Today, Explained - You voted. Does it matter?

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

Democrats talk a lot about protecting democracy, but for most Americans, the system was written to exclude them a long time ago. This show was edited by Kasia Broussalian, fact checked by Esther Gim, mixed by Shannon Mahoney, video edited by Christopher Snyder, and hosted by Astead Herndon. Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images. You can also watch this episode on youtube.com/vox. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Newsflash, you can't think about this year's midterm elections or the coming presidential election without thinking about the maps. I know things like gerrymandering can be boring and political gamesmanship can be confusing. But understanding the maps and who gets political power in our country is vitally important to understanding the health of our democratic system. So who actually has power in our democracy and who has power in name only? Let's dig in. Support for today's show comes from BetterHelp.

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That's betterhelp.com slash America actually. So here's one thing I never understood about the 2024 election. Why did Democrats spend so much time saying they were going to protect democracy? Now, I get it. Donald Trump has tested every single limit of our political system. And of course, the health of our democracy is an important goal. But to say you're going to protect democracy implies that democracy was working in the first place, or at least that it was working until Donald Trump came along.

And that isn't true. American democracy is broken, and most of us are written out of the political process on purpose. It's a big reason why Congress passes less legislation than ever, why the Senate rarely seems to reflect public opinion, or why presidential elections obsess over the same seven states. Let me explain. I'm going to show three charts in three minutes that help you understand why American democracy needs to be improved, not just protected, and why one person, one vote, is more myth

than reality. For those listening, I'm going to bring up a couple charts that show the structural health of our democracy or lack thereof. The first is about the electoral college. Now, everybody knows that the electoral college is a little messed up. We don't choose the president via direct popular vote. We choose it through this funky system made hundreds of years ago. But did you know that it's not just that the Electoral College causes us to focus on six or seven states for battleground presidential results?

It also means that the electoral votes themselves aren't distributed equally. Let's look at the relative voting power by state in the 2024 election. The least populous states, places like Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, all of that has the highest relative voting power if you think about the population of those states to their electoral votes. The smallest relative voting power belongs to populous states that don't get as many electoral votes, places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York. The second chart I'm going to show is about the Senate, because I think it takes the last problem and makes it a little more clear.

Because the Senate has two senators for every state, it is equally distributed in terms of representation. Right? Wrong. The Senate actually shows how least populous states have more power and the racial and demographic impacts of that distribution. Take a look at this chart that the Washington Post made in 2023. It showed that one person in Wyoming had similar influence in the Senate to 68 people in California, 50 people in Texas, and 37 people in Florida. And it's not just that the numbers don't add up.

It's that the type of people changes also. Those 68 people in California who add up to one person in Wyoming, those are three black people, dozens of Hispanic folks, a dozen of Asian folks. That's also true in places like Texas and Florida, which have higher representations of non-whites. Because of the way the sentence made up, those voices are almost intentionally suppressed. The third chart, which might be the most important, is about how fewer competitive house districts there are overall. In the 2026 cycle, there's only about 30 or so competitive house districts, which is a drastic decrease from 20, 30 years ago.

Check out this chart from G. Elliott-Morris. In 1976, there were more than 90 competitive house districts. And as recently as 2000, the number hovered around 60, 65. That has been cut almost in half by this midterm cycle, and it could get even lower as Republicans go further and further in terms of drawing red districts. gerrymandering isn't really about the maps. It's about power. Who gets it, whose voice matters in our democracy, and who's written out of the process.

And in the midterms here, especially, the maps itself could be more important in terms of determining the November result than the individual candidates themselves. So all of this is important context when we think about the redistricting wars currently playing out in this election cycle. Because while Donald Trump's push to get Republicans to drew mid-year, redistricting was unprecedented, it's only possible because the ways both parties have been comfortable with less competitive districts over time as it suited their partisan goals. And the Supreme Court's recent decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act only makes this stuff more important and adds

another wrinkle into an ever-developing story. Amy Walter is here to break all of this down for me. Amy is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report and a PBS political analyst that tracks all this stuff. Amy, thank you for joining us. I appreciate your time. Of course, instead. Happy to be here with you. I want us to dig into redistricting, gerrymandering, all the stuff that makes people's eyes usually glaze over it. But I want to start with what we already know. Donald Trump kicked off his redistricting fight by asking Texas Republicans to redraw maps in favor of the GOP and they complied. Democrats responded by drawing their own set in California. There was a referendum in Virginia to do a similar thing, which passed a public vote, but has since been

overturned by the courts. It can be confusing to know with all that's up in the air, who's exactly up or down in this redistricting war. Amy, I was hoping you can help us with that. Does one side currently have the advantage? I will try to put this in terms. You went through that so smartly and so quickly, instead, that I jumped over a lot of stuff. He did, but you got to the, to the core of it. And I think that's what I will try to do as well. I think before those two seminal cases, the Virginia Supreme Court case, which you mentioned, that threw out the Virginia map that had passed through a referendum, and the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana versus Kelly, which basically ended out the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Neither side looked like they were

going to have an advantage in the redistricting wars. The back and force basically was going to turn into a draw. But those two decisions have given Republicans something like, let's give them a four or five, six seat advantage when all said and done on the number of seeds that they drew in their favor. Now, as you, I think we're going, your next point, you're going to say, okay, but like, how does that actually work? Like, are they definitely going to gain all of these scenes? How is that going to work? And so a lot of that is dependent on assuming that Republicans win in all the districts that they re-drew. In other words, we talk about Texas and the number that comes up is five. Republicans drew five Republican-leaning districts.

But there's no guarantee they're going to win all five of those. It's probably as likely that they win just three of those instead of five of those. Florida's the same way. In large part, some of those redrawn districts are in areas that have significant Latino population, which, as we know, moved dramatically in Trump's favor in 2024 from where they voted in 2020. And so if those voters kind of snap back to a 2020 type of scenario where they're voting more Democratic, then those districts, districts will not be as favorable to Republicans. I mean, you're bringing out to an important point that the gerrymandering is based on

assumption and that assumption is the last big data point that these elected officials have gotten the previous election. Correct. And this is why what's happening right now is so different is that usually you're drawing these every 10 years with the theory of the case being you want these to last for 10 years, right? Like you're trying to build something that will be able to withstand what you know will be the shifts of changes. Yeah, like all kinds of changes.

Who turns out in one election is going to look different from who turns out in another election. What's going to happen if it's a great year for our party? What is it going to look like if it's a terrible year? Oh, my gosh, a lot of people are moving into our state. Oh, a lot of people are leaving our state. How do we think that's going to impact this? All of those are taking into consideration. This round of redistricting is literally about the immediate.

How can I immediately get these seats to perform the way I want them to in this election? And Virginia did a form of that. Now, that map, as you said, has been thrown out. But they drew a lot of districts in order to get 10 Democratic and just one Republican in that state. They drew a lot of districts that in a better year, Republicans, Democrats might not be able to hold on to those. So I guess my question is like we know that it's gotten focused on short-term benefit for both parties. We know that Republicans, particularly because of these recent court decisions,

are getting a slight advantage probably heading into these midterms. But what have we learned about how far Trump is willing to go to break or kind of push these boundaries? And what have we learned about the GOP's willingness to follow him? Yeah, I think we have a number of examples. Indiana was obviously another place where Republican legislators said, we don't really want to do this right now. But there are other states that quietly shelved redistricting. Kansas is one. They could have redrawn those lines. New Hampshire. Again, Republican-controlled Nebraska, another Republican-controlled state that could have redrawn their line. So not every state went along. When I first started covering politics instead and started

covering redistricting, it was a really parochial exercise. And every state had its own quirks. Like New Jersey, for example, it used to just be known that New Jersey Republicans and Democrats would get together and all agree, right? Like, we like this member, let's keep this seat, or this person has a powerful post on Ways and Means Committee or something, brings a lot of money, to New Jersey, whatever it was, we're going to keep these seats, we're going to make these districts a little bit tougher. Usually it was just to protect. It was like an incumbent protection plan. Yeah. Now this has become all completely nationalized and has turned the process from one in which the goal was to basically, yes, maximize the number of districts your party could win,

but really to maximize the influence that you, your delegation could have in Washington. And that's obviously no longer the case. I want to ask about the Supreme Court decision in the Louisiana versus Calais case, which you mentioned earlier. It chipped away of Voting Rights Act protections in federal law and basically gave a green light to some of these GOP redistricting efforts. When we think about the short-term question of November, How much do you see this decision affecting the question of control of Congress?

Well, I guess, so let's put it into two categories. One is how many seats actually shift from Democratic held to Republican held? And if we assume that the maps that passed in Tennessee on Alabama, they pass legal muster, we're still waiting on Alabama. That basically took three black majority districts, two of which were represented, by black members of Congress and made them safely Republican. Okay. Three gone, right?

So three gone. But you also wonder, to the point of its impact on the sort of environment in November. We already know that Democrats are much more interested and engaged when it comes to voting. They are more fired up. They are more frustrated. And it's just one more way in which Democrats may have something else to find. up their voters. And honestly, instead, this is what some Republicans will say they are worried about, which is, you know, maybe you get three seats, but you've also put a hornet's nest. And it could engage voters

to come and turn out who really hadn't felt that interested in voting before that this decision. Just a long-term question, though. How real is the threat to black representation because of this decision. Yeah, this to me becomes the other really interesting question as we go forward, which is how far will Democrats be willing to go to expand their advantage in states where they have majority black or majority Hispanic seats? Yeah. But if you break up those seats, well? Yeah, I want to slow this down because it's,

does feel like an important conundrum that might be in our future. There is the reality of the threat that the Kaleigh decision poses to majority black districts and black representatives, particularly in the South. But in the Democrats' desire to respond to Republican redistricting efforts, the clearest way for them to do so might be breaking up their own Black or Hispanic districts to disperse those to make, I guess, lighter blue districts in their cities. Like, the incentives could be such that both sides agree that kind of black representation or minority representation is not the priority for them in Congress. Right. What's the priority? Is the priority we need to have as many seats as possible for our party?

And our party will put the interests of those people first. Or is it we need to have more of those voices? Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of messy. It's real messy. And New Jersey is a really great. place to sort of zero in on because you do. You have a majority black district there. You have a majority Hispanic district there that if you did chop it up and spread it out could really help Democrats. Support for this show comes from Shopify. When you're starting a new business, it's easy to get stuck in the doubts. You start wondering, am I making the right decision?

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That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. I want to think about another question to go back to our kind of original point, which was specific to protecting versus improving democracy.

I'm someone who thought that the Democrats really erred in 2024 by talking about the protection of democracy rather than kind of acknowledging some of the shortcomings with our political system and vowing to improve it. I want to kind of put you in that hot seat. If you could pass a law or wave a magic wand that you think would make our democracy more fair, what would it be?

Yeah. I don't know that it would make it more fair. I do think at its core, one of the biggest challenges we have is the primary process, right? Which was designed more than 100 years ago to deal with another political problem we had, which was the sort of backroom, smoke-filled room way in which— nominees came to be. Let's be clear, the corrupt way that literally you had people basically picked by a handful of folks,

including business interests and, et cetera, picking who the nominee would be, and the idea of opening up to the people was, that to your point about protecting versus preserving democracy, boy, that was a really great way to protect and preserve democracy, right? Making it one that took it out of the hands of the feud and put it in the hands of many. But now the primary process has become as corrupted,

as it was back then. The amount of money that is coming into these primaries by outside groups, many of whom are attached either to an issue or a corporate interest is skyrocketing. The people who show up and vote in primaries ideologically are very far, left or right. And so that leaves us now in a primary system that is absolutely fundamentally broken. And most of those, if we're going to go back to where we started the same, conversation instead with the fact that most people who get elected to Congress are going to be elected in seats that are pretty safely red or safely blue.

The primaries matter more than anything. So how can we reform that? Is one way I've always thought is having a national primary day? Every voter is allowed to vote in that primary. You don't have to be Democrat or Republican. It's an open ballot, right? Like you pick because all the candidates are on the same ballot. And everybody knows to show up that day, whatever we're going to call it, June 2nd, every year, the first Tuesday in June.

I'm not going to say it's going to solve it, but it at least addresses one of the major problems. It also addresses the, like, kind of constant election cycle that we are increasingly in between primaries and runoffs. I feel for voters in competitive places who are now kind of like consistently bombarded. with an overload of information. A national primate day would fix a lot of that. I'm team, you know, national gerrymandering before. Honestly, I'm team all of the above. Like, you can convince me for a constitutional convention to write the whole thing over.

But I think at the basic level, doing something that does give us more of a direct democracy feel, as I think something folks crave. I hear about that. I hear about term limits. I hear about Supreme Court turn limits, increasing. more. And it just feels like one of those things that comes up from the bottom that you rarely hear from the elected official lane. Although, instead, I will say, one of the challenges we have, and California is a great example of this. I mean, they've done almost everything you could possibly

do if you think about academically. How would we solve these problems, right? They have an open primary system. They have a top two. It's very easy to register to vote. They have mail in voting. They have had so many different reforms. They have ballot initiatives. It doesn't mean that the state is governed better. It doesn't mean that people feel as if like, wow, government. I'm so glad I'm a part of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think I talk to a California who just feels heard, but more, you know. Okay, so a gazillion dollars is going to go into this referendum that I'm going to vote on. So I guess I have some power. But like, to do what? Yeah. You can create all the reforms you want.

But if people feel like the system is broken, they're not going to participate. I guess I want to ask them, what is there like a hopeful democracy spot of joy? I mean, here in New York, I think ranked choice voting certainly like I feel like got some good reviews, have invigorated folks into the process. I think in the mayor's race, you saw different levels of cooperation or things you wouldn't have seen before. Like, to take the California thought, like, if the reforms don't leave, to greater participation. Like, what overcomes the malaise?

I know. Well, one thing would be, like, government actually working. And so that is, but here's where the problem comes. The incentive structure has to change. Right now, if you are a member of Congress who actually just, like, keeps your head down and gets stuff done and, you know, you're not in the spotlight negatively. You're not going to get rewarded for that. Yeah, I'm like.

You don't start the clock. You won't be there long. You do a good job. Like in your real job, like in real jobs, people who do a good job, you show up, who put in the effort, like, oh, you can get a raise or you're getting a promotion. In Washington, that is getting you zero. And so as long as the incentive structure benefits those who make the most noise, do the most damage. do the most damage, refuse to do any sort of compromising. Well, there's not much that any sort of reform is going to be able to change. And the people that change the incentive structure

are, well, they're us. And this is the circular conversation, right? If you don't like those people, then stop voting for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. But it's, it gets harder and harder to have that conversation. Fundamentally, I think we have to change our, our framework. So instead, like, if you go back and you read American history, we've been slogging through for a long time. It's never been great. It's never been perfect. It's always been messy, and it has been corrupted and all these different things. And we keep slogging our way through. So I think slogging is just the reality of America. But one thing I think that has been really hard for, especially people who are living in this moment,

is that we experienced from basically the end of World War II through the end of the 20th century, a level of bipartisanship and comity, C-O-M-I-T-Y, in our politics that was rare, and we think that is normal. And so we keep saying, why can't it be like it was in 1979 or whatever, 1983, when, you know, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan were friends, it's like,

well, because that was, that was an abergration. You're saying that was the unique period. And so the nostalgia is actually calling you back to a time that we may look back on as unique rather than the uncomfort of now, which you're saying is more in the normal of the story. Sort of more of the norm. And so we have to, I think, just appreciate that with every subsequent generation. Yes, it feels like, you know, maybe we aren't governing particularly well, but we're trying to, we're trying to make it better. Yeah, yeah.

And that's where I keep my hope is just like, you know, look, we're still pretty young in this whole multi-ethnic. multi-racial democracy thing. Got to cut ourselves a little slack there. Hey, I love it. Giving us some grace from Amy Walter. This is the perspective my mom always gives me. She's like, you millennials act like your problems are the first problems to ever exist

and the biggest problems to exist. But like, name me a problem free time, you know. Tell me a time where Americans were like, this is fucking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear her in my ear saying like, what is the year where this was going? going well. Like, it is about the slog.

Thank you so much for joining us, Amy. We appreciate your expertise. Thank you, Asset. I was glad to be here. America actually will be in your feeds every Saturday with an interesting interview in culture or politics. You can also watch these episodes on the Vox YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube.com slash Vox or click the link in the show notes.

The best way to support this show is by becoming a Vox member. Members get a bonus segment on Patreon every week and they make our work possible. We are grateful. Go to box.com slash members to join. This show was edited by Kasha Brassalian, fact-checked by Esther Gim and mixed by Shannon Mahoney. Christopher Snyder is our video editor and Kuhnui is our senior art director. Our executive producer is Christina Valis and our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Additional support from Miranda Miranda Kennedy, David Tadishore and Nisha Chittal. I'm Estead Herndon and this is America Actually.