THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

The very short list of constraints on partisan gerrymandering has gotten even shorter. Until last week, the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require states to draw some majority-minority districts. But in Louisiana v. Callais, it overturned that requirement and held that the VRA prohibits gerrymandering only if it’s done with the explicit goal of racial discrimination. If the intent behind disenfranchising minority voters appears to be merely partisan, the gerrymander is now legal. The ruling will allow Republican state legislatures in the South to erase most if not all of the region’s few blue House districts without fear of being blocked in court.And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.Because of the timing of the ruling, the effects are likely to be modest for the upcoming midterms. On Thursday, Louisiana suspended its primary election to give the state time to redraw the map. The legislature might eliminate just the one seat at issue in Callais, or it could try to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black, Democratic-leaning districts. A few more seats could be in play elsewhere in the South. On Friday, after saying two days earlier that she would not do so, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced that she would call a special legislative session to redraw the state’s maps. Donald Trump has claimed that he has the Tennessee governor’s promise to do likewise. In other deep-red states, key deadlines have already passed, making last-minute map-drawing difficult or impossible.The implications for 2028 and onward are more dramatic. Trump’s successful push to get Republican states to do off-cycle redistricting this year already blew past one long-standing impediment to gerrymandering maximalism. The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat. “It’s gonna be awful,” Sean Trende, a prominent districting expert, told me. Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the Center for Politics at the University… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”Until recently, arguing that… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Cole Tomas Allen, the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump late last month, appeared to consume political news like so many of his fellow citizens, absorbing daily doses of outrage on social media, metabolizing the anger, and projecting it out into the world in his own voice. His posts are remarkable for how typical they are for such platforms, where expressions of disgust are currency and polarization is the product.In response to a clip of Vice President Vance expressing pride in ending aid to Ukraine, a Bluesky account reportedly used by Allen read, “what a piece of shit.” When another account argued that members of the administration were “damned” for serving a president who posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, the assumed Allen account quoted from the Book of Revelation about God’s fury at worshippers of “the beast.” When Trump proposed charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, Allen apparently responded, “it’s public knowledge that he likely IS basically a sociopathic mob boss.”These were not calls for violence. But they were building blocks for the crime he would soon allegedly commit. In the manifesto he is said to have emailed to his family, Allen deployed the buzzwords of social media, casting his political disagreements as questions of character that diminished the humanity of his targets. He said that he aimed to kill Trump-administration officials, but that everyone in the ballroom was fair game because “most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” He argued that the constitutional order had been upended and the social contract broken: “The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”I was among the hundreds of “complicit” journalists who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. My job is to interview figures from across the political spectrum, including the president and his advisers. I attend their events; I try to earn their trust; I inform the public about what is happening. Sometimes my work requires me to attend functions with administration officials; occasionally I am required to wear a tuxedo in the performance of this duty. It is no great revelation to say that Allen’s purported manifesto is wrong on the facts: The… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In mid-January, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents were battling protesters on the icy streets of Minneapolis, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan abruptly quit. This was a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good; another protester, Alex Pretti, was slain nine days later. Sheahan, then 28, had been on the job for less than a year, but she did not resign in protest. She left to run for Congress in Ohio.Sheahan’s campaign quickly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and released ads that leaned hard into her lead role in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Sheahan came to ICE with no background in immigration, but she was close to Kristi Noem, Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary this term. Some veteran officials did not take kindly to being ordered around by an inexperienced 20-something who had previously worked at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (some jokingly referred to her as “fish cop”). Noem’s public-affairs team often appeared intent to counter those concerns by circulating photos of Sheahan wearing body armor and an ICE badge, and flying in helicopters. Those images now feature prominently in Sheahan’s political ads and promotional videos.I was curious to see how Sheahan’s mass-deportation message was playing with Republican primary voters, especially as ICE’s reputation has deteriorated, so I traveled late last month to Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District, which includes Toledo and rural areas across the state’s northwest corner. Ohio was key to the MAGA movement’s conquest of working-class white voters in the Rust Belt who were disaffected by globalization and booming immigration. It is the state where Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield were eating cats and dogs. Trump has carried Ohio in the past three presidential elections and won this district in 2024. But without his name on the ballot this year, Sheahan’s candidacy will test how much the mass-deportation message can still drive GOP voters to the polls.I stopped by the city library for a candidate forum that was hosted by a local MAGA group, Toledoans for Trump, and was attended by about 50 Republicans who were mostly older and white. Several picked up yard signs that said YES to ICE and NO to Sanctuary Cities. Other voters and activists I spoke with said they have been thrilled by Trump’s border crackdown. And they wanted punishment for the immigrants Trump officials have… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Illustrations by Mike McQuadeThe courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life,… [TheTopNews] Read More.