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

After Democrats declared a landslide win in the midterms, a narrative quickly formed online: Republicans’ aggressive redistricting strategy had spectacularly backfired…but the reality is more complicated. Years ago, Donald Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw their electoral map specifically to blunt the kind of wave that just hit them, and it worked exactly as designed, just not enough to survive a landslide. This time the strategy didn’t win them the election, but it meaningfully softened the damage, even as their own aggressive redistricting triggered a counter-gerrymander from Democrats that cost them ground elsewhere. So did the plan really fail, or did it just stop a landslide from being even bigger? Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Why the hell would you be trying to fly through there on a night like that?

• 0:37Speaker 03

  His next call was screaming, "You're sitting on 5,000".

• 0:40Speaker 04

  It never goes out of your mind, ever.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  How does a plane just disappear? Search Expanse on ABC Listen.

• 0:48Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal, Gadigal and Wurundjeri Wurung people. The 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.

• 1:06Speaker 06

  Dummymandering is what we're calling it here. The total backfiring of their gerrymandering scheme.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  They gerrymandered themselves into unelectability. The Florida gerrymander failed.

• 1:17Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  They basically gerrymandered or re-appropriated the districts to such an extent that they made some of their Republicans vulnerable.

• 1:35Speaker 07

  It's possible that Republicans lose every single seat that they gerrymandered for themselves.

• 1:39Matt Bevan?

  We're seeing these 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 favour. 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.

• 2:03Speaker 07

  The problem for Republicans is they drew maps that were optimistic. These districts are not voting the same way that they did in 2024.

• 2:11Matt Bevan?

  So as the final votes are counted in this extraordinary election, I'm going to take a detailed look at what happened with the attempt to win seats through gerrymandering, not just by Republicans, but by Democrats too.

• 2:33Matt Bevan?

  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 seen that way? I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

• 3:06Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  That's me, the state Capitol. I'm the public face of Texas, and that means I've got an important job to do. So come on in, I'll tell you all about it.

• 3:27Matt Bevan?

  Yes, for some reason, in this video from the State Preservation Board, McConaughey is playing the role of the building itself.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:45Matt Bevan?

  This Capitol Building has an upsettingly sexy voice.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  The door weighs 28 tonnes. The walls are 28 inches thick.

• 3:53Matt Bevan?

  Oh, yeah. How thick is it again?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  28 inches thick.

• 3:57Matt Bevan?

  The thick Capitol Building is in the city of Austin, and is where Texas legislation is passed.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:12Matt Bevan?

  And it's here, in the House of Representatives, that a significant amount of drama took place back in 2003.

• 4:23Matt Bevan?

  Members, find 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. The only time problems arise is when some of the members have a bone to pick, and that happened on the 12th of May.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Fifty-three Democratic state representatives decided not to show up for work. It's a protest their Republican counterparts don't find very funny.

• 5:05Matt Bevan?

  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, send 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 Ds that did this ought to be ashamed of themselves today. He's calling them Chicken Ds because back in 1979, a group of state senators

• 5:48Matt Bevan?

  had pulled a similar stunt and become known as the Killer Bs because they'd buzzed off. And that's what they are, is a bunch of Chicken Ds. It doesn't really have the same ring to it. But the reason these Chicken Ds refuse 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. So the state troopers were tasked with finding them.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:40Matt Bevan?

  2003 was the Iraq War era, a time when the US government was issuing plane 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, which meant all the Democrats had to do was make

• 7:21Matt Bevan?

  sure at least 51 of them were out of the state for four days until the bill's time for passage expired.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  On a Mother's Day Sunday morning, Dunham secretly chartered two buses and told Democrats to meet outside a hotel in Austin.

• 7:37Matt Bevan?

  So Dunham bundled most of the Democrats onto the secret buses and headed for the state border.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Dunham and 50 other Democrats remain holed up in a hotel in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Flexing their political muscles, they refused to come home until Republicans drop a redistricting plan.

• 7:54Matt Bevan?

  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 the quorum. But actually, there were only 50 there, including Dunham.

• 8:16Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  Mission Center, Mike, you're bringing him up? Yeah, Mike, it's David Bailiff. I want to ask you a question.

• 8:42Matt Bevan?

  They called the Federal Aviation Administration to try and track him down.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  I've got a congressional officer on the line, and they want to know. They gave me the tail number of a plane, and can you tell by the tail number that it's a Piper Cherokee if the plane ever took off, or if it's in the air right now?

• 8:59Matt Bevan?

  The Aviation Administration went off to figure out where Laney's plane was.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Sir, he's airborne. He'll be landing in about seven minutes. Where is he landing? It's Ardmore, Oklahoma. Okay. Ardmore Downtown Executive Airport. All right, okay. Thanks a whole lot.

• 9:13Matt Bevan?

  Originally, he had chartered a course for Oklahoma, but he never arrived. They kept chasing him and found that he'd decided to go elsewhere. A guy flew from Austin to Plainview yesterday.

• 9:25Speaker 06

  Oh, great.

• 9:27Matt Bevan?

  Austin Plainview, they helped a lot. He had stopped over in Plainview to see his mother, as the previous day had been Mother's Day. 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, which 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.

• 10:09Matt Bevan?

  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...

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Austin, Texas, city of music and diversity, proudly standing out as somewhat of an individual in the state of Texas.

• 10:28Matt Bevan?

  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, a 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?

• 11:12Speaker 04

  28 inches thick.

• 11:14Matt Bevan?

  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. So the state capitol is in the same district as San Antonio International Airport, more than 100 kilometres away. Walk a few blocks west of the Austin State Capitol 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 capitol to get a taco, you'll find yourself

• 11:58Matt Bevan?

  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, it 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.

• 12:41Matt Bevan?

  And at the 2004 general election, when Texas's own George W Bush won a second term as president...

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Thank you all for coming. We had a long night and a great night.

• 12:54Matt Bevan?

  In fact, five of Texas's House districts flipped from Democrat to Republican. Now, you're possibly thinking, grr, 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 situation was almost exactly reversed.

• 13:35Matt Bevan?

  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 D's 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.

• 14:20Matt Bevan?

  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. At 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.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Here is how gerrymandering may be accomplished. Party A's strength is centered in the western third of the state, but statewide, they are outnumbered by Party B.

• 15:10Matt Bevan?

  So you've got a state where there are supporters of Party A concentrated in one particular area, but 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 centres 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.

• 15:55Matt Bevan?

  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 cracked 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.

• 16:40Matt Bevan?

  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. The 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.

• 17:22Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  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.

• 17:59Matt Bevan?

  In Alabama, as in other states, the map was gerrymandered to limit the influence of black voters.

• 18:06Speaker 07

  Critics felt that legislatures were grossly malapportioned in favour of rural areas.

• 18:11Matt Bevan?

  And Martin Luther King's campaigning paid off, in theory.

• 18:15Speaker 07

  Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

• 18:19Matt Bevan?

  The Voting Rights Act made it illegal to 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. When 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...

• 18:56Speaker 07

  The court said that federal and state legislative districts must be apportioned equally according to population. One man, one vote.

• 19:04Matt Bevan?

  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 by up to 10%. In the US, there is absolutely no leeway at all.

• 19:37Matt Bevan?

  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 gonna be salamanders everywhere. So if you're already drawing weird shapes, why not draw weird shapes that benefit your team?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  The one man, one vote mandate, freed in a certain sense to gerrymander in accordance with partisan political objectives.

• 20:19Matt Bevan?

  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. It 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.

• 21:01Speaker 07

  Gerrymandering continues to be an effective weapon to maintain the status quo, and the court has declined to rule on this practice.

• 21:10Matt Bevan?

  But gentleman's agreements don't mean much in the Trump era.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  And we have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats.

• 21:18Matt Bevan?

  Last year, Donald Trump started talking about throwing the unwritten rules aside and once again redrawing the map in Texas to benefit the Republicans even more than the 2003 redraw.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:42Matt Bevan?

  New maps were drawn, and well, the Texas Democrats knew what to do.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  As Speaker Dustin Burrows called the House to order Monday, all eyes were on the empty seats. Some of our colleagues have fled the states in their duty.

• 21:57Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  But I am disappointed that while these members are here, reporting for their duty, under the Constitution, others are out of the state, in New York, in Chicago, in places they do not represent.

• 22:19Matt Bevan?

  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.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  We're here to have the back, not only of those representative from Texas, but the people of Texas that are struggling, suffering from the same kind of assault on democracy that binds us together as a nation.

• 22:41Matt Bevan?

  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 the Californian map.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  They're not screwing around. We cannot afford to screw around, I think. We have got to fight fire with fire.

• 23:09Matt Bevan?

  The gentleman's agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans collapsed. Texas redraw 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 Bear County and all over our states. In Texas, it was a landslide victory for Democrats. This is how we won Texas. This is a win the size of Texas.

• 23:49Matt Bevan?

  They won the open Senate seat, and they took control of the Texas government itself, winning 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.

• 24:30Matt Bevan?

  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. Another 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.

• 25:14Matt Bevan?

  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 same 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.

• 25:57Matt Bevan?

  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 against us.

• 26:40Matt Bevan?

  Now that the gentleman'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.

• 27:24Matt Bevan?

  It's produced by Adair Shepherd and Jess O'Callaghan. On Tuesday, I'll be chatting to Emma Shortess about what these midterms results mean for the next two years of US politics. If you've got a question, please send a voice note to ifyou'[email protected]. I'll catch you next week.