The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump is still in denial about the scale of the losses his party suffered this week. He’s now telling people that it’s all because Republicans didn’t talk about his accomplishments enough. But he knows there’s a problem, because speaking to reporters on Thursday, he came right out and said Republicans should end the filibuster—not just to reopen the government, but also to pass a bunch of new laws making voting a whole lot harder.
Translation: He wants to respond to his losses by rigging the 2026 midterms. So we thought we’d check in on how Trump’s efforts to rig the elections—which include his pernicious gerrymandering scheme as well—actually are going. We’re going to work through all of it with Democratic operative Jessica Post, who has many years of experience doing state-level races and is now a campaign consultant at Vinca Advisors. Jessica, thanks for coming on.
Jessica Post: So happy to be here. Great to see you again, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said. He was asked if Republicans should compromise more with Democrats to end the shutdown. Here’s his answer:
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, I think it’s time for them to end the filibuster and just put everybody back to work. Vote in voter ID, vote in no mail-in voting except for military, far away military and people that are very sick. No, I’d like to see one day voting. I’d like to see not 65 days of voting from all over the place. No, I’d like to clean up the elections.
Sargent: End the filibuster in order to pass national legislation, ending vote by mail completely, ending early voting completely, and, “cleaning up our elections.” Now, putting that last thing aside, whatever he means by that, entirely ending vote by mail and early voting would be enormously dramatic and would restrict voting to an extraordinary degree, wouldn’t it?
Post: He’s clearly trying to make voting even more restrictive by saying that you should only be able to vote at the polls during one day of the year, which is really kind of anachronistic in our era of online technology, etc. So Democrats have pushed for allowing vote by mail, allowing early voting, to allow folks with more flexible schedules to make sure that they make it to the polls.
The states typically decide these laws, and there’s a lot of legal precedent that says that the administration of these elections is up to the states. And I think he’s really crossing some lines by saying this. And I think he’s also kind of revealing himself—that he knows that he’s going to have to cheat to win. And he wants to make sure that, in addition to changing these districts, the voting laws are changed to favor him as well.
Sargent: And he actually came out and said it in another quote right after Election Day this week. He said this of Democrats: “Now, if we do what I’m saying, they’ll most likely never obtain power.”
So there you have it: End the filibuster, pass all these voting restrictions, and we will lock in Republican power forever. You’re not supposed to admit openly that you want to do these voting restrictions in order to rig the elections in your favor and create one-party rule—you’re supposed to say you want to do it in order to eliminate fraud, which is all bullshit, but that’s what they say.
And at least most Republicans know that they’re supposed to say that. But Trump says straight out, let’s do all this stuff in order to lock in power for ourselves. It’s just amazing.
Post: Yeah. He’s definitely not hiding the ball there. And the Republicans received, like, printed talking points saying, We’re going to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat, after they decided they wanted to change all the voting laws leading up to the last 2024 election. And obviously, Trump—if he got that handout—he just decided to ignore it.
Sargent: Right. Republicans have these talking points which say, no, we’re not making voting harder. We’re making voting easier. And Trump just says, let’s make voting harder so Democrats can’t vote.
Post: They literally are making voting harder, right? Like, whether it is eliminating same-day registration or vote by mail. In the state that I moved to—Missouri—you have to get your absentee ballot application notarized, which is essentially a poll tax. So there are all of these historic barriers to the franchise already in many of these states, many of them being reversed by recent Democratic legislative majorities. And Trump’s obviously upset about it.
Some of this is his continued argument that—going back to sort of Stephen Miller and everything with the Great Replacement Theory—he’s saying that really only the people that should vote are white Christian Americans, and the other folks that are voting don’t have a somehow constitutional or somehow biblical basis for doing it. And that’s a really limited and horrific worldview. But that’s what he’s trying to promulgate through this policy.
Sargent: Right. The basic underlying philosophy is that Democratic voters and Democratic constituents aren’t fit to decide who rules them. And I want to switch to what Trump said about the losses, because it really shows that they know how bad these losses were for them.
CNN reports that Trump is telling Republicans that what happened, in part, is that Republicans didn’t talk enough about Trump’s accomplishments. He said, “I tell Republicans, you want to win elections, you got to talk about these facts. It’s really easy to win elections when you talk about the facts.”
Now, by “facts,” he means Republicans should talk about his record. Jessica, that strikes me as pretty deep denial. It seems to me that, in just about every conceivable way, these elections were a repudiation of his record—particularly on the economy. But you’re in touch with people on the ground across the country, operatives and so forth. Is that what you guys saw?
Post: Yeah, 100 percent. Folks—and I think Democrats did a much better job of putting concerns about rising costs front and center in this election. So if you look at Mikie Sherrill, or if you look at Spanberger, or the state legislative races in Virginia, the main focus was addressing rising costs.
And folks are really upset, you know, especially—there’s people losing federal jobs, there’s people making SNAP pantries in their front yard. So a lot of these policies are very, very unpopular, and he’s definitely in denial about it.
The thing he’s right about is there is a different electorate when Trump is on the ballot. But we won’t see that electorate, I don’t think, in 2026. We historically haven’t. So hopefully that presents an opportunity for us to win back power before he tries to completely rig the game against us.
Sargent: Yes. He’s been saying one of the reasons that the loss has happened is he wasn’t on the ballot and that there is some truth to that, but that’s also actually an admission that in 2026 they’re in trouble.
Post: 100 percent. He knows that. I mean, that’s part of the reason he’s pushing all of … he’s trying to use every ounce of the political capital he has to move anything or push gerrymandering because he knows that he’s not going to win a fair fight. And we’re seeing that every day. And he’s saying that out loud, really.
Sargent: Yes. Let’s switch to redistricting, in fact. That—as you say—is why they’re trying to redistrict in as many states as possible. Republicans are getting five extra seats out of Texas. But now that Prop 50 passed in California, Democrats should be able to cancel Texas out with five more Dem seats in that state.
But there’s stuff going on in other states as well—mostly Republican, unfortunately. Can you bring us up to date on that map?
Post: Look, I think hopefully we’ve dodged a little bit of a bullet in Kansas, where I think it’s unlikely that they’re going to make changes. We know that he’s pressured folks in Nebraska, and they haven’t sort of stepped up. Same story in New Hampshire, where Governor Kelly Ayotte has said, you know, We’re not going to redraw these two districts.
And then in Indiana, they’re saying that the Indiana legislature is saying they’ll go back in December, but they don’t really have the votes in the Indiana State Senate to bring this thing back. Look, we should be concerned about a lot of other states. We know what’s happening in Texas. North Carolina, obviously, they recently eliminated the Don Davis seat, historically the G.K. Butterfield seat. North Carolina, which is famous for gerrymandering—who thought that these maps could get any worse?—but they were able to eliminate a seat.
And then, of course, this is moving forward in Missouri. The Missouri State Supreme Court—as a new Missouri native, a former Missouri native—the Missouri State Supreme Court has come down pretty hard against some of these efforts over the years. I don’t know that they’re … I don’t know that we would prevail in federal court, but maybe there can be a victory in state court.
They’re trying to—right now, Missouri has two Democratic members of Congress. There’s one in the St. Louis area, and then there’s the Emanuel Cleaver seat in Kansas City. They’re trying to eliminate the Emanuel Cleaver seat. So there’s a few additional seats here and there that they’re 100 percent trying to pick up.
They maximized a lot of these maps, though. Like, I was—I think all of us were surprised that they could get five more seats out of Texas. So they’re really pressure-testing these districts, and we’ll see if it backfires.
Sargent: So what is the overall picture here? What do you expect at the end of the day? I think we’ve got the five in Texas for Republicans. We’ve got one in North Carolina, two in Ohio, one in Missouri. So they’re kind of homing in on a total of nine seats now. They may not get all those, but they might. And then there are others. So what are the lower end and upper end here of what Republicans could end up with in total extra House seats?
Post: I think they could end up with nine to 12 House seats—and maybe even more—if they’re able, if Trump’s able to convince more states to act. The one thing that folks are not—maybe we’re not including in this calculation—is Virginia. Virginia has expressed interest in redrawing their congressional map, and there’s certainly a way, with Northern Virginia and some of the trends that we just saw, to pick up a number of Dem seats.
So many of these Dem states are saying, you know, We’re going to come right back at you, including states with larger populations like Virginia.
Sargent: Well, so right now we’re looking at somewhere between nine and 12 extra seats for Republicans. We know that Democrats will get five out of California, so that actually would cancel out the Texas ones—meaning Republicans would get somewhere from four to seven extra. And then maybe Virginia chips away at that.
And unfortunately, Democrats in Maryland seem opposed. Is it possible? What do you think? What do you expect at the end of the day—Republicans end up with somewhere around four or five or six more seats?
Post: Virginia redistricted through a commission, and so their delegation right now is six Dems and five Republicans. But certainly, after what we saw on Tuesday, they could maybe pick up three to four additional seats on that map and still give a lot of breathing room to the Democrats.
So these Northern Virginia Democrats also have extremely blue seats. So there are also different ways—if you were drawing it in a more political way—to pick up additional seats. So I’m hopeful that the Virginia voters will pick that up. They committed—the Virginia Democrats, House Democrats committed to take it up during session.
Sargent: So at the end of the day, how many extra seats do you expect Republicans to have realistically?
Post: Potentially three to five, if all of the states act to maximize maps. Now, you have to remember, though, for a long time in the Democratic Party, the folks that were leading the way on redistricting were really encouraging fair maps. So there are states like Colorado that redistricted by commission, where we could have maximized Democratic maps—and going into this election cycle, Virginia is the same story.
They didn’t have to pass the nonpartisan commission. Democrats passed nonpartisan commissions in both of those states. So there may be—there certainly may be—some seats out there for us to potentially, for—I should say, Democrats—for Democrats to go in and potentially gain.
Sargent: Yeah. It looks like Republicans will have a few no matter what, but that’s probably surmountable, I think. I want to ask one other thing. Now that we saw the scale of the Democratic wins this week, it’s at least possible that a lot more House seats generally get put in play next year than we expected.
So if that’s the case, does it now look as if it’s more risky for Republicans to do some of this redistricting? Because in order to make more Republican seats with redistricting, they have to spread around the GOP vote more, which makes some of these other Republican seats that were safer a little more vulnerable.
Is there a sense that, now that we saw the size of those losses, Dems could actually have a real shot at kind of picking up more of those newly vulnerable GOP seats if there’s a big enough wave?
Post: Yes, absolutely. And, look, my understanding is they’re looking—when they’re looking at redistricting in Texas—they’re looking at the Trump numbers in these districts. So they’re looking at, here’s the percentage of the vote that Donald Trump received, assuming that in an off-year election—a 2026 election—those could still be winnable.
So I think there are a lot of Republicans that should be very concerned about overreaching. Look, Democrats picked up state legislative seats that were at the very bottom of the target list—that were not on the target list. Republican +12 seats were picked up on Tuesday. So there’s certainly a trend that needs to be reckoned with—that it isn’t always a Trump electorate.
Will the electorate in 2026 be as good as it is in 2025? I think we don’t know that. I think it’s possible. But, the things that we do know, are that historically, midterm elections are very bad for incumbent presidents, and we have a huge outpouring of support and people really angry at the direction of the country.
So if we can recruit candidates that are willing to talk about costs, willing to sort of follow this playbook, we should be in a decent position. And it’s really possible that these Republicans absolutely overreach. And if I [were] a congressional Republican, this is something I’d be calling my state legislature about right now—if they were considering changing up my seat.
Sargent: Right, that’s very interesting, in fact. So these results—this overwhelming Democratic victory—are going to make Republican Congress people who have safe seats say to themselves, shit, maybe if you redistrict my state, it could really put me on a target list all of a sudden, and they’re not going to want that. So we’ll have to watch that going forward.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t look like Trump will be able to get the filibuster and get his voter-suppression stuff passed, but Republicans will have some extra seats—and yet some of that could backfire.
So there’s really a range of possibilities here, going all the way from Republicans having five extra seats at the end of the day and they are able to hold onto the House as a result of that, to, at the other end, all this backfiring and Republicans actually losing a couple more seats and losing the House as a result, right?
Post: Absolutely. And I think the good news is it’s not as dire. You know, when all of this started in Texas, it was really concerning. I knew that mid-cycle redistricting could happen, and I knew that we should build additional power in state legislatures to try to block efforts of this type. But it was really terrifying.
So I think hopefully now some of the wind is taken out of the sails of state Republicans. The only question is—they really live and die in fealty to Trump. And these districts are gerrymandered as well. So many of these Republicans are more concerned about Republican primaries than they are about potentially a Democrat.
Now, maybe that changed on Tuesday, but that is a problem, because the state legislators have also gerrymandered their state legislative districts in these states. That’s part of the reason they’re able to make some of these moves—because they have many more seats than they should.
Sargent: So are you optimistic or pessimistic about 2026? What’s the overall picture?
Post: Coming out of yesterday, I’m extremely optimistic. I think we had a great day. I think it was incredible to see that people were so enthused about our candidates. We obviously faced the same structural disadvantages that we’ve faced as a party—like gerrymandering, and maybe even an increase in gerrymandering, potentially even more damaging voting laws in states—but obviously we were able to win some Republican-advantage seats, and that’s really exciting going into the midterm. So I’m optimistic.
Sargent: Jessica Post, I’m actually somewhat optimistic too, which is rare for me. Really good to have you on. Thank you so much.
Post: Thank you so much too.