Transcript: Trump in Fury as GOPers Quietly Defy His Plot to Rig 2026
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump is raging at Indiana Republicans in a last-ditch effort to get them to gerrymander their state as part of his push to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Interestingly, however, some Republicans now fear all this will backfire because Trump is dragging them down so badly that even more seats will be at risk under gerrymandered maps. Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, sees another kind of opening here for his party. Today he’s introducing a new bill that would require ranked choice voting in congressional races across the country. So is all the corruption and chaos that Trump and Republicans are unleashing with their gerrymandering ploys creating an opportunity to talk to voters about a different way of doing things? We are talking to Congressman Raskin today about all this. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Congressman Jamie Raskin: I am thrilled to be with you today, Greg Sargent. Very excited.
Sargent: So Trump is now pressuring Republicans everywhere to gerrymander their states, but Senate Republicans in Indiana are resisting. Trump raged about this the other day, tweeting:
“Why would a real Republican vote against this when the Dems have been doing it for years? If they stupidly say no, vote them out of office! They are not worthy!”
Congressman, what’s your response to the sheer nakedness of Trump’s corrupt pressure on Republicans to gerrymander expressly to hold on to power?
Raskin: Well, that brazenness is invited by the Supreme Court, which now not only tolerates or accepts but celebrates partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate and valid purpose. I love the Indiana Republican state senator who said he would never vote for this after Trump called some people the R-word as a way to denigrate their intelligence, I suppose, or their personality. I think this man is the father of a Down syndrome kid and just said, ‘I will never go along with this to teach him a lesson about the language he uses.’ And that’s the spirit, man.
Sargent: I hope he means it, don’t you, Congressman?
Raskin: Well, me too. In fact, we’re in a bit of a tangle in Maryland because the Senate president, Bill Ferguson, has said for various reasons that he’s opposed to redistricting to add one seat that would be more competitive for Democrats. One of the reasons he invoked for it was that he said he had spoken to the Republican president of the Indiana Senate, who said he was going to stay out. Well, if he doesn’t stay out, that is going to redouble everybody’s determination to change Bill Ferguson’s mind. I mean, there’s nothing remotely ethical or moral about unilaterally disarming before authoritarians in a game that they’ve created. I mean, they want to essentially declare Congress Republican before a single vote is cast.
Sargent: Well, I want to return to all that in a bit. But first, Congressman, you’re introducing a new bill today to require ranked choice voting in congressional elections. Ranked choice voting, of course, allows voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. Can you tell us what your new bill does and why you favor ranked choice voting?
Raskin: Yeah, I mean, there are 52 jurisdictions across the country that are using ranked-choice voting with great success, including the state of Maine, including the state of Alaska. The central virtue of ranked-choice voting is that it guarantees that the winner of an election actually has majority support. There are something like a dozen candidates now running in this special election to replace Mikie Sherrill, who just won as governor in New Jersey. Somebody could win that with, like, 15 percent of the vote, 18 percent, 20 percent of the vote.
But what ranked-choice voting does is to say, “Rank all of the candidates.” If there are a lot of great candidates and they have similar politics, put them in order, and then you can actually sift through what you think are the critical qualities for someone to have. And then the way it works is that candidates are dropped from the bottom of the ballot. If they lose, their votes are redistributed to their second choice, and then if still nobody has a majority, then you go to the next person and the next person and so on. And it’s a way of accumulating public sentiment.
We saw in the New York City mayoral election another great advantage to ranked-choice voting, which is it promotes positive politics among the candidates. Because now instead of Mamdani and Brad Lander being at each other’s throats and their voters having to accentuate what they hate about the other candidate—now, instead, they look for reasons to build a bridge and they say, Hey, you know, you like Brad Lander. That’s great. I love him. He’s a great guy. Why don’t you put me second? and vice versa. The candidates start campaigning together. They build coalitions rather than engaging in character assassination.
Sargent: Well, your bill would require rank choice voting in congressional and Senate elections, both general and primaries across the country.
Rasking: General and primary both.
Sargent: Can you talk about what the bill does, how that requirement works, what the legal basis for it is?
Raskin: Well, it starts in 2030. So it would be in the 2030 elections; it would require the use of ranked-choice voting in all primary and general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and for the U.S. Senate. And it also authorizes federal funding to help states implement the change because there are some technical things that need to be done. But it’s proven to be very straightforward and very efficient in all of the jurisdictions that have adopted it. And, you know, as I was saying, people love the fact that the candidates who win have commanded majority support across the electoral jurisdiction and that it promotes this kind of positive, coalitional campaigning rather than divisive, negative campaigning.
It also gets rid of what people oftentimes describe as the spoiler problem. That is, you’ve got one person who is your dream candidate, say, who’s focused on a particular issue that’s really important to you, but you know they can’t really win. Well, this says go ahead and put them first, but then rank second the candidate who you think is viable who wins, and then that candidate can learn, oh, you’re really supporting Candidate A because you believe so strongly in that issue; I’m going to take that into account if there’s a significant segment of the electorate motivated by that issue. So it just allows for a far more fine-grained and subtle election.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about why ranked choice voting is both a good thing and an antidote to gerrymandering on a real structural level. It essentially makes it a lot harder to dilute the votes of voters of the opposition, correct? How does rank choice voting work as as kind of an impediment to gerrymandering?
Raskin: Well, I’ve got two colleagues who I’ve served with in the House who would not have been there except for ranked-choice voting. One is Jared Golden, who comes from a very swing district, the northernmost district in Maine. And when the first-ballot votes were counted, he was slightly behind the Republican, but when they redistributed the independents’ votes, he won overwhelmingly. In other words, he was the overwhelming second choice of people who wanted the independent candidate. So that created a kind of coalition between the Democrats and the independents.
And the same thing happened in Alaska, essentially, with Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat elected to the U.S. House from Alaska in decades, precisely because an electoral coalition formed between Democrats and more progressive and moderate independents. So we’ve seen how that kind of majoritarian politics is an antidote both to divisive reactionary politics and also an antidote to gerrymandering. The whole point of gerrymandering is to basically render the voters irrelevant so that your vote doesn’t really make any difference because the politicians have chosen the voters before the voters get to speak.
Sargent: And you can’t really gerrymander districts when you have ranked choice voting, right? Or at least it’s way more challenging, yes?
Raskin: Well, I don’t want to claim, Greg, that ranked-choice voting is a panacea for the problems of gerrymandering. Because the truth is that a sixth grader can now take the map of a state and computer technology and artificial intelligence and turn a 55 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats or even a 48 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats or 95 percent of the congressional seats. So you can work wonders with gerrymandering if you get to control the district lines and you know who’s in there. It’s true that ranked-choice voting will complicate the picture somewhat in certain districts, but we do have to confront that problem separately. It’s not going to be any kind of knockout punch against the extreme gerrymandering that the Republicans have unleashed in the 2026 elections.
Sargent: Well, it’s now being reported that a number of Republicans fear that the pressure on them to gerrymander will backfire. The worry is that the Trump coalition is disintegrating. So Republicans whose seats are made a little less safe by these gerrymandering schemes—as spreading their voters around a bit more might make them more vulnerable to a blue wave in 2026—those Republicans now fear that outcome. Congressman, everything for these people is about insulating them from the voters and the consequences of their unpopular governing decisions. Doesn’t this really kind of underscore the absurdity of the current system?
Raskin: Yeah, very much so. Well, look, on your first point, let me just say we owe a debt of gratitude to Aftyn Behn in Tennessee and really everybody, including Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who’ve run such strong campaigns because they’ve all put the fear of God into Republican legislators who might otherwise have gone along much more compliantly with these extreme gerrymander plans.
But if you average together all of the electoral victories that Democrats have had in special elections in 2025 or in the gubernatorial elections, we’re up 10, 11, 12 points, depending on where you are in the country, over where we were before. So now if you’re a Republican who’s got an eight-point advantage in your district, you’re saying, Do not touch my district for the purpose of trying to squeeze out more Republican legislators. I need every Republican vote I’ve got. So that is putting the brakes on a lot of this extreme gerrymandering.
But look, the single-member districts ultimately are going to be the problem because it’s very tough to distinguish between what’s redistricting and what’s gerrymandering. The truth is that no matter how you draw the district, it’s going to be favoring somebody.
Now, this is not in my bill—my bill is just the ranked-choice voting part of it—but we do have a more sweeping bill that I’ve worked on with Don Beyer, which would mandate the creation of multi-member districts and the use of ranked-choice voting, you know, as a form of proportional representation. So what that would do is allow Democrats to win in very conservative states—they would at least be able to win some seats—and it would allow Republicans, MAGA Republicans, to win in a very progressive state like Maryland; you’d be able to get something.
But right now we’ve got a system because of the single-member districts, which basically says if you’ve got 55 percent of the vote, you can draw districts that will lead to 100 percent of the delegation, even if 45 percent of the people are in the other party. And that’s why we get states like Utah, which is all Republican now—we’ll see what happens in this election; maybe we’ll be able to break that up because of some court action—or Massachusetts, which is all Democratic.
One of the other shoes that’s going to drop during this cycle is the Supreme Court’s perhaps completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, they got rid of Section 5—the preclearance requirement—which required covered jurisdictions that had discriminated in the past to submit their plans to the Department of Justice or a federal court in advance. By getting rid of that, there have been hundreds of changes in voting systems and gerrymandering and all these things going on that have really set back the cause of voting rights.
Now they want to get rid of Section 2 in this Louisiana case, the Callais decision. If they get rid of Section 2, that is an open door to go ahead and dismantle more than a dozen majority-African American and Hispanic districts that are in place right now. Take Mississippi, for example, where there is one majority-African American district, which is occupied by my friend Bennie Thompson. They will just split that district in half. So we’re talking about totally turning the clock back across the South. I mean, this really would be analogous to the end of Reconstruction if they do that, and they are very likely to do it. So we need to be fighting with every means at our disposal legislatively and politically to blow the whistle on what’s about to happen so the country understands what’s going on.
Sargent: Well, I want to talk to you about Maryland since you brought it up earlier. Democrats nationally are trying to match the Republican gerrymandering schemes. We’re seeing California. creating five new Democratic seats. But as you noted, there’s resistance in your state, Maryland, from the state Senate President Bill Ferguson, who says it would be too legally vulnerable. Now, just to focus on what he said, is there any legitimacy to his argument about the law?
Raskin: Well, let me start with this. If that is all that my friend Bill Ferguson is saying now, that’s good, because before he was also saying it was morally questionable. He was likening it to racial disenfranchisement and racist redistricting, which is, you know, an outrageous misunderstanding of the situation.
If you look at what’s going on with these extreme Republican gerrymanders starting in Texas, they are targeting majority-Black and Hispanic districts. So the people whose districts are hit in the first instance are Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar, Al Green, Mark Veasey, and Greg Casar. So three Hispanic Americans and two African Americans. And they went to North Carolina—they did it to our African American colleague Don Davis. Then they went to Missouri and they did it to our African American colleague Emanuel Cleaver. Then they want to go to Kansas and do it to one of only two Native American Indians in Congress. So the whole thing, although it certainly has a partisan political agenda, depends on racial and ethnic redistricting and removal of minority members from all of these delegations. That’s number one.
There was no legitimacy to his original critique, which depended on an analogy [on] fighting back against a political racial gerrymander. I really felt that that was a flawed argument. It’s completely legitimate for him to raise the question of whether or not a Republican-dominated state Supreme Court, which we have, would try to overthrow a gerrymander.
Now, let’s be clear. Under federal constitutional analysis that is now not just approved but mandated by the Roberts Court, redistricting for political partisan reasons is perfectly legitimate. So he’s saying, Well, what happens if a federal court misapplies the law and says that the state constitution, which says that there shall be no partisan gerrymandering in state elections, also applies to federal elections? A judge has done that before. So it’s not a fanciful concern to raise, but it is legally erroneous.
In fact, the state constitution was amended to ban partisan redistricting in state legislative races and specifically excluded federal races from it. And there was a judge who just conflated the two and just made a basic error. Could it happen again and might they seize upon that prior case to do it? Sure, it might happen again. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe it could happen and then we are back to the 7-1 map we have.
He’s also raised the point, Well, maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they use it as an opportunity to discredit the current redistricting. That’s extremely unlikely for several reasons. Number one is when you look at what happens when legislative redistricting is struck down. In greater than 95 percent of the cases, it’s just returned to the legislature to do what they want. I don’t know if you can find a case like the one he’s potentially forecasting where they say, Well, you overstretched and now we’re going to dismantle the districts that are in law right now.
The second reason for that is the districts that are in place right now were signed into law by our Republican [former] governor, Governor Hogan. So it seems extremely unlikely that it could lead to some kind of further retrogression. In any event, all of those are tactical considerations that we should be taking into account. But that’s very different from the way that President Ferguson started when he was likening our fighting back to engaging in racial gerrymandering. And I think that’s why his initial remarks caused so much outcry in our state.
Sargent: Well, and also to return to a point you raised earlier, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and does go forward with their gerrymander, which is of course very possible, that could add a couple more seats to the Republican side. I would think that would increase the pressure for Maryland to act as well.
Raskin: Every seat counts. I mean, we’re down three seats right now. I mean, this is, you know, we’re like in the trenches in World War One and we’re fighting for every district. Nobody’s got the luxury of saying, Well, we’re above this.
And look, here’s the thing that I want to argue very strongly: The Democrats have been fighting to end partisan gerrymandering for more than a decade. If you go back and look at the For the People Act, its very first plank was to get rid of partisan gerrymandering and to create independent redistricting panels in every state in the union. And you know who voted for it? Every Democrat. You know who voted against it? Every Republican. They live on gerrymandering. They swear by gerrymandering. They thrive by gerrymandering. They control a lot more state legislatures than we do. You know why? Because they continue to gerrymander—first, they gerrymander themselves into power at the state level, and then that translates into a gerrymandering advantage at the federal level.
So what we got in North Carolina is a situation where the Democrats win statewide for governor, win statewide for attorney general, but in the U.S. House delegation, there are 10 Republicans and four Democrats. Now, why do they have that extraordinary five-to-two advantage, 10-to-four advantage in the U.S. House delegation? It’s because their legislature gerrymandered it that way. And why does the legislature have super-Republican majorities that are able to do that? Because they themselves have been gerrymandered into power decade after decade.
That is the story across the South, Greg. That’s what’s going on. And so we’ve got states that are very close—even Texas, when you go down there, all the Democrats will tell you, This is not a red state. This is a purple state that’s been gerrymandered into oblivion for the Republicans through a combination of prior gerrymanders and the manipulation of voting through voter suppression devices.
Sargent: Right, it’s layer upon layer upon layer of rigging. Now, just to talk about Ferguson for one more second, if Indiana goes forward, I would think the pressure on Ferguson is going to get extremely intense. Can you talk about what that’s going to look like?
Raskin: To deprive the majority in Maryland of being able to do what majorities are doing all around the country is an essential deprivation of our ability to participate effectively in the national political process. I think he’s raised legitimate points, but I’m convinced that Governor Moore and the people both in the Senate, where I served for a decade, and the people in the House will be able to come to terms with this because the Republicans are doing everything in their power to put the fix in, and we’ve got to counter them wherever we can. And Maryland is one of the handful of states where we can do it.
I know that Governor-elect Spanberger has said that Virginia is going to redistrict to create more competitive districts for Democrats—at least two or three. And again, that’s just writing against prior Republican gerrymanders. So I’d like us to get out of the system entirely, which is why I fought for the For the People Act. It’s why I’m fighting for ranked-choice voting. But in the meantime, we’ve got to use the rules that the Republicans have put in place and not wash our hands of it and say, We’re too clean for that, we’re just going to let them take over Congress.
Sargent: Right. Just to boil this down, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and act, you fully expect that Maryland will do the same, right?
Raskin: Well, I’m not in Annapolis every day anymore, so I don’t want to make a prediction. I’m not really in the prognostication business. I’m in the mobilization business. I know I will be fighting very hard among our colleagues to express to our friends in Annapolis what a serious situation this is and that everything is on the line. Medicaid is on the line, Affordable Care Act tax credits are on the line, housing is on the line, voting rights are on the line, and you know, I don’t want to be a broken record, but democracy itself is under threat.
Sargent: Well, the bottom line is, will Republicans be allowed to play by their own rules or will Democrats join them and play by the same rules that Republicans do, correct?
Raskin: In terms of gerrymandering and redistricting, yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, they just do not have clean hands in this conversation. We’ve been trying to reform this rotten system. They’re the ones that have guaranteed we’ve not been able to change it. And so now we have to accept the terms that have been written. Does that mean that I would do whatever Republicans do? No. I mean, I would not start disenfranchising likely Republican voters the way that they disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. I just would never do that. People have a right to vote. They are constantly trying to throw people off the rolls. They’re constantly trying to make it more difficult for people to vote. They’re constantly trying to intimidate people at the polls. We would never do that.
But when it comes to the design of the electoral districts, if they are going to try to tilt the playing field to benefit themselves and they control a lot more state legislatures than we do, we have not just a political and a strategic but, I think, an ethical and a moral imperative to fight back the best that we can. And I understand that decision-making under repressive and authoritarian regimes and governments is difficult. And it is difficult to make these decisions, but I am absolutely convinced we’re doing the right thing to fight back however we can, even though we would never start disenfranchising voters and throwing people off the rolls, which is what they are doing right now when you go out to a lot of these states.
Sargent: Well, as you say, democracy itself is on the line. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Raskin: It is my pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much for having me.
