The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.
That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.
In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats….
When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?
Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.
“It seemed to me worth a bluff,” Lofgren said. “If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”
“But they didn’t stop,” she added. “They just doubled down.”
So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency.
“It got very real, very fast,” recounted Newsom, whose provocative podcast appearances and social media posturing lit the fuse for this slapdash effort — and positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party in advance of his likely 2028 White House run.
POLITICO spoke with nearly 50 people involved with the California effort, including lawmakers, political operatives, staffers and redistricting wonks. Many were granted anonymity to share details of private deliberations of the tightly-guarded process, which spanned multiple states and levels of government. Together, they paint a picture of a showdown propelled not by painstaking deliberations but by its own self-generating momentum and the opportunity for a rudderless Democratic party to remake itself as a political street brawler….
You can watch this episode of the PBS Series, Civics Made Easy with Ben Sheehan in which Josh Douglas and I are both interviewed about the U.S. Constitution, state constitutions and voting rights.
Troubling story out of Hawaii, hat tip to Charles Stewart for flagging this:
The next meeting of the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission on Wednesday is expected to be dominated by recent findings of discrepancies in the number of drop box and mail-in ballots cast on Kauaʻi during the 2024 general election.
That the state’s official count of those ballots exceeded the number that the county said it collected and submitted is not in dispute.
But accounts of just how great that discrepancy was vary — a lot.
The numbers range from 25 according to the state’s chief elections officer to 39 according to the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court to 661 according to an Elections Commission permitted interaction group and up to 3,772 based on the initial Kauaʻi County ballot envelope count.
Civil Beat has reviewed the tranche of public records, correspondence and court submissions and confirmed there were inconsistencies that raise questions about the management of mail-in ballots in Hawaiʻi.
However, gaps in the chain of custody records during the county’s ballot collection all the way through the state’s counting make it impossible to say with certainty who’s right about how big the difference really was.
Hawaii's difficulties reconciling mail ballots in the 2024 election will undermine confidence in mail-balloting nationwide and illustrate the reality that a skeptical world is watching. Jen Morrell has good quotes in this article. I hope this leads to serious reforms.…
Pro Publica:
Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead… Continue reading
NYT:
The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to… Continue reading
WSJ:
While both Texas and California are seeking to flip five seats, other states have fewer seats to target. Shawn Donahue, a political-science professor at the University at Buffalo, predicts Republicans would pick up four to six of House seats nationwide… Continue reading
NYT oped:
To begin with, the surprise announcement and the sudden, if ambiguous, turnabout suggested once again that Mr. Trump is governing in his second term without advisers who can or even try to help him discipline his impulses. The… Continue reading
Florida Politics:
In a victory for immigrants and advocacy groups, a federal judge has provisionally blocked enforcement of a Florida elections law that prohibited noncitizens from collecting signatures for citizen-led ballot initiatives.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, in a 28-page ruling… Continue reading
NPR:
The Trump administration has indicated it may withhold tens of millions of dollars in election security funding if states don’t comply with its voting policy goals.
The money comes from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program, and… Continue reading
Arizona Mirror:
The vast majority of Arizonans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 cast their ballot by mail — a system ushered into existence and expanded by Republican lawmakers in the Grand Canyon State. Trump… Continue reading