Dear listeners,
Assuming Virginia’s new congressional map survives legal challenges, it will replace a map co-drawn in 2021 by Sean Trende, election analyst for Real Clear Politics and lecturer in political science at The Ohio State University. Sean joined us this week to talk about the genesis of his map, the gerrymander that will likely replace it, and the national arms-race to redraw maps to favor the parties that control various states. With this week’s Supreme Court decision in Callais, even more opportunities to seek partisan advantage will arise — obviously in southern red states that can now draw out black-majority districts; and less obviously in northern blue states that can now draw more efficient Democratic gerrymanders, if coalitional politics allow. We talk with Sean about how to define and measure ‘fairness,’ and about the ways the gerrymandering debate remains stuck in the 2010s.
Also this week, we talk about food inflation. Sean had a viral tweet in 2023 bemoaning how a family-size DoorDash order from Outback Steakhouse had climbed to $125. Well, today that same order would be $190, in part due to the spiraling cost of lobster tails. This sounds trivial, but it gets at a key fact about politics — inflation bothers everyone, from those scraping by to those who simply notice that the things they like to buy cost more than they used to.
Plus, Ben, Megan and I talk about the assassination attempt on President Trump, and the low-intensity public response to it — why is it no longer even that interesting when someone tries to kill the president? We discuss.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
