that is used, the speed and the precision that skilled operatives can draw maps with is unlike any other moment. I mean, here we are, in 2019. And these maps, and all of these states have held strong throughout a pretty good democratic year in 2012, and a really good democratic year 2018, and kind of a, an all over the place here in 2016. In the states that were fundamentally most affected by the toxic partisan gerrymandering that followed 2010 talking about the republican gerrymandering in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the democratic gerrymander in Maryland, they have all held strong, the one
Rich Ledet 15:52
in Maryland's pretty bad, it looks pretty screwed. I'm looking at it right now. But you know what, you can't just look at the one in Maryland and say, but look, the democratic do it, too.
Dave Daley 16:01
You know, I agree.
Rich Ledet 16:03
No, I'm not saying you're saying that. But you know, you just hit on something that and I don't want to put words in your mouth. But did I hear you kind of hit that it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is, in some of these districts, the way they're drawn? Have a D or an R behind their name, it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is, is that accurate? And I don't want to, because Did I hear you say that or not? I don't think
Dave Daley 16:27
I said exactly that. But I think that is true. I mean, in these polarized tons, yeah, will tend to vote for whoever the D or the R is. So when you draw a district that is heavily weighted towards either the D or the art side, the winner of the party primary is odds on to be elected from that district and might not even face and opponent in the general election in a lot of these districts, you know, both for the statehouse as well as for Congress,
Rich Ledet 17:02
because that that's actually jogging my memory a little bit to one of the arguments, actually, from the right, that I heard against this idea of using the the efficiency gap, I believe it is or the using that formula. And I don't know too much about the formula. But one of the arguments against that was it doesn't take into account that maybe the democrats aren't running good candidates,
Dave Daley 17:24
which well, maybe they're not running good candidates, because they can't win the district. So nobody wants to spend 18 months running and nobody will donate to that camp.
Rich Ledet 17:35
I think it's laughable, you know, argument, but you
Dave Daley 17:38
know, I really, it's not a horrible argument. It's just not true. You know, I mean, like, it could be Yeah, you know, I mean, like, okay,
Rich Ledet 17:48
and it certainly doesn't take into account like the context of elections, and also the very nature of the system, that you're explaining the very nature of the system, that rat fact helps explain. And that's a system that can be changed, it can be drawn different, it can be treated differently, because not every state does it this way.
Dave Daley 18:10
Let's ask some of these obvious questions, then. Because Yeah,
yeah, we've gotten in the weeds fast. Right, right. Right. So let me pull
us out of the weeds. And let me ask some of these. So one of the things people often complain about is term limits. And my response normally is vote your person out, just in their term, but people don't want to do that. They don't want to lose their person. Because that's not how we play the game. And then is it possible that we could just self select into districts and district caps out of out of whatever 10,000 people? I mean, because you do want to be represented by your person? I mean, if we're going to do a direct representation, is that a better way to do it? Or do we just lay a grid over the entire nation and say, You fall into grid 20,217? And that's your grid, every systems exploitable? Every parties exploited this system? What the fuck do we do?
Man, you're going to push me even further into the ways that you are pulling us out of the waves? Um, you know, I think the trick there is that we don't live in neat grids. Right, right. And most states, with the exception of like Iowa, you know, aren't neat grids. So, district thing is, as long as we're going to have a districts and as long as we're going to have single member, winner take all districts, you're going to have this problem. So we either think about single member winner take all which I would love to do, but that pulls us even further into, into the weeds probably takes into the forest, or we think about ways they we district better, and perhaps take it out of the hands of those who have the most conf conflicted sense of it, and stop the people from drawing the lines who are also trying to, you know, choose their own voters as we, as we so often here, but I think that something has happened that we have to grapple with in a representative democracy. And that is that we have a two party system in which the demographics have been moving against one of the two parties. So in 2008, Barack Obama is elected president and people say, Boy, the country is changing. And it's it's changing and becoming more colorful and diverse in ways that will probably benefit the Democratic Party for the next 15 to 20 years. And republicans looked at this and they said, Yeah, you're you're right, you know, they, they did an autopsy. And they said, we have to figure out ways to, you know, talk to the, you know, growing new communities in this in this in this country, and to communicate that we're listening to them, and we have ideas to, you know, make their lives better, and that our policies would would work for them. And then there were also these strategists who are saying, Ah, that's not going to be the way we do this. We could do something else, we could change the rules of the system, we could change the very maps themselves and district ourselves into power, do that for at least a decade, on perhaps during that time, some of those growing new communities start doing better. And as people improve economically, they started voting for Republicans, and perhaps, if we can fake our way through the 2010, is based on disrupting, we get to the other side of this, and we don't have to really change that much. And that was the strategy that they went with and double down on. And it's fundamentally anti authoritarian. And it's done devastating things to our politics over the course of the last decade. And what we see now in the fight over the citizenship question, and seems to me to be a pretty clear republican strategy to try to shift redistricting and 2021 to citizen voting age population, rather than total population and state legislators is growing effort to change the rules to keep a shrinking section of the country in charge. And that calls into question the very legitimacy of the system itself. And it puts a lot of constitutional pressure on that system. And I don't know how long it functions before. People, you know, I'm not suggesting people are trying to be in the streets. But you know, I do wonder how long you can go, in which the side with more votes continuously doesn't hold power in state legislatures in Washington, in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, until the very system, legitimacy gets questioned. And I think a Frankenstein's monster was really unleashed on our politics in 2010. And we are living with the consequences of it, I can
Rich Ledet 23:29
hint at what's going to continue to happen, people will continue to be to feel disenfranchised, they will continue to feel like their voices are not heard, they will continue to feel like something you said you felt when you first started with the red flag project, which is we don't see anything happening. You know, that's what's going to continue to happen, and people are going to continue to lose a sense of efficacy. And right now you got a situation this is for all my partisan friends out there listening, you got a situation where the republican party has made it look like they're a lot more popular than they really are. And we are seeing the results of some of that in, you know why there's no movement on the immigration and why we want to build a stupid wall instead of actually fixing it, because that's a simplistic solution there. For any listeners, it's too simplistic. There was a bipartisan consensus on this issue. There was very recent,
Dave Daley 24:21
I think there still is I think that our system is, you know, there's a bipartisan consensus on a lot of things, even these things that we think are so hot button and controversial, whether it's health care, ration, until we bring back wishing lots of things. And we've simply changed the rules of the electoral game in such a way that we can't bring those solutions forward and they can't win.
Rich Ledet 24:53
But you know, when I when I talk about things like that, you know, I do live down here in Alabama, when I talk about things like that I get called a little tarde. Yeah. And I get told, you know, I get told things about, you know, trickle down economics and about, you know, about the right to life and all this bullshit that aren't reality from what I see, you know, but we have politics that's driven by an extreme. And you can have an extreme on both ends. I just, of course, name on the right right now. I want Pete to jump in. Because Pete has been making an argument that part of our problem is we need to make the middle sexy again.
Pete Turner 25:30
Hey, this is Pete Turner from lions rock productions, we create podcasts around here. And if you your brand, or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me, I'll give you the advice on the right gear. The best plan is show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable, that scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown show. com Let me help. I want to hear about it.
Rich Ledet 25:52
I want Pete to jump in. Because Pete has been making argument that part of our problem is we need to make the middle sexy again.
Dave Daley 25:59
Huh. Yeah. And this is one of the things that I did I wanted to say was, every party thinks they have a mandate. Right. And so we'll go back further back like President Bush, the younger, at his second term beginning is like I've got a mandate to fix up security. Everybody claims they have a mandate. Right. But the reality is hard to make that mandate pay off for a variety of reasons. We've had gridlock since not since President Obama. But before President Bush and the last term of President Clinton, we've had gridlock has been relatively normal. It's gotten worse, it's gotten more cataclysmic, but I think a lot of our problem is that we're too focused on which party is winning or dying, or whatever it is, and less on how do we gather people to because we have an immigration problem, we can disagree on the means and the ways but we have an immigration problem, and it's not going to get better, we're not going to get rid of ice and customs. You know, we have to have some kind of control over the insanity. But also, I like to think of integration like a funnel, we want to bring a whole lot of people in, but then it gets choked down real fast, because we don't provision the processing of people through so they're encouraged to go around the funnel, because that's what desperate people do. But people were like, forget it. The other thing I wanted to say and put this into the conversation is regardless of party, there are 10s of millions of people that are going to disagree. On no matter what we do 10s of millions of people, maybe even 100 million people in this nation, I feel disenfranchised I vote but I choose to exercise my rights by being more involved by having these conversations by you know, getting on different committees and doing things because I value my rights. And that's how I can actually influence something because I don't feel like a candidate hardly ever comes along that represents what I think is okay, so how do we make the middle sexier so we can encourage some other people to run because if I ran for First off, I'm completely unelectable, let's just be honest about that. But apart from my past poor decision making. There's not a guy like our lady like me, who's in the middle of like, stoked to run like, yeah, I'm gonna run independent. And I'm not saying we need because I've been to Iraq, and we don't want 55 different political parties, because everybody's pissed off. They have the magic of having a balance, we have three different documents that protect three different kinds of freedom, we seem to keep it mostly in inside the bounds of some kind of sanity, although we do run up against the wall and drag the ship down the side of that insane barrier. But, Dave, what do we do? How do we balance and get more folks in the middle where we can say, let's figure out how to reduce gun violence in schools? Let's figure out how to deal with immigration. Let's, by the way, Social Security is still a problem. Let's figure out how to deal with that. You know, we seems like we have this panic wheel that we spin and go. Now we're worried about abortion, not that abortion is done an important topic, but we spin the wheel and we spin the wheel and we spin the wheel. And at some point you you know, we all get fatigued and all of this stuff.
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I mean, I think one of the things that redistricting in such an extreme way has done, it's gotten rid of the middle. You know, I mean, if I could point if only I had my charts with me, that would make the middle sexy. Again, if you look at what's happened to our congressional districts over the last 20 to 30 years, but what's accelerated in the 2000s, in the 2000, and 10s, is that there are more and more districts than ever, that are called landslide districts that were won by a Team Blue Team Red by upwards of 25%. And there are fewer and fewer of the competitive swing seats in the middle that are within 5% that are actually able to kind of swing one way or the other. And as that has happened, what you've seen in the voting records is you used to, there used to be democrats who were more conservative than some Republicans and some Republicans who are more liberal than some Democrats, and those were kind of the centrist bridge builders in the middle, who could be elected from some of those of those seats, and those people are gone. Because that those districts are gone, you know, they didn't disappear. Because that they don't exist anymore, they disappear, because they were, you know, an animal that lived in certain terrain, and they can't live in other
Rich Ledet 30:32
the environment is as no shapes for them, that they draw
Dave Daley 30:40
certain environment, and that environment doesn't exist anymore. So they are extinct. And we made them extinct. They don't have to be politicians in all of these states made decisions when they were drawing these districts that led to the extinction of these folks. And so, I think we have to take some responsibility for that we can solve that through, you know, more responsible a district thing that does a better job of paying attention to actual criteria of holding together communities of interest and actually representing the will of the voters and being attention to competitiveness and continuity, and all of these, you know, important factors, or we can try to get around that by using tools like ranked choice voting, um, you know, I mean, imagine if we had, you know, a system in which four or five parties could run, but you actually had a voting mechanism, that meant that the winner was always going to have more than 50% of the vote. So if you could put an end to pluralities, which is something ranked choice would do. I mean, say you combined ranked choice with, you know, larger multi member districts, which you know, works really, really well in states around the country and countries around the world, you know, and those bodies, you get rid of the power of those individuals specific lines to sort of control destiny on and then you actually empower voters in such a way that you would see republicans elected from the northeast, and democrats elected across the south, all kinds of third parties and centrists and in places where, you know, that was possible and of interest, it just seems like there's, we have to be creative in this moment. You know, I mean, we talked about states being, you know, laboratories for a democracy, it seems to me like they become meth labs of democracy, of late, maybe what we have to do is kind of become creative again, and, you know, open ourselves up to some ideas, and new systems that actually encourage the building of Coalition's and majorities and then allow those majorities to actually have a majority of seats again,
Rich Ledet 33:12
well, I would like to see a little more actual competition instead of some of this fake competition that we're talking about. And I guess one thing that I find really, I'm sitting here laughing, to myself just so ironic that some of the same people who really, really like competition in their markets, they don't really like it in their politics, you know, that they've rigged the politics to get rid of the competition. And it's this very lack of competition within our politics that allows the extreme So hey, all you people on the right, you really want to know, you look at the AO seas of the world and your left wing extremists, guess what, there's more on the way, because the right wing extreme has been created. And the same tools that have been used to create what we're seeing right now. You know, the modern day culture warrior movement, and you know, this pelvic politics for us that we're seeing instead of fixing damn infrastructure, figuring out what to do with education, the environment, immigrations, stupid wars, etc, etc, the stuff that we really agree on. So by the way, keep pushing it, keep pushing it right wing, because the left wing backlash is going to be even more organized. And you helped write the books. So you know, it's coming. And it's coming quick, because the youth, this demographic shift that the old, white male intelligentsia that runs the Republican Party, they fear it, well, they're not going to be able to stop it, they can control it for a little while. But I don't like this, because we have a system that that needs to kind of ebb and flow. And it doesn't need, we don't need to be walling up all of this competition and politics.
Dave Daley 34:46
And that's what district thing is done. It's taking the ebb and the flow. And, you know, our politics should Evan flow. You know, I mean, those voters in Wisconsin, in 2008, 10, elected republicans in a republican landslide. So those Republicans should have had the ability to govern, except one of the things they did in 2011 was they drew the maps that entrench themselves in power for a decade. And when in 2012, voters came out and said, You know, we're not so in love with what you did in the last couple years, we'd like to go another way, nothing changed. So it should have flowed back the other way in 2012. And then in 2014, a big republican year should have won it back. And they would have under, you know, competitive maps. And in 2016, which was kind of all over the place, it would have been a pretty competitive year, probably in Wisconsin, right? The presidential was was 17,000 votes or something. And then 2018, when 200,000 more people go for the Democratic candidates than the Republican candidates, it would have gone the other way. Instead, there's 200,000 people, a majority of 200,000, people still lead to Republican majority in the Wisconsin assembly of 6336. And democrats picked up one seat, and that puts a lot of pressure on a system, I think, then there's nothing you can do to change it, boy, that that starts to sound more like, you know, it's not it's not a
Rich Ledet 36:17
democracy, like we think of democracy. And I've, I am steeped in the PhD version of democracy. But there's the also the democracy that we as American citizens think of, right? It's not just an academic level,
Dave Daley 36:31
and it's not the debate of it's a republic. or this or that it's a majority of people ought to be able to reflect their will at the ballot box. And that that ought to mean something. And when it doesn't mean anything anymore, that's not really what we've come to expect.
Rich Ledet 36:51
And when you look at some of the NAT, like, look at national politics, those things that went down in Wisconsin, the bad Well, good example of a bad thing, but they are now sending more republicans from what's really a purple state, mind you, they're sending a lot more Republicans to deal with national level issues than they should be. And that's, that's twisted, because now our national politics is looking like it's a lot more. And that's Yeah.
Dave Daley 37:21
Wisconsin only sends an eight person delegation. So it's, you know, it's five, three. So Wisconsin is not as twisted as, as Pennsylvania, which had been 13, five Ohio, 12. for Michigan, which for a long time was nine five, but I mean, I think the best example of this is North Carolina, on you know, it pretty competitive state. It goes back and forth, the Democratic and Republican governors, but it was, you know, 10, three, for a long, long that there's the open seat because of the voter fraud in 2018, but has been 10. Three for, you know, a long time. And it's not just that it's a 10. Three skew. It's the kind of 10 three, you know, it's it's the it's the kind of representatives that a gerrymander district creates. And my favorite example of this is Mark Meadows, who represents the western part of North Carolina is the 10th or the 11th. And I'm blanking, it's one of those two. So the western mountains of North Carolina on are pretty conservative. That's where Eric Rudolph went to hide, except you've got the biggest city in the western part of the state is Asheville, which is completely hippie liberal, you know, so it's an interesting electoral cluster, right? How do you represent that part of the state and throughout the 2000s, it was a swing district that went kind of back and forth, there was a Republican, and then you had one of the most conservative democrats in the house, former football player named Heath Shuler, who represented that district for a long time. And when the Republicans took over in in 2011, they were determined to draw a 10 three map I mean, David Lewis, the state rep. In charge of District thing there has famously said I want to 10 three map because I don't think I can draw on 11 to map. So they crack Asheville in half. That's how you do it, you know, there's two ways of gerrymandering, there's a cracking and packet and impact, you can either pack all the other side's votes in as few seats as possible, or you can crack them in half and just dilute them enough so that they can't elect a member and, and what they did in Nashville was they kind of drew a line right across the middle of the city. They said, half of you hippies over here, other half of you hippies over there,
Rich Ledet 39:34
now you're voting with the conservatives. And
Dave Daley 39:36
now you got Patrick McHenry representing half of you and Mark Meadows representing the other half, you know, good luck with that. And that always wins. I mean, metals have been a sandwich shop owner in western North Carolina. And he runs on a platform of sending Barack Obama back to Kenya or wherever it is, he comes from, you can go on YouTube and find his campaign rallies. They're amazing, you know, and Mark Meadows represents Asheville, this kind of hippie vegetarian enclave in the mountains, and they can't do squat about it. Mark Meadows doesn't like john banner anymore than he likes. Brock Obama, it's meadows, who goes to Washington forces, the 2013, shut down polls, the parliamentary motion of vacate the chair that that leads to painter stepping down and paul ryan coming in. He's now the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, which is probably the most powerful caucus in the house when the republicans were in power. So it's fundamentally skewed, not only the nature of representation, but the kind of member who can get elected, and then how they behave. Once they get to Washington,
Rich Ledet 40:53
it's really open the door for people that aren't states, women and statesmen, you know, people who I think, have a fundamental lack of understanding about how our political system supposed to
Dave Daley 41:04
work, they go to represent a small sliver of the population rather than everybody and the system is set up in such a way that they're able to do that and get away with it.
Rich Ledet 41:16
Well, and they want to go in advance specific issues. But you know, under this overarching ideological agenda that they feel is correct, when the vast majority of American citizens aren't so neatly, you know, put into these ideological boxes,
Dave Daley 41:31
whether on the left or the right,
Rich Ledet 41:32
no, no, I'm pretty damn liberal when it comes to domestic stuff. But you catch me in a foreign policy discussion to the right of john bolton. So, you know, we're not so neatly stacked, but man, it really looks like our representation is it's not the way it's supposed to be doesn't work.
Dave Daley 41:51
Hey, Dave, how does California or the other hippie know good liberal states do in terms of their own internal gerrymandering, because there's a lot of conservative folks, hell, we have a whole state here in California, the state of Jefferson or Jackson, where the hell it's called, you know, where it's very, very, very conservative. So how do the more liberal states perform in terms of how they district?
Yeah, I mean, California, turned it over to an independent commission back in in 2010. And that commission is not a pretty reasonable job. It's funny, I mean, the democrats and the republicans fought against a lot of ways. Um, I mean, Nancy Pelosi, put, you know, millions into, into trying to stop this. California is this weird, fascinating beast. I mean, in the 19, in the 1980s, they had a congressman, Congressman Burton, who was always the guy who essentially drew all of the maps, and he just had this intuitive computer brain to be able to do this. And he would call the district's his contributions to modern art. And they would essentially take care of all of the incumbents and more Democrats than Republicans, but it was a real kind of incumbent protection scheme, he would, you know, draw a nice, safe district for his brother that would connect these communities that only had, you know, water between them. And he draw this and be like, hope my brother knows how to swim. You know, and in 2000, I mean, Karl Rove and Nancy Pelosi had a conversation, and they said, well, as long as it gets divvied up in this number, and it protects all of our people, we don't really care what the individual lines look like, as long as it's, you know, make it be 3524, or whatever the actual number was. And there were reformers in California who were driven nuts by this on that there's actually a story of the California legislature had finally agreed on a redistricting proposal that would take this out of the hands of the politicians. And as the story goes, as they were walking the bill from the Senate to the house to file it, oops, we lost it couldn't be found? Well, I guess what the try again, next session, guys, you know, so it's crazy. And so so finally, in 2010, that they passed this independent commission. And, you know, I'm a California republican party has gotten probably a little bit more extreme than the republicans in the state on and I think that there were a lot of Republican moderates in California who were hoping that this would pass, thinking that it might kind of pull the republicans back into a more moderate place, which is why shorts and Egger was behind it, and why kind of some of the republican money got behind it. It didn't exactly turn out that way for them, I think. But it's a pretty solid commission in that it requires Democrats, Republicans and independents, it requires them to sort of tour the state and, and do hundreds of meetings and listen to a lot of concern about kind of what a community of interest is kind of what ought to be held together. And then they have to draw maps that everybody agrees on. So the democrats and independents can, you know, team up together and, and screw the republicans or the Republicans, the democrats can team up and screw the independence, but you have to have a super majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents, if you want to pass a set of maps. And then at the end of the process, it's this, the, the group has to actually justify all of the choices that they made, and the lines that they drew and explain why they did it. So I think that's a, you know, a pretty good system. You know, it's it's not perfect, it's not foolproof, there's, you know, been stories written about, you know, various ways that, you know, Democrats may have tried to, again, that system, there will always be efforts to kind of game the system, anything is political is disrupting, is going to be gamed, but it's Can you set up enough kind of, you know, tests and traps along the way that try to force some some fairness onto the process. And I think that there are clearly ways to do that. And a lot of these commission states are starting to kind of figure out what they are. Anytime you come up with a couple of those things. Of course, the politicians figure out what they are, and then they figure out how to game the next time. So you have to be responsive and ready to kind of move on it
Rich Ledet 46:32
and let the governor appoint the people on the commission. session, nobody gets Yeah, he's on the commission. But it's still a it's a good first step, I think, because what it does is it takes all of the drawing all of the power to draw away from the same people who are in those districts representing those districts.
Dave Daley 46:53
Like there are awful commissions out there, right. I mean, I'm sure the commission in Arizona is five people and the democrats appoint to the republicans appoint to and then there's one fifth person who comes through the state of appellate court, a personnel process, who's supposed to be an independent, who's supposed to have the job of keeping all of this partisanship in check. And in reality, both sides do is they try to sneak in that system.
Rich Ledet 47:21
I want that job. Yeah.
Dave Daley 47:23
You know, I mean, like, that's a lousy condition. There are conditions in New Jersey and Washington state that are essentially incumbent protection boards. Those aren't commissions that work on. And to get back to the question you asked me before I launched on a 10 minute, soliloquy about the the California commission. But yeah, I mean, a Democrat, you know, I mean, I'm talking to you from the People's Republic of Massachusetts, which, you know, has, has got a republican governor, but hasn't elected a republican to the House of Representatives in you know, 20 years. Right. And it's a nine oh, state. And that's, you know, that's a bullshit, I think, is the technical term. And some of the problems that the republicans have up here in New England where they I don't think they have a single member of the House. There may be one, not from Rhode Island, not from Connecticut, not from Massachusetts, not from Maine, not from Vermont. Maybe it's a split delegation in New Hampshire. I don't, I don't know, you know, some of that is that the party has gone too far. Right. Some of it is that we've polarized so much that no one's willing to consider another candidate. But I mean, I grew up here in the age of, you know, Lowell weicker and Jacob Javits and sort of, you know, the idea that there were, you know, centrists and a good minded independent folks of both parties who people kind of stood up and voted for, and we've distributed a lot of that intention out of our politics.
We're coming up on the end of the hour here, and I just wanted to save this thanks for coming on, man. Because this, you know, there are these things that we can deal with, you know, we can improve our state commissions, we all want to be represented better. What are the things that were just taught me about democracy is that you don't get what you want, you get what you can tolerate. And you participate in in voting sorry, everybody, that ain't good enough, like you have to do more, if you want to get more of your way. Voting is everybody's decided for you. And you're left with these two or three choices. So get in front of that process by getting involved. And I promise you, the government does want your involvement. There's ways to volunteer, you can go get on someone staff. So let's just say that, first of all, but in terms of redistricting and gerrymandering, this is not a left or right owned problem. It's everybody. I mean, we have to deal with these things as a body and make the sexy middle happen so that people can do things. And though Dave works for a hippie, no good publication, like salon, you didn't hear all that come out of his mouth, what you heard was a reasonable person who wants us to be represented more fairly, by who we all are in our specific area. And I've got all day for that, you know, so let's stop getting distracted by which party we're dealing with. And let's start to understand each other a little more and hear from one another. So we can understand, like, you may be pro life, maybe you are against murdering babies, I've got time for you to say that. I've totally have time for that. I also have time for a woman to say I want to take care of my own body. I don't want the government doing it. I don't know what the answer is. There's a moral conundrum there. But I'm okay with the conversation. As long as we're actually having a conversation. If we're just yelling at each other, everybody shaking their fists, then I'm just gonna get in the middle and wait for everybody to chill out and kind of meet in the middle and figure out what we can solve whether it's immigration. I mean, gosh, I thought abortion was done. But apparently, we're still having that conversation, on and on and on. Right. So these conversations are great. And Dave, I really appreciate how you handle everything, because it's reasonable. And that's what I'm looking forward is how do we have reasonable conversation so we can see the light of somebody don't have to agree when rich and I were in Afghanistan running around, we see the culture, we don't have to, you know, love it, but we have to abide that it exists for a reason. So there's a whole lot of us, there's over 300 million of us. And there are more people coming here all the time. So we're getting more diverse, not less, and it's well past time that we start to slow down and and listen to one another. And maybe we can't solve problems today. But we can if we start listening and looking for the simplest things that we can do.
Rich Ledet 51:34
You know, Pete The other thing, too, that I to jump on that try to close up close this out, is there was a couple of issues that came up during this conversation, abortion gun rights. And Dave was quick to say, Hey, I don't want to go down there. That's not necessarily an issue based current political issue based conversation. I mean, gerrymandering is an issue, but the conversation we're having is about the structure. And it's about the way that system that we all benefit from, you know, left wing, right wing, it doesn't matter. We're all in the same boat, man. You know, so what we're having a conversation with, we're having a conversation about the structure, and the structure is rigged right now. And and what that means is the outcomes are not fair to the most of us. And that's really what I think the most simplistic conceptualization of what democracy like, well, what people want out of democracy is some kind of fairness. You know, so we'll see, maybe the Supreme Court will take this up in 30 years, I don't know, again, take it up again. But, you know, we're talking about the structure of our system. And this is why this is not a republican or democratic problem. This is a United States citizen issue. And if you care, doesn't matter how you feel about abortion, or gay rights or guns or doesn't matter. What you need to be concerned about is that your system is producing unjust outcomes, because it's got input that are flawed and biased, is because there's this problem with the structure that we the voter, I think we let this happen to begin with, you know, and that's my critique of American political culture for right now. I wipe my hands.
Pete Turner 53:16
Any final words? Dave, it's up to you to close this out.
Dave Daley 53:19
That's a lot of pressure. I'm, since I've been so reasonable all this time, maybe I should be less reasonable. Do it man. Here's my concern. And I agree with much of what you said here. But I think that we are, I think we're entering a more dangerous moment than that. And I think that the system is rigged, and that the inputs are the problem. And that, for a long time, this has been both the democratic and the Republican Party problem. What I worry about is that we've politicized the very nature of a democracy issues. And I think that that is really, really dangerous and ugly, and can't lead us in a good way. And what we've seen gerrymandered legislators do is make it harder for people to vote and that, yeah, Republicans on and I think I can say Republicans, because then 24 of the 25 states that have been doing this, that's who did it. So you know, I'm not trying to pick on either side, it's just it's just that's kind of that's been the strategy.
Rich Ledet 54:39
Simply speaking man, you could say that
Dave Daley 54:42
on, you know, is, is try to put up barriers between people and the ballot box in any number of ways. That can be voter ID that can be eliminating days of early voting, it can be you know, closing precincts, again, can be any number of, of these things. And it leads to situations in which people are trying to hold back the will of the people in artificial ways. And that just, you know, you saw it in 2018. Um, and, and that's what the new book is, is about, it's about kind of all of these citizen movements around the country, behind, you know, non partisan issues behind redistricting behind, you know, felon voting rights in Florida, which I think is one of the most amazing, I mean, that's, it's one of the, you know, great civil rights stories of our time, you know, 1.4 million people give them their right to vote back and Florida after finishing up their prison sentences, getting their civic voice back and 64% of Floridians. So Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, in a year that Republicans elected republican governor and a republican US Senator, you know, everybody kind of got behind this idea, because they all knew somebody who had been in that in that position. And all 1.4 million of these people weren't Democrats. You know, it was not a partisan scheme. It was it was a fairness scheme that almost two thirds of people backed, and then a gerrymandered legislature. Guts it and essentially adds a poll tax. Yeah, takes it away. You know, you see in Missouri, you see in Michigan, where citizens, you know, I mean, Missouri is a red state and the Michigan's kind of a purple state and the citizens in both of those places tried to solve the redistricting through independent commissions and, and various means, and the legislators in both states come back, you know, weeks later, and that's how little these gerrymandered legislators have to care about what 60% of their citizens want to do is they just come back and they try to override it and got it. We're heading into a dangerous anti majority Attarian place. And if we can't find a way to make these small d democracy, issues matter to everybody. Again, I don't know how we talk about the bigger problems if we can all agree on the need to have our voices heard, and for elections to fundamentally
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
