Elijah talks about redistricting

From the spacious KWTO studios, it's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560 KWTO. Welcome about KW. Big show and a big weekend coming up. It's absolutely beautiful out there. Once again, I will apologize. My voice is raw and raspy. But we're going to make due today. We've got a lot of people coming on the share today. State Senator Curtis Trent going to join us at the bottom of the hour to do a little recap on the second to last day of session or second last week of session. We'll talk to him at 435. In the 5 o'clock hour, we're going to have State Representative Jeff Vernetti on. He's going to talk about the budget this week. There's a lot of moving and shaking. You've probably seen it on KY3 or the newsletter. The budget passed. We'll talk about that. We'll get his thoughts on education spending. You know, was it a good budget, a bad budget? We'll have all that conversation later. But I want to start with the biggest political news of the morning. You may not have seen this. I don't expect you to see it. It doesn't affect you on a day-to-day basis, but it's going to affect you in November. Redistricting. We've talked about it. Virginia had drawn, they had taken their six to five Democratic majority, and they had redrawn it to a 10-1 Democrat majority. Republicans filed lawsuit and said, no, I don't think you get to do this. I think the process by which you did it was wrong. Well, the Virginia's Supreme Court, which is apparently a very strongly procedural Supreme Court, agreed and said Democrats didn't follow the rules on redistricting and the maps are null and void. Let's play this from Fox News. Virginia State Supreme Court found Democratic lawmakers violated the state's demand that they take two votes in two separate sessions of the General Assembly before submitting a constitutional amendment to voters. They say that was not done in this case. The justices wrote, the violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void. Virginia had redrawn their congressional maps so Democrats were favored in four additional seats, bringing the total of left-leaning seats in the state to 10, leaving Republicans just one. Without those seats in the redistricting wars, Republicans are left with a much higher advantage. Jessica Rosenthal, Fox News. Now, I want you, I want to take you back to last year when this whole conversation started because Donald Trump started going out there saying, you know what, we should redistrict. And there was a bunch of what I would call either the naysayers, the never Trumpers, the Democrat, whoever were like, listen, this is going to go bad for Republicans. We're trying to help you guys out. You don't want to start this battle.

And what Trump had decided is, listen, the Democrats are doing this whether Republicans do or not. There's not much more they can do. I mean, we've talked about, you know, the New England area. You take, there's like five states up there where it's 60, 40 Democrat and there's not a single Republican and congressman because the Democrats have been redistricting for years by using the gerrymandering process. But when he started the conversation. You had California, Gavin Newsom's like, oh, well, if Texas is going to redistrict, we're going to redistrict. And then you had Maryland, and then you had Virginia. And so although it looked like for a long period of time, this was going to be a big swing and a miss for Donald Trump. Missouri last year, we withdrew from 6-2 to 7-1, but there was a lot of wailing and gnash of teeth. There's going to be an initiative petition fighting back against what we did. So there's a lot of people like, boy, Donald Trump once again, just, just a big miss. Well, let's go through. Let's see how big of a mess it was. First of all, we had Florida. They were 20 to 8. Ron DeSantis, already told you this. He's like, I've got a map. It's 24 to 4. And they picked it up and passed it in two days. Louisiana, that is currently for Republicans, two Democrats, they went to the Supreme Court. They had the VRA ruling. They're going to redraw at least one more seat. It's going to either be 5-1 or 6-0, but let's just say 5-1. Alabama, they're currently 5-2. The governor said, let's call a special session early May. The house has already voted to pass the new map, a plus one there. Tennessee, they were 8-1. They've already gone into special session. They're going to redraw a map. They're going to be 9-0, plus one. Mississippi is interesting. Mississippi, they're going to do a special session, but it's unlikely that they'll be able to change the map for this election. So we're going to say they're in no change. And you're probably like, I don't understand why are you going through each of these? Well, I'm going through each of them because I want to add these numbers up at the end. South Carolina, there is 6-1. They've already, the Republican houses already voted 87-27 to reconvene and draw a new district. Obviously, we talked about some of the states that have done it last year, like Missouri that already have done this process. Texas has already done the process. So let's go through. Okay. California, they added five Democrats. Utah added one Democrat. I know Utah weird. They had a weird court issue. I still think there's a chance that gets undone. I don't know if you follow this. Basically, the Democrats went and sued. They won in the Supreme Court. They got an extra Democrat. But then it turned out that the guy arguing the case in the Utah Supreme Court, I know there's a random story. You probably don't care about it. The guy arguing this case in the Supreme Court. was dating the justice on the Supreme Court at the time he was arguing the case. So now there's all of this other stuff. Who knows what will happen in Utah, but we're going to say the plus one Democrat. Florida plus four Republican, Missouri, plus one Republican, North Carolina, plus one Republican, Ohio, plus two Republicans, Texas plus five Republicans. Where does that put us confirmed? That puts us at plus eight Republicans. Now let's go to the pending.

You've got Alabama plus one, Louisiana, plus two, Mississippi, plus one, Tennessee, plus one. That's two, three, four, five. That's five additional Republicans. We thought there was going to be some additional Democrats. It doesn't look like that's the case. We're talking about a swing of potentially a dozen seats in the election this November towards the Republicans. Now, what's my takeaway from all this? There's several. First of all, Donald Trump's political team was extraordinarily savvy. They made the right decisions in moving forward on this particular issue when they did it last year. And for all the naysayers, never Trumpers, especially the Democrats were like, oh, Donald Trump's open a can of worms. It's going to hurt him. We've got way, you know, this is going to be, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I will tell you that they're coming out on the right side of this number. Now, there's still rumblings that the Democrats are like, well, we're going to, you know, we already read you, California, maybe we can redraw it into a 52 to zero number. They're going to try to take another crack in Maryland. But I will also say that there's Republican recriminations as well. I think, and I am confident in this, that next year. Missouri will redraw their maps again, and I think we will see an 8-0 district. We will do it in response to the VRA decision that came down for the Supreme Court last week because the only reason we drew a 7-1 map the last time is because St. Louis had to be drawn together. And now that we don't have to do that, we can draw a new district, a new state map that allows us to break up portions of St. Louis. That's an 8-0 map. Mississippi, the states that said, oh, we can't do it in time for this year's elections. I think they'll come back next year. I think they will draw at least a plus one Republican. Georgia. Georgia said we can't do anything right now because early voting has already started for our primaries. But I think in the next legislative session, you will see Georgia go and say, let's redraw. Now, let's pull back a little bit. What's, you know, tonight, you're sitting at dinner and somebody's like, what do you think about redistricting? There's a few things you tell them. Number one, you say, the Democrats have been doing this for the last three decades, and it's finally time that we play the same way they do. Number two, I think you'd be honest. Listen, this is all pretty bad. What's this means? This means that more races are deciding the primary, lesser deciding the general election. And while I want conservatives to win, this essentially guarantees. decades, at least years, but probably decades, where both sides are further and further on the polls. Now, it's a good thing Republicans are becoming more conservative, but it doesn't really matter if we've got a narrowly divided House and Senate and both sides of the polls. They're never going to agree on anything. And so what we're going to have is essentially intractable congresses and the president's just using more and more the executive order and the executive action to decide what they want to do. probably not a good thing for the future of the country. Now, there's no way to undo this. Like this is, this is sort of the cat's out of the bag scenario. Once you open up Pandora's box, you can never undo what's been done. We can never figure out a way.

you know, to draw nonpartisan lines because every line ends up being partisan. I mean, like California had a nonpartisan district and they drew, I think it was like a 40, 40, 42 to 10 map, which is clearly not, not good. And then the Democrats are like, we're so angry. We're going to, we're going to override the nonpartisan process and draw our own map. It's like 48 to 4. So it doesn't really matter if you have a non-partisan. They're still going to draw districts that are seen as partisan, and they're going to be overridden by the others. But the third thing you should remind everybody is, listen. Donald Trump's a lot smarter than the media and the left, and even some Republicans give him credit for him. And you may or may not think Donald Trump is smart, but the guys and people around Donald Trump are very, very intelligent. James Blair. The White House, he just left the White House to go run Trump's political arm. He's the guy that's responsible for all of these wins in Indiana. I think Indiana probably next year redistricts. He's the guy that's setting up the plans for this fall. While Donald Trump does his sort of, you know, crazy all over the place stuff. His team is laser focused, and he is using them, and they are using him to move the ball forward on these both policy and political items. And I think that's the takeaway is, listen, it's finally time we fight Democrats like they fight us. Long term, this is going to lead to intractable congresses and presidents that are more powerful and Supreme Court justices that are more powerful. And frankly, never, ever, ever underestimate Donald Trump. All right, we've got lots more to go on the show. I'm Elijah Harre. This is KWT.m.