How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever

I'm Jonathan Swan. I'm a White House reporter for The New York Times. Our job as reporters is to dig out information that powerful people don't want published, to take you into rooms that you would not otherwise have access to. There's no robot that can go and talk to someone who was in the situation room and find out what was really said. In order to get original information that's not public, we actually need journalists to do that. I'm asking you to consider subscribing to The New York Times. Independent journalism is important, and without you, we simply can't do it. It. Go back a couple of weeks, and Democrats thought they were drawing nearly even with Republicans in the gerrymandering wars. Yes. Texas had tried this aggressive mid cycle redistricting, but California countered them. And that was the pattern we were seeing. For every red state that was doing a big redistricting, there was a blue state now trying to match it. But then in the past couple weeks, Democrats caught a series of very bad breaks. One was a Supreme Court decision in Calais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, gutted one of the last boundaries on what you could do in terms of partisan and racial redistricting. And the second was that Virginia, which had paused their commission and drawn new maps, had its new maps thrown out by their courts. And so now Democrats are gonna be down depending on who you talk to, something like seven to 10 seats from these redistricting fights. So I think there are two questions here. One is what this means for this midterm and the fights over gerrymandering that will come after it. And the second is how can we actually put an end to this? Because this is a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work. Lee Druptmann is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He's the author of the 2020 book, Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop, The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. He writes a newsletter under current events, and he is one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for something you see in a lot of other countries. Something that might be an answer we need to turn to here, which is proportional representation. As always, my email, EzraKleinshow@nytimes.com. Lee Drutman, welcome to the show. Hey. It's real treat to be having this conversation, Ezra. So before we get into everything that has happened with gerrymandering over the past couple of weeks, months, years, what is gerrymandering? What is gerrymandering? That that is a great question that nobody has the perfect answer to. Gerrymandering is an old word. It goes back to 1812 when the Boston Gazette coined the phrase for Elbridge Gerry, who was one of the signers of the declaration of independence. And he was a a big poohbah in Massachusetts politics, and he drew these …