This is not the end of the road by a long stretch. This is the summer of our gerrymandering Armageddon.

'Almost a decade ago, David Daley wrote a book that put a spotlight on how politicians redraw maps to win elections. And right now, he's keeping a very close eye on the gerrymandering arms race that's been heating up in recent weeks. House Republicans in Texas passed newly redrawn maps this week, Democrats in California are answering with their own and other states are weighing mid-decade redistricting moves, too. I asked David to break down how we got here, where this gerrymandering showdown could lead, and whether there's a way to cool it down. I'm CNN Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director David Chalian, and this is the CNN Political Briefing. Stay with us. David, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it.

A pleasure, thanks for having me.

So as you and I are sitting here on Thursday recording this conversation, things seem to be coming to a bit of a culmination in both Texas and California as it relates to redistricting. It looks like Texas will have a law passed for Governor Abbott to sign and change those maps and potentially gain Republicans five seats in real short order. And it looks like in California, we've got Democrats successfully moving towards getting this on the ballot to put before California voters to see if their countervailing measure will work here. So do you believe that this tit for tat that we're seeing between Texas and California is the end of this battle over redistricting for this cycle, or will this go on in other places?

I think this is not the end of the road by a long stretch. This is the summer of our gerrymandering Armageddon, and what has started in Texas has spread to California. As you mentioned, California not a guarantee that they will move ahead with these maps. They're going to have to be approved by voters. Voters in California have cast a very tough eye on partisan gerrymandering in the past, so that could be a hard sell. But Republicans look likely to keep going. There's going to be a new map in Ohio. There's a legal process that has to be followed there. Republicans could pick up an additional two seats there. Ron DeSantis in Florida has said he is very seriously looking at three districts in South Florida, two more in Tampa and Orlando. I don't think he can get anywhere near those, but can you squeeze one or two more out of Florida? Probably. Indiana, Missouri likely to go. If Republicans want to keep going, they have more targets on the table. They could look at Kentucky, New Hampshire, Kansas, Tennessee, North Carolina. Democrats are beginning to run out of space. So, while Blue State governors continue to talk tough, right, they're at war, they're bringing a gun to a gunfight, they're starting to find themselves, I think, a little bit out of ammo.

Can we then talk about, one, how we got to this place and, two, what you see as the ills of partisan gerrymandering.

We got here, in part, because redistricting has been reinvented as a blunt force partisan weapon. We've always had gerrymandering. It's been a part of our politics ever since Patrick Henry tries to gerrymander James Madison out of the very first Congress before Elbridge Gerry gives it its name in Massachusetts in 1812. The gerrymandering wars take a new technological turn in 2010, which is around the time that the computer software, the map making programs, the voluminous voter data, the census data sets, but also all of the public and private information that can be uploaded into these programs allow partisan map makers to go up and down streets and determining district lines with just such precision that was never possible before. So gerrymanders that once might have expired or lost their power over the course of a decade in the past, these days it's the power to choose winners and losers almost in perpetuity. Republicans realized this first. They ran a really audacious redistricting play in 2010 called Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project, and they recognized the key insight here was that state legislatures are where this power is held. Republicans, after getting shellacked in 2008, plotted their path to power back by winning state legislatures and then remapping not only the states but the congressional delegations. I don't think you can understand American politics today without grappling with the consequences of Redmap and the sort of nation that it created. To get to the second part of your question, the nation it created is much more polarized. Now, gerrymandering doesn't exactly cause polarization, but the two are accelerants that feed on each other. We are in a place right now in which we have 37 of 435 congressional districts that are competitive, which is to say in 2024, 37 of 435 seats were within five percentage points. In most of these other districts, the key race is the party primary, a low turnout summer election closed to anyone but party members. It elects more extreme people. It sends them onto Congress really without having to worry about the general election. It incentivizes members not to have to think about anything but their base or losing a primary. And, as a result, we have a nation in which people recognize something is broken, that there's a disconnect between them and their leaders, and much of it is caused by redistricting.

'Now, as you said, it's not necessarily that redistricting causes polarization. But we do know that this has been a trend in American society of citizens sort of self-selecting their neighbors and starting to group themselves just where they live politically. And I'm wondering, I don't know what you say to the argument that, no, like this is how Americans have been sort of sorting themselves out and choosing where they want to live and that this is part of the calculation and therefore having a map that conforms to that political quest isn't necessarily not representative of what citizens were looking for. What do you say to that?

'I think that if you were to look at the states that had the most serious partisan gerrymandering problem in the last cycle, back in the 2010s when much of this was litigated — so you're looking at North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Maryland — that these states, it's not that voters sorted themselves; it's that the voters were sorted by the map makers. You can't look at districts that resemble Donald Duck kicking Goofy and suggest that people actually decided to live in those patterns. They didn't. And I think if you look at similar elections, right? If you look at a state like Pennsylvania, in the 2008 elections, the 2012 elections, very, very similar. Barack Obama wins statewide by about a hundred thousand votes each time. In 2008, you have a map with 11 Democrats and 7 Republicans in Congress. And in 2012, you get a map with 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats. So, what happened in between 2008 and 2012? Did hundreds of thousands of voters in Pennsylvania relocate because they wanted to be closer to blue-leaning people or closer to a better Thai restaurant or something? No, that's not what happened, right? The lines were redrawn in 2011 in such a way that Republicans were able to win 13 of 18 seats. Republicans were able to win 64 of 94 congressional seats in 2012 in purplish swing states that Barack Obama carried. Had that been a 50-50 battle, right? Had Obama even been able to carry half of these states and Republicans remapped, but Obama carried statewide, you're looking at a 219, 216 Democratic House and a very, very different version of American history.

'I wanna talk to you about the Supreme Court's role in all of this. We'll do that when we come back. Stay with us. One of the things you wrote about in a New York Times op-ed was John Roberts' role in this moment of gerrymandering. It's interesting because I guess people do ask, is there sort of a national solution to this, and your argument, I think, would be that John Roberts says, no, there's not a national solutions to this.

'John Roberts did, in fact, say no. John Roberts said partisan gerrymandering is essentially just politics as usual, and we have to live with it and deal with it and defeat it through politics, right? Well, that's not how gerrymandering works. It's very hard to defeat at the ballot box. Partisan gerrymantering is pretty much undefeated. The most disappointing, I think, the bitterest piece of the Roberts ruling, which came in a 2019 case called Rucho vs. Common Cause out of North Carolina, is that it arrived at a moment in which federal judges nationwide, appointed by presidents of both parties, looked at extreme maps drawn by both parties—by Democrats in Maryland, by Republicans in Ohio, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina—and they said, we have all the tools we need to determine when a gerrymander goes too far. And they said, if we don't do it, no one else will. This is a role that not only are the courts uniquely suited to play, but they're the only people who can play it when the representatives are trying to lock themselves in office. And Roberts says no. He not only overturns the lower court decision from North Carolina, but he closes the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims in the future. And what does that do, right? It tells all of these state legislators that nobody is going to stand in their way if they engage in what was a festival of partisan gerrymandering in 2021 by both parties, right? Democrats did it in Illinois, in Maryland. They expanded onto Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico. Republicans who already had a big gerrymander advantage from the previous decade, grabbed additional seats in Florida and North Carolina, in Utah, Oklahoma, Tennessee. And now we're in the middle of this mid-decade redistricting, and voters have nowhere to go because John Roberts closed the federal courts and, I would argue, failed the nation.

Now something that Roberts pointed to, I believe in that case, in his opinion, and for the majority in that case, was this trend we had seen for these independent commissions to handle redistricting. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, have those efforts in those states where this has been taken out of the hands of the legislators who, as you say, just want to sort of lock themselves into power and put into the hands an independent commission — has there been a success story there or no?

'Yes, I think that there have been success stories there. I think Michigan might be one of the very best success stories. Michigan, a state that had been wildly gerrymandered throughout the 2000s and the 2010s at both the state legislative level, as well as the congressional districts, voters there got sick of it. And there was a cross-partisan effort in 2018 to amend the state constitution, to take this out of the hands of politicians, put it back in the hands of voters. This won at the ballot box with more than 60% of the vote in 2018, a year in which redistricting reform was especially popular nationwide. It wins in Utah, it wins in Missouri, it wins in Colorado, it wins in Ohio, adding on to victories that had been won in Arizona and California and Florida, that would follow in Virginia. And if you look at what has happened in Michigan in 2022 and in 2024, the state legislative chambers actually switch sides based on which party wins more votes. I mean, that is sort of what is supposed to happen in an election. It didn't happen in Michigan for 20 years, but it has happened because a commission drew honest, fair lines. The parties compete. When the voters change their minds and want to go another way, the maps are responsive.

Now, you just listed some states in your list of states that had moved to an independent commission. California, you listed Ohio, Missouri, Florida, and yet what we're seeing, those are the same states you just listed that partisans are now trying to reclaim control of the process.

And that's the problem with John Roberts' decision, right? He suggested that this was, you know, a settled deal. It's never a settled, deal. These lines are too important to politicians. And now that gerrymandering has gone out of control, what we are seeing in California, right, is that Gavin Newsom and the Democrats are asking voters to suspend what has been a gold standard commission and allow the Democrats to pass a wild 48 to 4 map that gerrymanders the other side into oblivion.

'And this is why we see Arnold Schwarzenegger getting ready to fight this battle against Newsom in the fall in this campaign that's gonna go before voters because he was sort of the godfather of promoting the independent commission when he was governor in California. So I'm wondering, what do you make — and I'll say this specifically about the Democrats who have been, I think of the two parties, the bigger champions of moving towards non-partisan gerrymandering and independent commissions — when you see Eric Holder, the former Obama attorney general or President Obama himself supporting what you just described is happening in California now?

I think it's a tragedy. I think that Democrats are throwing away a decade of messaging on redistricting that is extraordinarily popular with the American people. When you look at YouGov polls, any other polls, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, there's still huge public support for not allowing politicians to draw district lines and choose winners and losers. And Democrats are essentially saying we have to gerrymander our way out of our gerrymandering problem. Not only is this bad for democracy, the math isn't there for them. They cannot gerrymanter their way out of their gerrymandering problem. They don't control enough states to even do it.

I mean, not controlling enough states to do it is their gerrymandering problem, right?

That's their gerrymandering problem. They can't gerrymander their way out of it. So they're throwing away a decade of messaging on a war they can't win. I think it's a big mistake.

You also wrote, I believe in the Washington Post, about how rank choice voting can intersect with this. Can you explain that to our listeners? Why would a ranked choice system help support this notion of getting to fairer districts drawn?

'Well, I think there's two different ways that ranked choice voting could be used. If you simply used ranked choice voting in congressional primaries, so many of those primaries that are non-competitive seats and the primary determines the winner, you might have nine or 10 different people running in that race, and you end up with a winner chosen by a fraction of a fraction of voters. With ranked choice voting, working as an instant runoff, you would at least come out with a candidate who won a majority of votes in the primary. That would be a big help. But when you combine ranked choice voting and multi-member districts, if we were to transform the house and make it more proportional in each state by getting rid of single-member districts, moving to larger multi-members districts, you would take away the power of district lines to choose winners and losers once and for all. And this solves two problems, right? You talked about the geography problem earlier. We have a lot of states, I'm in one right now, Massachusetts, in which we have a nine-zero Democratic delegation, even though there's plenty of Republicans here. You can't really draw a Republican district in Massachusetts. It's just the way people live. If you had a more proportional delegation, if you had three districts of three, and you elected with ranked choice, you would have two Democrats and one Republican from each of these districts. And you would, likewise in Tennessee, have two Republicans and one Democrat. You would open up representation nationally. And it's New England Republicans, it's Southern and Midwestern Democrats, who can be the bridge builders, who can try to find consensus. We have lost that in the House. We've lost it in our politics. Our governing has suffered as a result.

David Daley, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate your expertise.

A pleasure, thanks for having me on.

That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.