The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 19 episode of theDaily 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.
On Monday, President Donald Trump unleashed a long, tortured rant on Truth Social rehashing many of his favorite lies about the supposed fraudulence of voting by mail. He also made a concrete announcement: He’s going to try to end mail voting entirely by executive order. Can Trump do that? Well, no. Legally speaking, he theoretically can’t. But we think it’s folly to leave the matter there. Nothing, no matter how absurd seeming, can be ruled out at this point. And if you look at Trump’s eruption carefully, you can see that he clearly let slip his broader intent to abuse presidential power in every conceivable way he can to swing the midterm elections against Democrats. Today we’re talking about all this with David Daley, who’s one of the best analysts out there of right-wing dirty tricks and election subversion, having written several very good books on exactly that topic. He’s been arguing that Trump’s effort to get Texas to gerrymander five new GOP House seats is part of a much bigger scheme, one that has roots going back decades. Thanks for coming on, David.
David Daley: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So Trump had this long eruption on Truth Social in which he lied relentlessly about vote by mail, and he said he will lead a new movement to end it. But here’s the key part, “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT … by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” Now some quick context here. Trump already tried to vastly curtail vote by mail with another executive order earlier this year, but it’s blocked in the courts. David, this looks like he’s going to revisit the idea with something even more radical—an abolishment to vote by mail entirely. What’s your reaction to this?
Daley: Here we go again, right? This is all of Donald Trump’s favorite lines about election fraud, about vote by mail, about how the 2020 election was stolen from him. And once again, all of these lines have no basis in reality. There is no truth to any of it. Whenever Republicans are asked to put up any proof whatsoever about voter fraud, they can’t do it. You can’t find actual examples of this. It is a technique to intimidate and to scare voters. I’m certain that we will see much more of it, but it comes from a place of weakness, of fear, and we have to stand up and fight this.
Sargent: Well, he certainly can’t legally end vote by mail by fiat. The Constitution assigns the authority to set the time, places, and manner of elections to the states and says Congress can alter those regulations. But in another part of his rant, Trump says that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.” That’s nonsense. He also says that states “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” I’m wondering, Dave, if Trump is going to try to make some sweeping argument about national security and vote by mail undermining it to assert some very broad presidential powers here. What do you expect him to argue in legal terms to try to assert the power to do this?
Daley: I expect Trump to argue exactly that: that this is a national security question, that this is about voter fraud, that there are non-Americans voting in elections, that there are dead people voting in elections, immigrants—all of which we know to be not true. You can’t actually find documented examples of this from American elections. It simply does not happen. What we are seeing though, I think, is going to be a real effort to militarize the nation ahead of the 2026 elections. This might be done in the name of purportedly stopping voter fraud, but really it will be done in the name of trying to intimidate Democratic voters and keep them away from the polls. We’re seeing what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C., with National Guard troops on the ground. We see red state governors sending National Guardsmen from their states. And if we think that this is going to stop in Washington, D.C., it’s not. And if we think that this is not likely to happen in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Atlanta, in Philadelphia, in all of the places that Donald Trump already blames for costing him the 2020 election.… I do expect that we will see ICE enforcement on the ground, National Guard troops in these cities, and that there will be a full-on effort to intimidate and suppress Democratic voters.
Sargent: I expect that as well. Before we get into that a little more deeply, do you think Donald Trump will essentially put out an executive order and saying something about ending vote by mail? And you really think he [or] his administration will argue in the courts that he, as the commander in chief, has the authority to do something like this in order to protect the nation on a national security basis? That’s what you expect?
Daley: I expect that they will make some sort of argument along those lines, that there is a connection between voter fraud and national security. It’s laughable on its face, but I find that lots of things laughable on their face can be taken quite seriously in certain federal courts.
Sargent: A hundred percent, especially the highest one. I just want to quickly highlight the fact, before we forget this, that Trump explicitly tied this effort to the midterm elections in his tweet. That gives away the scam entirely. It’s only about the midterms. You put that together with Trump’s naked assertion of utterly absurd powers to end vote by mail, and the larger story comes into view. I think you were getting at it. Trump is showing, with this insane rant, that he fully intends to maximally abuse presidential powers in every way possible to try to rig and swing the midterms. It’s not an accident that this is all happening while he’s militarizing cities. In the run-up to the 2026 elections, you really could see other kinds of military maneuvers maybe in Democratic strongholds or in swing areas that are designed, as you say, to intimidate voters from coming out or possibly to foment and manufacture a crisis atmosphere that they think helps Republicans. That’s the story, right? We’re looking at an open advertising of his intent to maximally abuse presidential powers to rig the midterms.
Daley: This is the game. He has never been quite so explicit before linking what they’re trying to do to Republicans holding power in the midterms. This is not an accident. This is an alarm. And if we don’t react seriously to all of the things that we are seeing and link them together and understand that this is the path that we are headed down, we are not going to be prepared to stop it next fall.
Sargent: I’m glad you put it that way, linking all these things together, because there’s this tendency in the discourse to treat each thing in isolation. Trump occupying L.A. with troops, that’s one story. Trump occupying D.C. with troops, that’s another story. Trump threatening to end vote by mail by fiat, that’s still another story. But when you connect them, you can see the broader intent here.
Daley: This is all the same story. This is an effort to change the very basic nature of American democracy. This is the institution of American authoritarianism, and it is happening right here in front of us. And if we don’t call it that, and if we don’t recognize that all of these things are tied together, we are going to be powerless to stop it. This is the moment in which we have to stand up to this and say no.
Sargent: Speaking of Trump making things more explicit than ever before, we’re now seeing him pressure Texas state legislators to redraw their congressional map to create five new seats. That’s now apparently going to happen. As you wrote in your great book, Ratf**ked, they basically supercharged it as a technique after the 2010 elections. So when Trump goes out and just explicitly tells Texas state legislators to do this, it’s yet another level of the slide into authoritarianism we’re talking about here. California is planning their own redrawing in response. Can you bring us up to date on the Texas and California stories right now?
Daley: What we are watching is the latest chapter in a long Republican effort to use gerrymandering as a blunt force partisan weapon and a tool to lock in their own version of minority rule. Texas stands ready to pass a new mid-decade re-gerrymander—because the state was already gerrymandered back in 2021. They’re going to add five additional seats. It’s going to give them 30 of 38. If this goes according to plan, the Texas Democrats who walked out to deny a quorum are basically back now in Austin and this is going to proceed. They were never going to be able to stop this forever. California is getting ready this week to try to put a special election before voters there in November that would essentially suspend their independent commission and give lawmakers the ability to do a retaliatory gerrymander of California that would add five seats to the Democratic column there. That would make it a 48–4 map.
Now, what you often see in the media is the sense that, Well, California will cancel out Texas. First, Texas can do this as simple as passing a law, and California is going to take voters winning a special election to have the right to do this. And I don’t think that’s necessarily guaranteed. Voters hate gerrymandering and going to them and saying, We have to gerrymander, is a tough fight—and there’s going to be hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the other side. That said, Republicans are not going to stop in Texas. They are going to keep moving. They’re going to go to Ohio next; there’s two Democratic seats that they can pick up there pretty easily. Ron DeSantis in Florida says he’s looking at five Democratic districts—three in South Florida, one in Tampa, one in Orlando. I don’t think he can get all of them, but he could probably pick up at least two or three. Missouri and Indiana have already suggested that they’re going to wipe out one Democratic seat.
And if Democrats want to retaliate for those, they’re essentially out of targets. There’s nowhere left for them to go on the map. I don’t think you can get much more out of Illinois or Maryland. A governor of Oregon has said that they’re not going to do this. If Republicans decide to keep going and turn this into an all-out wildfire, they could lock in anywhere from an additional six to 12 seats in Congress, making it very, very difficult for Democrats to take back the House in the midterms.
Sargent: So presuming that California does squeak out that five extra seats—I think it’s likely that Newsom will succeed, although hardly guaranteed—that would cut the Republican margin. How do you expect it to all shake out? Do you expect Republicans to walk out of this with a significant new batch of seats and a significant leg up in the midterms as a result? Or is there a decent chance that maybe some of those efforts peter out and Democrats manage to do a few mitigating things here and there to make it close to a wash? What’s the most likely outcome?
Daley: I think Republicans are going to pick up multiple seats here. Ohio, this is less a mid-decade redraw than it is a mandated one. The current congressional map in Ohio was only a four-year map, so they are definitely going to go ahead and redraw there. DeSantis vowed to pick up four seats back in 2021 and did so. I take him seriously when he says they’re going to reopen the maps there. JD Vance has been to Indiana and encouraged those lawmakers. Missouri lawmakers have effectively said they’re going to come back into session and get rid of the seat held by Representative Cleaver in Kansas City. Do I think Republicans go too much further than that? No, I don’t think they’ll go to Kansas or Kentucky or Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire—but those are possibilities if they decide to. And the thing about the Democratic side is they don’t really have anywhere else to go.
And all of this is before.… I don’t want to complicate this too much, but the U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear another case on voting rights this fall, essentially regarding the constitutionality of majority-minority seats across the South. We all know how John Roberts feels about the Voting Rights Act. Whenever he has a chance to put one more section in the shredder, he tends to take that opportunity. This case could result in Black Democratic seats across the South being wiped off the map next year. So the combination of mid-decade redistricting and the threat to majority-minority districts currently before the U.S. Supreme Court could dramatically expand the number of seats Democrats would have to win to take back the House.
Sargent: It’s a pretty terrible thought. Now, I want to go big picture. For a long time, Democrats have tried to stand for an ideal in which fair play in politics is a virtue. Yes, both parties have gerrymandered—but generally speaking, Democrats have actually tried to take that out of politics. They’ve implemented things like nonpartisan redistricting commissions to try to take politics out of map drawing. They’ve tried to make voting easier not just for Democratic voters [but] for Republican ones as well with things like automatic voter registration. These efforts, however, have been met with years of nonstop voter suppression by Republicans aimed expressly and deliberately at Democratic constituencies, by the GOP rallying behind an effort to steal an election outright, and now an explicit effort directed by the president himself to gerrymander ostentatiously for the express purpose of holding power in the 2026 midterms. And now that you got Democrats fighting back with the California gerrymander, the usual media voices are accusing them of hypocrisy. But Dems are just simply saying both parties should play by the same set of rules. How do you think about these broader set of dilemmas? Can you help us understand them?
Daley: I think what all of this shows is how badly we need a national standard. It shows how dramatically John Roberts and the U.S. Supreme Court failed us in the Rucho v. Common Cause case in 2019 when they closed the federal courts to a partisan gerrymandering claims and invited the festival of partisan gerrymandering that we saw in 2021 and this mid-decade wildfire that we are seeing right now. So much of this can be laid at Roberts’s doorstep. He absolutely incentivized this. Democrats have got to understand, though, that they can’t gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering problem. They don’t have the numbers to make it work in 2026. And when reapportionment comes in 2030—and I don’t think enough of us are talking about this or thinking about it—you’re going to lose four seats from California, probably two seats from New York, a seat in Michigan, maybe one in Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island. These are seats from blue states going down to red states. They’re to go to Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona.
So we can’t permanently try to use gerrymandering the same way as Republicans have. We are going to have to find a way to go into these states where there are still swing districts. And there’s two in Iowa, one in Minnesota, three in Pennsylvania, one in Virginia. There’s enough swing districts out there. It’s a very difficult strategy, and I know this is horribly unsatisfying at a time that Republicans are using executive orders and gerrymandering and voter suppression and calling out the National Guard to say, Well, we just have to go win a bunch of swing districts. Sounds like I’m a goody-goody. But nothing else is going to work.
The map is about to get harder, not easier. And if we can’t find a way to go into states where sometimes the national brand is toxic and persuade voters and then have a dramatic plan of action for big structural reform when we take back trifecta power that actually thinks about a more proportional House; that thinks about the role of the U.S. Senate; that reflects upon the size and the scope of the U.S. Supreme Court; that thinks about the Electoral College; that thinks about adding states.… We need our own DOGE for structural reform when we take power back in Washington, and we have to be prepared to use it to act boldly. That’s the piece of this we have to take from the Republicans: the willingness to act boldly. But what we need in this moment is a strategy that will actually work. And that is going to require not doing exactly what they’re doing but focusing laser beam on the districts that we can still win and finding that way to 218 seats.
Sargent: Just to close this out, to return to the fair play question for a second, ultimately, the real answer to Republican abuses of power and Republican gamesmanship and rigging of elections in every way that they possibly can is for Democrats to be willing to use their power when they have it nationally, when they have a trifecta, to impose reforms that really enforce a real standard of fair play on our elections once and for all. Is that the size of it?
Daley: That’s exactly right. We have seen how quickly the federal government can be transformed by those who are willing to act boldly and use federal power. Democrats, the last time we had trifecta power, we treated these voting rights bills essentially as omnibus messaging packages. And we were willing to let them go down to defend the anti-democratic filibuster. And we are paying the consequences for that now, in addition to paying the consequences for falling asleep on the importance of redistricting 15 years ago. We could have taken some of these very popular pieces of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act and forced individual votes on redistricting, on mid-decade gerrymanders, on automatic voter registration, and all of these things that the American people are with us on—Republicans, Democrats, independents. And we didn’t take that opportunity. We have to learn how to play politics better and actually use power once we have it. That’s what it’s there for.
Sargent: Well, if what we’re seeing now doesn’t finally persuade Democrats of that, then nothing will. Folks, if you enjoy this discussion, make sure to check out David’s latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far-Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. Dave, it was really good to have you on, man. Thanks so much.
Daley: Such a pleasure, Greg. Thanks for all your good work.
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