The dirty trick that couldn’t save Trump’s midterms

0:00ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hey, I'm Keely Johnson. Just before If You're Listening, I want to tell you about my new podcast, Expanse Disappearing in the Devil's Triangle. It's about one of Australia's greatest aviation mysteries. I've realised that a plane crash without a wreckage is a bit like a murder without a body. And when flight VHMDX vanished without a trace, with five men on board, people had questions. Why the hell would you be trying to fly through there on a night like that? His next call was screaming, he said, I'm 5,000. It never goes out of your mind, ever. How does a plane just disappear? Search Expanse on ABC Listen. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal, Gadigal and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people.

0:54The dust has hardly settled after Democrats' thumping victory in the US midterm elections and already a narrative is forming about the recent efforts to rig electoral maps through gerrymandering. Dummymandering is what we're calling it here. The total backfiring of their gerrymandering scheme. They gerrymandered themselves into unelectability. The Florida gerrymander failed. The message people seem to be taking from the election is that the Republican effort over the last year to win themselves more seats by redistricting has absolutely backfired. They basically gerrymandered or reappropriated the districts to such an extent that they made some of their Republicans vulnerable. It's possible that Republicans lose every single seat that they gerrymandered for themselves.

1:39We're seeing these gerrymanders fall place after place. Now, as a guy who is very into maps, I am fascinated by gerrymanders fall place after place. Now, as a guy who is very into maps, I am fascinated by gerrymandering, the process of redrawing electoral district boundaries in your favor. Usually it massively benefits the party that's doing it. So if the Republicans really did botch this, it shows that they are catastrophically out of touch with the electorate. The problem for Republicans is they drew maps that were optimistic. These districts are not voting the same way that they did in 2024. So as the final votes are counted in this extraordinary election, I'm going to take a detailed look at what happened

2:18with the attempt to win seats through gerrymandering, not just by Republicans, but by Democrats too. The big gerrymandering fight kicked off last year in Texas, a state which was formerly a safe Republican seat, but has now seen Democrats win seats in the House, Senate, and even in the Governor's Mansion. So did the effort to gerrymander Texas really backfire? Or is the size of the surge in Democratic Party votes just making it seem that way? I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening. Not many states can get Matthew McConaughey to do a voiceover for a tour of their Capitol building, but Texas isn't like most states. That's me, the state capitol. I'm the public face of Texas, and that means I've got an important job to do.

3:25So come on in. I'll tell you all about it. Yes, for some reason in this video from the State Preservation Board, McConaughey is playing the role of the building itself. First of all, the thing I like best is seeing all the young visitors. That's because the moment young people see me, they know right away they're in a very special place. This Capitol building has an upsettingly sexy voice. The doorway's 28 tons. The walls are 28 inches thick. Oh, yeah. How thick is it again? 28 inches thick. The thick Capitol building is in the city of Austin and is where Texas legislation is passed. Half of the legislative branch meets here in my largest room, the House of Representatives chamber, where members gather to pass the laws of our state.

4:12And it's here in the House of Representatives that a significant amount of drama took place back in 2003. Members, if I may have your attention, a quorum is not present. The Constitution of the state of Texas says in order to do any business in the state's legislative houses, more than two-thirds of members must be present. In 2003, that meant that out of the 150 representatives, 100 of them needed to be in the House chamber or they couldn't operate. Now, ordinarily, that's not a problem. At least 100 of them show up each day. needed to be in the House chamber or they couldn't operate. Now, ordinarily, that's not a problem. At least 100 of them show up each day. The only time problems arise is when some of the members have a bone to pick.

4:56And that happened on the 12th of May. 53 Democratic state representatives decided not to show up for work. It's a protest their Republican counterparts don't find very funny. Now, these kinds of protests are obviously very disruptive to getting things done, which is why in Texas, the law permits the Speaker of the House to send state troopers to compel members to return to the chamber. I move that the sergeant or officers appointed by the sergeant sent for an arrest all absentees whose absence is not excused for the purpose of securing and retaining their attendance. The sergeant is so ordered. The House Speaker wasn't happy about this situation at all. And I think that the chicken D's that did this

5:41ought to be ashamed of themselves today. He's calling them chicken D's because back in 1979, a group of state senators had pulled a similar stunt and become known as the Killer B's because they'd buzzed off. And that's what they are, is a bunch of Chicken D's. It doesn't really have the same ring to it. But the reason these Chicken D's refused to show up to work is that the House was set to vote to approve a new electoral map for the US congressional seats in Texas. In the view of the Democrats, the new map was designed to deliberately hand seats to Republicans. They didn't have the numbers to win a vote against the map on the floor of the House, so they figured their best option was to not come to work.

6:26So the state troopers were tasked with finding them. Absent on Monday, Democratic State Representative Helen Giddings of Dallas was hauled into work by state troopers on Tuesday. They picked her up outside her Austin apartment. 2003 was the Iraq War era, a time when the US government was issuing playing cards to soldiers printed with the faces of wanted Iraqi officials. There's 52 cards in a pack, and in Texas that day, there were 53 missing Democrats. It was almost too perfect. I have here some cards of Democrats that are missing in action. The king of clubs was the ringleader of the operation, Representative Jim Dunham. And Jim Dunham had a plan. Now, the fun thing about state troopers is that by law, they cannot operate in other states,

7:18which meant all the Democrats had to do was make sure at least 51 of them were out of the state for four days until the bill's time for passage expired. On a Mother's Day Sunday morning, Dunham secretly chartered two buses and told Democrats to meet outside a hotel in Austin. So Dunham bundled most of the Democrats onto the secret buses and headed for the state border. Dunham and 50 other Democrats remain holed up in a hotel in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Flexing their political muscles, they refuse to come home until Republicans drop a redistricting plan. That reporter from KVUE said that Dunham and 50 other Democrats were in Oklahoma. But that wasn't quite true. See, Dunham plus 50 would equal 51, which is enough to bust

8:07the quorum. But actually, there were only 50 there, including Dunham. That's because former Democratic House Speaker Pete Laney wasn't there. He told everyone he would be flying to Oklahoma on his light plane, but he never showed up. The Republicans saw this as an opportunity and set out to find out if he was still in Texas, and if he was, to stop him from crossing into Oklahoma. Mission Centre, Mike, you bring him in, I'll be there. Yeah, Mike, it's David Bailoff. I want to ask you a question. They called the Federal Aviation Administration to try and track him down. I've got a congressional office on another line and they want to know. They gave me the tail number of a plane. And can you tell by the tail number if it's a Piper Cherokee, if the plane ever took off, or if it's in the air right now?

8:59The Aviation Administration went off to figure out where Laney's plane was. Sir, he's airborne. He'll be landing in about seven minutes. Where is he landing? It's Ardmore, Oklahoma. Ardmore Downtown Executive Airport. Alright, okay. Thanks a whole lot. Originally, he had charted a course for Oklahoma, but he never arrived. They kept chasing him and found that he'd decided to go elsewhere. The guy flew from Austin to Plainview yesterday. Oh, great. Austin to Plainview. That helps a lot. He had stopped over in Plainview to see his mother, as the previous day had been Mother's Day. But unfortunately for Laney, Plainview is in Texas. The state troopers set off after him, but by the time they got there, he had taken off again and flown to Ardmore in Oklahoma,

9:48which meant that the Democrats had the numbers they needed. They defeated the bill for a while. After months of struggle in the Texas State House, including another attempt to bust a quorum when 11 Democratic state senators fled to New Mexico for a month, it passed. The lines of the Texas electoral map were redrawn and the shift was pretty dramatic. So let's see what the new districts looked like, starting at the state capitol itself in... Austin, Texas, city of music and diversity, proudly standing out as somewhat of an individual in the state of Texas. Austin may have seen itself as a bit of an individual, but the new congressional map didn't. Formerly, pretty much all of Austin and its suburbs were in Texas District 10,

10:40a safe Democratic Party seat. But after the redraw, it was an entirely different story. After 2003, if you went for a short walk around the Austin downtown area, you'd find yourself in three separate congressional districts that were somehow connected with other cities hundreds of miles away. One of the new districts, the 21st Congressional District, which contained the Matthew McConaughey-voiced State Capitol building with doors which are how thick again? 28 inches thick. Oh, yeah. This district stretched southwest through the Austin suburbs all the way to San Antonio, a city far enough away that it has its own separate, though vaguely similar, sounding tourism campaigns. This is unforgettable San Antonio. It's a land of art, history, and culture.

11:35So, the state capital is in the same district as San Antonio International Airport, more than 100 kilometres away. Walk a few blocks west of the Austin state capital to get a bagel, and your representative there is also representing people in suburban Houston. But if you walk a few blocks east of the capital to get a taco, you'll find yourself in the 25th congressional district. That district stretches all the way to McAllen, Texas, a city which offers a place for travellers to get their first taste of Mexico. Because it's on the Mexican border, 500 kilometres away from Austin. For Australians, this would be like Parliament House in Canberra and the MCG being in the same electorate with the same MP. For the American East Coast elite,

12:26it is like the White House and Niagara Falls being in the same district. Or if you're British, Edinburgh Castle and Oxford University. This madness spread right across Texas. And at the 2004 general election, when Texas's own George W. Bush won a second term as president. Thank you all for coming. We had a long night and a great night. In fact, five of Texas's House districts flipped from Democrat to Republican. Now, you're possibly thinking, grrr, evil Republicans stealing seats from good and noble Democrats, right? Many, many such cases. But this requires a bit of context. At the 2004 election, Texas Republicans won 65% of the House seats despite only getting 59% of the popular vote. But at the previous election, when the map they were using was drawn by Democrats, the

13:30situation was almost exactly reversed. Despite winning 54% of the popular vote, the Republicans had only won 47% of the seats. And that was mild compared to the gap over the previous three decades. Republicans had been systematically underrepresented in the Texas congressional delegation for a very, very long time. The redistricting of 2003, which the Chicken Dees were fighting against, was no more unfair than the maps that they had been drawing themselves for years. The difference was this new map was unfair against them instead of for them. See, this kind of thing did not start in 2003. It started way before that. In fact, it's such an old practice that even the word we use to describe it, a gerrymander, is from all the way back in 1812.

14:32At the time, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry had approved redrawn districts in the state in a bid to keep his party in power. A cartoonist at the Boston Gazette looked at the map and decided that one of the districts resembled a salamander. He combined the governor's name, Elbridge Gerry, with the shape of the salamander and created the word gerrymander, as we now pronounce it. So let's find out from this old-timey video how this process works. Here is how gerrymandering may be accomplished. Party A's strength is centred in the western third of the state, but statewide they are outnumbered by Party B. So you've got a state where there are supporters of Party A concentrated in one particular area,

15:16but across the whole state there are actually more supporters of Party B. This is pretty common in America. Democrats tend to outnumber Republicans in large urban centers like Austin, Houston and Dallas, while Republicans tend to be more highly represented in small towns and rural areas. So for the purpose of this explanation let's say that this hypothetical state needs to be divided into three districts. There are two methods that you can use to gerrymander it to give one party an advantage. Those methods are called packing and cracking. Let's start with cracking. By the criteria of equal population only, A could end up with no representation, as in this example. Cracking involves drawing map lines so that party A's supporters are

16:07cracked apart and spread thin across multiple districts rather than being concentrated in one of them. It means that in each district party A supporters are outnumbered by party B supporters so party B will win all three districts. The other way to do this is with packing. Or with one seat out of three, depending upon which party was drawing the new lines. Packing involves drawing the map lines around as many Party A voters as you can to pack them all into a small number of districts. Then you're free to draw lots more districts, all of which would have a majority of B voters. In this instance, Party A would win the one city district, and Party B would win two rural districts. The Texas gerrymandering of 2003 was mostly an exercise in packing.

16:59The map was drawn so that Black and Latino voters were concentrated in a small number of very, very safe democratic districts. That's how you end up with the taco stand in eastern Austin being in the same district as the bridge into Mexico, 500 kilometres away. District 25 was in fact nicknamed the Fajita Strip. Now, you might be asking, isn't drawing district boundaries based on race illegal? And the answer is, well, kind of. See, back in the 1960s, the civil rights movement under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. campaigned against exactly this kind of thing. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time. Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.

17:55Turn me round, oh, turn me round. In Alabama, as in other states, the map was gerrymandered to limit the influence of black voters. Critics felt that legislatures were grossly malapportioned in favour of rural areas. And Martin Luther King's campaigning paid off. In theory. Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act made it illegal to gerrymander based on race. But it didn't say anything about gerrymander based on race, but it didn't say anything about gerrymandering based on party preference. If you say, oh I'm not packing and cracking black voters, I'm packing and cracking Democrats who happen to be black. That's totally fine, according to the courts.

18:40When this was challenged, the Supreme Court in fact decided repeatedly that it's not their job to prevent partisan gerrymandering, just racial gerrymandering. That's not all the court said, though. In a series of unprecedented decisions, the court said that federal and state legislative districts must be apportioned equally according to population. One man, one vote. The idea of one man, one vote isn't controversial. The idea is that each district should have the same number of voters in it. We do this in Australia, but to allow the Electoral Commission to create electorates that make, you know, geographic and socio-economic sense, the Electoral Commission's got a little bit of leeway. They have a quota that they aim for, but they can vary from that quota, sometimes

19:30by up to 10%. In the US, there is absolutely no leeway at all. In Texas's new map adopted in 2003, each district had either 651,619 or 651,620 people in it. A variation of one person. There's no way to do that without drawing a lot of weird shapes. There's just going to be salamanders everywhere. So if you're already drawing weird shapes, why not draw weird shapes that benefit your team? The one-man, one-vote mandate. Freed, in a certain sense, to gerrymander in accordance with partisan political objectives. So gerrymandering is basically legal, as long as you don't say that you're doing it for racist reasons. So why isn't the entire country permanently gerrymandered? Well, for a long time, the thing that prevented that was basically a gentleman's agreement between the two major parties.

20:37It was a mix of deterrence and collusion. The deterrence came from a promise that if either party started gerrymandering too much, the other party would respond in kind. The collusion came from the fact that Congress was a bit of a boys club with friendships formed across the aisle, and both sides kind of were colluding to make sure that their friends kept their jobs. Gerrymandering continues to be an effective weapon to maintain the status quo, and the court has declined to rule on this practice. But gentlemen's agreements don't mean much in the Trump era. And we have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats. Last year, Donald Trump started talking about throwing the unwritten rules aside

21:23and once again redrawing the map in Texas to benefit the Republicans even more than the 2003 redraw. We have a really good governor and we have good people in Texas and I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats. New maps were drawn and, well, the Texas Democrats knew what to do. As Speaker Dustin Burroughs called the House to order Monday, all eyes were on the empty seats. Some of our colleagues have fled the state in their duty. Once again, the Speaker and Governor signed orders to send a posse of state troopers out to find them and drag them back to the House. I am disappointed that while these members are here reporting for their duty under the

22:10Constitution, others are out of the state in New York, in Chicago, in places they do not represent. It was unclear how long they'd be able to stay out of the state, but then their colleagues in California came to their rescue. We're here to have the back not only of those represented from Texas, but the people of Texas that are struggling and suffering from the same kind of assault on democracy that binds us together as a nation. Now, California is a little weird and actually has an independent electoral redistricting commission to avoid overt gerrymandering. But Governor Gavin Newsom held a referendum where voters agreed to basically switch that commission off until 2030 so that Democrats could gerrymander

23:00the Californian map. They're not screwing around. We cannot afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire. The gentleman's agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans collapsed. Texas redrew its map, and California, and North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama. But nobody knew exactly how it would all work in practice until it was tested at the actual midterm election this week. Good afternoon Texans. It is a very exciting day here in Bexar County and all over our state. In Texas, it was a landslide victory for Democrats. This is how we won Texas. This is a win the size of Texas. They won the open Senate seat and they took control of the Texas government itself,

23:57winning both the state house in Austin and the governor's mansion. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the shock of this win. In the US Congress, the fajita strip flipped from Republican to Democrat. God bless Texas and God bless the United States. Further along the Mexican border, Democratic candidate Katie Padilla Stout, an attorney who represents kids in the foster care system, defeated the Republican candidate, a guy named Brandon, who makes videos about guns on YouTube. I am incredibly honoured to be your first Congresswoman-elect for the District of Texas 23. But despite the landslide results everywhere else, when it came to the House, those were the only two seats that flipped from Republican to Democrat.

24:46Another seat actually flipped the other way, with the Republicans scooping enough rural voters into a Dallas district to overwhelm the urban Democrats and win. Which, if you didn't know about the gerrymandered map, would have been a big surprise. Democrats won 52% of the vote in House races, but only won 14 out of a possible 38 seats. Republicans held on to 24 of them. That is the gerrymandered map at work. By my count, the map probably saved two or three Texas Republicans their job. And keep in mind that the map already favoured Republicans even before it was redrawn. Across the country, gerrymandering may have only picked up one or two seats for the Republicans, but it probably saw them retain around five. At the

25:39same time, by triggering the gerrymandering arms race with the Democrats, they probably cost themselves five seats in California. Also the Democrats won so many seats elsewhere that, I mean, it hardly matters. But this whole situation, it's so mad. Having a government at a state level determine how elections operate at a federal level is such a silly way to handle this. And these strange laws which force people to draw salamander-shaped boundaries and ban some types of gerrymandering but not others are also mad. It's a recipe for unfair maps, and this year's maps were particularly unfair. As the dust settles, it seems like the lesson the Republicans will take from this is not gerrymandering doesn't work, it's gerrymandering would have worked if it wasn't such a landslide

26:38against us. Now that the gentlemen's agreement has been well and truly blasted to smithereens, both parties are already planning for how they might gerrymander districts even more in the lead up to the 2028 presidential election. The result of this election in gerrymandered states isn't a win for democracy. It's proof that if you'd prefer to pick your voters by drawing salamanders rather than win new ones with popular policies, the only thing that can stop you is a stampede. This podcast was written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepard and Jess O'Callaghan. On Tuesday, I'll be chatting to Emma Shortus about what these midterms results mean

27:32for the next two years of US politics. If you've got a question, please send a voice note to if you're listening at abc.net.au. I'll catch you next week.