Sam Greenglass

I just watched this play out at the Capitol in the context of this effort to preserve those expiring Affordable Care Act health subsidies.

In the House, the handful of Republicans and Democrats who were most interested in working across the aisle to cut a deal to try and do something here, they came from the handful of competitive districts that do still exist, but it's really just not many.

And so there often aren't enough people to cut these kinds of deals.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it can be really helpful here to put a point on what this actually looks like in the real world.

So I lived in Atlanta and the metro Atlanta suburbs were growing a lot in the last decade, becoming more diverse.

And Democrats were able to flip to suburban congressional districts, one in 2018 and another in 2020.

And then after the 2020 census, Republicans gerrymandered these districts.

And you ended up with, instead of having two pretty competitive districts, you had one very blue one and one really red one.

And I heard from so many voters who kind of, like Ashley was talking about earlier, regretted that they did not have a real general election choice.

And then you can imagine how that will influence how the members that those districts voted

elect will end up voting in Congress and the types of policies they're going to pursue and the extent to which they're going to be willing to compromise and work across the aisle.

I do wonder, though, if this redistricting arms race will change this at all.

I went to Indiana last fall where Trump's allies were pushing this off-cycle redistricting effort.

And at the Capitol, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there protesting.

I went to a couple holiday parades around town and...

people knew about the redistricting effort and were pretty well versed in what was going on, even people who don't follow politics really regularly.

And so I wonder if this is waking people up to the point where maybe they're going to be more engaged in some of these debates going forward.

One other thing that kind of is just sticking with me from this

whole effort over the last couple of months to gerrymander these districts.