Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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larry sabato
20:09
Appearances
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mike flood
rep/r00:47
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mimi geerges
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What's Happening Here?00:14:12
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He is a Center for Politics director at the University of Virginia and also author of the book called Campaign of Chaos, Trump, Biden-Harris, and the 2024 American Election.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm going to leave that to the lawyers in and out of Texas.
But it's very simple how we got here.
We got here because the House of Representatives is very closely divided.
There's a critical election in 2026 and regular midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the House of Representatives for the final two years of President Trump's term.
Now, naturally, he wants to see Republicans control the House of Representatives because they're likely, not certain, but likely to retain control of the Senate.
He wants to have the whole Congress as he does now.
He's able to command his people in the House and Senate to do pretty much what he wants.
In order to do that, he has to find some extra seats because traditionally, and I think it probably will hold next year, probably will hold next year, that the out-of-power party will gain seats in the House of Representatives.
Well, five seats in a closely divided House, which it is now and might well be after the next election, is a lot of seats.
And the president said, President Trump, that is, said, I want those additional five seats.
We control the governorship.
We control both houses of the Texas legislature.
And they've got five Democratic seats that we could carve up and turn into Republican seats.
And so Governor Abbott in Republican governor of Texas said, good idea.
Or maybe he thought it was a bad idea, but when the president calls you and says, do this, and you're in the president's party, and particularly with President Trump, you pretty much do what he says.
And that's what's happened.
The Democrats have almost no power here except the power to deny a quorum.
And even that, in some ways, is limited.
We'll see how long this actually lasts.
So I know that was a long answer, but it's also a short explanation of why things are happening as they're happening.
It's also not common because usually, you know, in the old days when I was growing up, this was shortly after Thomas Jefferson died, you only had redistricting once a decade after the census.
And it was messy then, and people got mad, and some people were districted out of their seats.
And it was never happy, but you only had it once a decade.
So you got through it.
People got over their injuries and their hurt feelings, and we went on.
Now, because partisanship is so intense and we are so terribly divided in this country, people are looking for every advantage.
And that includes the power to redistrict in states that permit it to be done more than once a decade.
That doesn't mean you have to do it more than once a decade, but if you have the ability to do it and you see a way to gain some extra seats, well, you might throw fair play out the window, or you might redefine fair play so that it includes population shifts that have occurred since the census.
Take your pick.
That's essentially what is happening here.
It is, as I said, it is not unique, but it is uncommon.
But I'm afraid, I really am afraid that this is going to become the new norm.
And what's to stop states that have control where one party has control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature from redistricting and redistricting and redistricting every time they have the opportunity and they see a way to carve out a member of the opposition party?
Fair play is important, Meany.
It really is.
Fair play is a fundamental in American democracy and the American Republic.
I want to give full credit to my crystal ball team, Kyle Kondick and Jay Miles Coleman, who do a great job in analyzing all these districts constantly.
They do this day and night.
It's really a sickness.
But I would say this.
Here's why it's bad.
The fact that you don't have more competition in politics means that in most cases, congressmen and women are elected in the primary.
You know, it's like the old South.
We used to call the Democratic primary tantamount to election because the general election didn't matter.
Republicans were competitive in the South.
Same was true in reverse in some of the Northeastern states, Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine and so on.
That is not a good thing because who are the people who participate in primaries?
They tend to be much more conservative on the Republican side, much more liberal on the Democratic side.
So these members of Congress become more rigid and ideological because they don't want to be defeated in the primary.
They know they can win a general election because there's no competition, but they worry about the primary.
It makes them more extreme, which means it's more difficult to get any kind of bipartisan compromise.
And, you know, we are all Americans, right?
I mean, this is supposed to be one country.
I thought that was settled back in the 1860s, but sometimes I wonder.
First of all, Trump, as he frequently says, and he's right about this, he won all seven swing states.
And that's a tragedy, too, Mimi, that out of 50 states, we have seven swing states.
We can call the election of 2028 right now in probably 40 states, maybe more than 40.
So I think that's regrettable too.
But seven swing states ahead of the election.
Most people thought that they would split them in some fashion.
Obviously, one candidate was going to win.
But in the end, Trump carried all of them.
I think he carried them in a decisive enough fashion to keep the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and help the Republicans to take over the U.S. Senate, though that may have been in the cards anyway, given the states that were actually on the ballot.
So they won everything that mattered in the federal system, and they already have the Supreme Court.
We no longer maintain the fiction that our nine justices are nonpartisan.
They have a D or an R next to their name, and we all know it.
Whether they want to admit it or not is another matter.
So we have a very partisan, polarized government.
Trump won it all.
And therefore, he's been able to dictate pretty much what Congress does.
And he certainly had the support in all the key cases that I'm thinking of from the Supreme Court.
You also write this about former President Biden staying in the race.
We've talked about this a lot on this program, staying in the race and kind of delaying his exit.
But you write this.
Perhaps they would have lost anyway, but if Biden had accepted reality and put the nation's needs ahead of his self-absorbed and unrealistic ambitions, Democrats at least could have had a normal primary process to test the strengths and weaknesses of various contenders.
I know your crystal ball looks to the future, but if you could look into the past, what do you think would have happened if former President Biden would have dropped out early or would have announced very early on that he was not seeking a second term?
Yes, and meaning, remember, he said he was going to be a transitional president.
Everyone in both parties interpreted that as, given my age, I'm going to serve one term and then pass the baton.
Well, he didn't do that.
Like many presidents, he, I'm not going to say he was addicted to power, but he liked the perks and he thought at some level that he was the only Democrat who could win.
They all think that.
You know, nobody else can sit behind the Oval Office.
Nobody else can be elected who's good.
I'm already here.
I really should stay.
Well, that was a fatal decision for Democrats.
And of course, in retrospect, Democrats wish they had spoken up against this.
And I'm just stunned to hear not just former President Biden, but also some of his key aides say ridiculous things like, he would have won.
No, no, I got news for you.
He would have done worse than Kamala Harris did.
Okay, except reality, because it's obvious to just about everybody.
So he condemned his party in a way to this result.
And Kamala Harris, as we know, had, what was it, 170 days?
I think that's the title of her forthcoming book.
And she's right to point that out.
If there had been a normal process, you would have had what we normally have, a four-year-long campaign, even though you don't see it for a while, the invisible primary.
You don't see it for a year, maybe a year and a half, and then boom, it's everywhere all the time, money raising and rallies and so on.
And the partisans who vote in the primaries or caucuses that determine the nominee get a chance to get to know the candidates a bit, see the candidates a lot, test the candidates, see who does better, who doesn't do so well.
And you tend to get a tougher nominee, a better nominee, somebody who's been grilled and who's been through, put through their paces early on.
And you could say it's a general societal problem.
You know, there's probably never been more lying in more sectors.
But Donald Trump is an extreme example.
He does tell so many untruths/slash lies, whatever you want to say, and gets away with it because, well, number one, his followers in MAGA have a filter of some sort that enables them to just slough it off and say, oh, well, that's just Trump.
I happen to think presidential words matter.
They really do.
In history, they have anyway.
And that if you're not careful about what you say and you don't try to be truthful, it's going to catch up with you eventually, though I'll admit it certainly hasn't caught up with Donald Trump.
But it's not a good thing.
I mean, do we want to teach young people that it's okay to lie and to lie a lot and to lie about important things, not just trivial things?
I hope we all say no, but I wonder.
So, you know, I agree with the gentleman about that.
Well, first of all, I want to tell her I'm glad she wants to visit the Miller Center, but first on her list should be the Center for Politics.
And there's no bias there on my part at all, but you come first to the Center for Politics.
And if you have extra time, you can go to the Miller Center or other centers here at UVA.
And I'm being facetious.
Not really, actually.
I think I mean that.
But I'm delighted to hear from somebody from Randolph Macon and about my era.
We're about the same age.
Look, if you have to do more than one redistricting in a decade, okay, and I see your point about population changing quickly in some states.
In other states, it's stable.
But if population is changing quickly, if you have to do it, then maybe you have two redistrictings, one every five years.
I don't think I'd want to go through it personally, but if you feel strongly about that, then that's one way to do it.
As far as excluding non-citizens from the census or having them listed as non-citizens and then excluding them from congressional representation, you need a constitutional amendment for that.
And good luck.
We are so divided.
And I hate to say this because I don't support this attitude, but we are so divided, we could not get a constitutional amendment passed and ratified saluting motherhood.
So that's where we are, and we're all going to have to work at it.
If we ever can get back to a point where we can have heated debates, sincere principled debates, but then shake hands and go about our lives respecting the other person.
Larry, the NRCC chair, Richard Hudson, has discouraged GOP members from holding in-person town halls.
I want to show you a portion of Mike Flood's town hall from yesterday and then get your opinion on whether you think that's a good strategy.
My question is, fiscal.
unidentified
With $450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz and $600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people, how much does it cost for fascism?
How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?
Americans went to the polls in November, and they had a choice between a Democratic candidate that had an open border, no enforcement, fentanyl, drugs, human trafficking.
And they had a choice between that and a candidate that said, close the border, get illegal immigrants out of our country.
Stop the fentanyl.
Stop the human trafficking.
Stop the drugs.
Stop the crime.
Stop the violence.
That's what Americans voted for.
Americans voted for a border that is secure.
And I support the president enforcing our immigration laws, which, by the way, were written by Congress.
Well, I admire and respect Congressman Flood for having a town hall.
And that is part of representation.
It really is.
Now, you also have to take precautions in this violent era.
Again, regrettably, I'm sure he had sufficient security there, but you need to do those sorts of things because we've all seen these terrible incidents unfold and the number of threats against members of both parties constantly flowing in have reached record numbers in modern times at least, thousands of them in every year.
This is absolutely unacceptable and must be condemned by everybody.
So I do support the fact that he had in-person town halls, and I think they all should do it.
It's part of representation.
And I live in a district where the member, I'm not going to mention his name, I don't believe has had a town hall.
He has online town halls because that's perfectly safe.
They can filter who says what and who gets a chance to speak.
And I'm sure it's more comfortable for the representative.
But I don't know that there's any guarantee in the Constitution or laws that a representative should feel comfortable.
That's not part of our system.
So I'm glad that you're covering them.
I think people should watch them.
You need to remember that people who are angry about something are much more likely to show up at town halls.
Now, having said that, people who are angry are much more likely to show up at the polls.
So if this is still going on, if this is still going on in the fall of 2026, it may tell us something about what's going to happen once the votes are tallied in November.
On the line for Democrats in New Jersey, here is Mitchell.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Mimi.
Good morning, Professor Sabitow.
Good morning.
You know, I'm in my late 60s.
I've been following politics fairly closely most of my life.
I think what's happened, what I'm seeing now in the Trump era, and it started before that, but is how weak our system is, how weak our guardrails are in protecting our system and how much was always, how much our system was always dependent upon the good faith of representatives and doing what's right for the people.
Now it just seems to be a power play.
Having said that, a lot of the responses that the Democrats might take are legal When they retain power back, they are legal, but I don't know if they're necessarily advisable, like increasing the size of the Supreme Court, adding Washington, D.C. as a state and Puerto Rico as a state.
And when we talk about the redistricting, one of the other legal methods that could be done is increasing the representation size of the House.
I mean, most of the House members, I believe, are serving close to three-quarters of a million people.
You know, not that long ago, it was more like 500,000.
So there's a numbers argument for that, too.
But one thing it might do if they add more representatives is dilute the effect of the gerrymandering.
It's the one you want to buy now is Campaign of Chaos about the 2024 election, Mimi.
I know you agree with my mentioning it, but I did a book in the first decade of this century called A More Perfect Constitution, in which I proposed 23 changes to the Constitution, more as a way of starting debate and discussion, especially in the classroom, about this.
And I included some of the ideas like expanding the House that you have just mentioned.
So I agree with some of these ideas, though, people should debate them and think about them because it's always a good idea to think about the Constitution.
But look, you said something very important right in the beginning.
We don't just depend upon what's in the Constitution or what's in the rule book created by statutes passed by Congress and the state legislatures.
As a country, we have depended heavily on tradition, respect for custom and tradition.
And that is what is gone or going.
You can argue about whether it's totally gone or whether it's going, but there is a disrespect for the ground rules of fair play.
And it is hurting us badly.
And people need to look at that and think about it.
Politicians are always going to do what maintains or increases their power.
It's only the check provided by the electorate that may make them pay attention to custom and tradition.
You see this in Congress all the time.
Look at how things have deteriorated in some of the state legislatures as well and the presidency.
Susan in Massachusetts on the line for independence.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes.
Hello, Mr. Savo.
Good morning.
You know, I live in a 100% gerrymandered state.
And the downside of that is ramp corruption, candidates that run unopposed, literally with no opposition candidate from their own party, much less an opposite party or an independent candidate.
All branches of government are in cahoots with each other.
Policies are terrible.
Mismanagement is rampant.
Recently, the voters by ballot initiative voted for a state audit because to call the state legislature a den of seats would be an understatement.
And so we voted for this audit.
And yet, the governor, the attorney general, and certainly the legislature won't honor the voters' wishes.
And so earlier, you made a comment about: oh, after every census, we redo districts and then we move on.
And everybody's at a happy place.
Well, you're not at a happy place if you have no access to vote.
If all primaries are party-based only.
And what do you do if there isn't an opposite party in your state?
So I could go on and on.
For instance, our legislature a few years ago voted themselves annual auto raises of 12% annually without any permission from the voters.