Letters from an American - Nothing You Can Do Can Stop Us

Starting point is 00:00:06 Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is unable to read the letter today, so I will be reading it in her place. September 2, 26. A number of pundits, especially Republican pundits, interpreted Trump's win in 2024 as a permanent political realignment, proving that post-World War II liberalism was dead. That conviction appeared to help feed Trump's insistence that he had won a landslide and had a mandate to enact draconian policies. Skeptics disagreed with this interpretation, noting that Trump's victory in the popular vote was small. More people voted for someone else than for him, and that the 2024 election appeared to be

Starting point is 00:00:56 determined by inflation and the pandemic, two things that had little to do with political positions. Rather than being an embrace of a political audience, ideology, it appeared the swing toward Trump had more to do with anti-incumbent feeling, especially over inflation. Still, after the 2024 election, hopeful Republicans set out to redistrict states to try to guarantee they would hold onto control of Congress after the 26th election. They redrew districts based on the idea that what they thought was a new coalition would last, banking especially on Hispanic voters continuing to cast their ballot, and for Republicans.

Starting point is 00:01:36 With that expectation, they created gerrymanders that shaved their margins thinner than they had been before the redistricting. And then, in the elections of November 2025, dramatic gains by the Democrats across Texas made some observers wonder if the gerrymandering of Texas hadn't been a dummymander, teeing districts up for Democrats in a blue wave. After the election, G. Eliot Morris of strength and numbers noted that the anti-incumbent feeling had turned against the Republicans, and that voters were even more strongly opposed to Republicans than they had been against the Democrats in 2024. He explained that by then, Republicans had lost

Starting point is 00:02:23 an average of 25 points of support from the very voters they were counting on to create their new coalition, young people, non-white voters, and working class lower-income voters. And then, in a special election on January 31, 26, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democrat in a historically Republican-dominated district in Terrant County. Democrat Taylor Remitt, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Lee Wamsgans for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wamsgans campaign spent $310,000, while Remit spent nothing. And Daniel Nishanian of Bolt's Magh posted that

Starting point is 00:03:23 overall, Wamsgans spent nearly $2.2 million more than Remit in the campaign. Both Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wamsgans. Voters flipped a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024 to remit, electing him by a 14.4 point margin. Without the minor party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. Liz Crampton of Politico noted that, Republicans are in full-out panic mode after the election,

Starting point is 00:04:04 especially over the swing of Hispanic voters toward Remit. Republican consultant Mike Madrid referred back to the newly gerrymandered maps and the voting patterns of young Hispanic men when he told Krampton, they've banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for 30, 40 years. Now, though, they had turned toward Democrats as Trump, Trump's arrests, detentions, and deportation policies had angered and upset them.

Starting point is 00:04:37 In the wake of the election, Trump immediately began talking about nationalizing voting in the country, despite the provisions in the U.S. Constitution establishing that states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections. If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections, Trump said, during a press conference at the White House. House in early February. I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyway. Trump's allies began talking about rigging the election by sending armed officers to the polls. Steve Bannon said on his podcast, you're damn right we're going to have ice around the polls come November. We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.

Starting point is 00:05:22 And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want. But we will never again allow an election to be stolen. Since then, the administration has worked hard to take over the mid-term elections, but so far everything it has tried has been blocked by the courts or failed in Congress. It is zero for 23 in its effort to take over state voter data, with the apparent plan of running it through a program designed to make sure non-citizens aren't receiving welfare benefits for which they're not eligible, a process that mistakenly flagged citizens as non-citizens with the failure rate of at least 14%.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Courts also blocked Trump's attempt to use the United States Postal Service, or USPS, as a gatekeeper to stop ballots that the federal government decides shouldn't be delivered, even though state agencies determined they should be. We learned yesterday that, despite court orders, The administration's plan to use the USPS to impose federal control on elections has continued. It has rushed into place a system a whistleblower warns would throw out entire batches of up to 10,000 ballots if a single one gets rejected. This is a deliberate attempt to skew the midterm election. An analysis by Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT,

Starting point is 00:06:52 election data and science lab, shows that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans. In 2024, 37% of Democrats voted by mail, while only 24% of Republicans did. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen told reporters yesterday that he is not ruling out sending immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE, agents to the polls. The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down, Mullen said. ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job. If we're serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be. Maya Yang of the Guardian notes that Mullen's threat flies in the face of federal law, which prohibits armed agents. from any place where a general or special election is held.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Last night, in Terrand County, Texas, county commissioners tried an even cruder way of rigging the election. As Cecilia Lenzhen of the Texas Tribune reported, they voted three to two along party lines to get rid of 92 of the polling sites the county had in 2022 before the midterm election. In 2022, there were 316 election sites. The Republican commissioners cut that number to 224.

Starting point is 00:08:28 They also cut three sites for early voting, from 50 to 47. Republicans voted for the cuts, Democrats voted against them. It's not about cost. This is about power. This is very political. This is campaigning from the days, said, Democrat Alyssa Simmons. Throughout the eight-hour meeting about the cuts, speakers from the audience called on the commissioners to increase, rather than decrease,

Starting point is 00:08:57 the number of voting sites for the more than 1.3 million people registered to vote in Tarrant County. Those 1.3 million people are more than live in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, or Montana, and about the same number of people who live in Maine or New Hampshire. Voters in Tarrant County had plenty to say to the Republican commissioners about the cuts. One constituent warned, You guys are out. When county judge Tim O'Hare refused to look at him,

Starting point is 00:09:36 the man called out the disrespect. What could possibly be so important, Mr. O'Hare? Can you listen to me, please? Hello? Hello? Can you look at my eyes, please? O'Hare answered, I can hear every word you're saying. You can use your minute however you choose. The man responded, I want you to look me in the eyes. When O'Hare still wouldn't, the man continued. Yeah, look down because down is what you're going in November. So keep looking where you're going, okay? Because this is what we're going. doing after this from now until November, whether you cut those places or not, we're going and we're knocking on doors and we're bringing people out and we're telling them where the voter locations are and we're helping them get there. And nothing you can do can stop us from removing you in November. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions,

Starting point is 00:10:48 dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

Letters from an American - Nothing You Can Do Can Stop Us

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