A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.  How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri. > “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform > legislative power.” By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.  “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.” That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control. “At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.” When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states. This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.” “Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.” But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule. “Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.” The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington. In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.

On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a livestream for volunteers in support of Proposition 50, the governor’s redistricting measure, and the sole question on the ballot in the November 4 special election. As I reported last week in a story on the almost unprecedented spending around the measure: > Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, > as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try > to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began > in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the > state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five > seats in the national party’s favor. “This is in reaction to something unprecedented,” Newsom said at the start of Wednesday’s call. Proposition 50, Newsom said, is his attempt to counter Republican efforts to redraw congressional lines at the president’s behest, not just in Texas but in other states—like Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina—with GOP-run legislatures.  Obama, the highest-profile of many Democratic political notables to throw their weight behind the measure, joined midway through the call to drive home Newsom’s message.  “The problem that we are seeing right now,” Obama said, is that Trump and his administration are brazenly saying that they want to “change the rules of the game midstream” to “give themselves an advantage.”  “This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop 50 is about,” he added, noting that the measure “has critical implications not just for California but for the entire country.” “As a consequence of California’s actions, we have a chance at least to create a level playing field in the upcoming midterm elections,” he said.  This comes days after Obama featured in the Yes on 50 campaign’s latest ad, and the same day that the Washington Post released a report about how the former president has been advocating for the measure behind the scenes since the summer.  As part of Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations, thousands of Bay Area protesters at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach showed their support for the proposal and opposition to Trump’s authoritarian policies by forming a human banner that read, “NO KINGS,” and below that, “YES ON 50.”

If you live in California, like me, chances are you’ve been inundated with political ads and have a recycling bin filled up with mailers urging you to vote for or against Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposal in response to Texas’ newly gerrymandered congressional map.  Prop 50 is part of a larger redistricting fight unfolding across the country, as Democrats seek to retake the House of Representatives and Republicans try to retain their narrow majority in next year’s midterm elections. It all began in June, when President Donald Trump nudged Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s voting maps mid-decade, off the usual 10-year schedule, to swing five seats in the national party’s favor.  In response—and after the Texas GOP quashed Democratic opposition with threats of arrest—Newsom unveiled a proposal to counter Trump’s plans to rig the race.  “We have got to fight fire with fire,” Newsom said when announcing his plan to circumvent the state’s independent redistricting process and offset Texas’ gains with a map that would likely flip the same number of red seats blue. Since 2010, California’s congressional maps have been drawn by a nonpartisan 14-member commission of citizens. If Prop 50 were to pass, the state would adopt gerrymandered maps until the 2030 census, after which it would revert to the old model.  Since it was certified for the ballot in late August, Prop 50 has already become one of the most expensive ballot measures in California’s history, drawing about $140 million in spending for and against with weeks remaining until the November 4 special election. More than twice as much—some $97.7 million—has gone to the Yes on 50 campaign. While tens of millions of dollars have been raised from small donors and labor unions, the largest contributions, about $11 million, came from the House Majority PAC, focused on electing Democrats to office, followed by $10 million from the Fund for Policy Reform, a lobbying group funded by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. Of the more than $42 million raised for the No campaign, the majority—$32 million—comes from conservative megadonor Charles Munger Jr., who helped former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger establish the state’s nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission in the late aughts and has donated to anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, and Republican former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy have also contributed $5 million and $1 million, respectively. In one Munger-funded No on 50 ad with half a million views on YouTube, local politicians and faith leaders claim the measure will destroy California’s “reputation as a national leader for fair elections” and sacrifice “fair elections and voter choice.” On the flip side, Yes on 50 ads featuring Gov. Newsom and California Sen. Alex Padilla, and well-known national Democrats including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and most recently, former president Barack Obama, insist that the new map is needed to “protect democracy.” > As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record > $10.8 billion, with California leading at an estimated $1.1 billion. In one ad, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett draws a straight line between her home and the Golden State, telling California voters, “When Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to rig the next election, they drew my seat off the map…With Prop 50, you have the power to stop them.” As the 2026 midterms approach, ad spending is projected to reach a record $10.8 billion, with California leading the states at an estimated $1.1 billion in spending this cycle, according to an August report by AdImpact. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) poll conducted in mid-August, before the ad blitz, surveyed nearly 5,000 registered voters—about 48 percent of whom said they would support Prop 50, with 32 percent against and the remaining 20 percent undecided. “This will be an intense campaign with both sides spending tens of millions to try to move those undecided voters,” IGS co-director Eric Schickler predicted in a press release at the time.  A poll of nearly 1,000 likely voters conducted by the research company Co/efficient about a month later found that 54 percent of those polled supported the proposition, 36 percent opposed it, and only 10 percent were still undecided. By comparison, campaigns around California’s most expensive ballot measures—Propositions 26 and 27, a 2022 pair of measures on legalizing sports betting, and Prop 22, a 2020 proposal about whether to recognize rideshare drivers as independent contractors or employees—received more than $463 and $224 million, respectively. While efforts to pass those measures were bankrolled by major corporations with deep pockets, Prop 50 is unusual: it isn’t about the profits of one industry or a few firms, but who will hold the reins of federal government. While Texas’ new map faces challenges in federal court, and Californians wait to cast their ballots, the midterms—and Congress—hang in the balance. Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.

After weeks of delays, protests, and threats of arrests, the Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday passed a highly contentious redistricting plan that could give the GOP five additional seats in the US House. “This is racial gerrymandering at its worst. It is something that Jim Crow would be proud of, but it is something that John Lewis would be ashamed of,” Rep. Al Green told Mother Jones during the House proceedings, “That Dr. King would be ashamed of that. The former president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was from the state of Texas, would be ashamed of it.” As my colleague Ari Berman wrote, the Trump-backed plan amounts to an effort to “rig the midterm elections before a single vote has been cast.” More than 50 Texas Democrats fled the state for nearly two weeks to delay the vote’s proceedings, prompting Gov. Greg Abbott to threaten Democrats with arrest. But Texas Democrats had no other choice but to leave the state to prevent Trump’s Texas takeover. Here’s what former Attorney General Eric Holder told Ari: > “In this moment of democracy survival, people need to be prepared to do > anything in order to ensure that our constitutional system of government > continues to exist,” former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder told me on > Monday. “The authoritarian move that was dictated to Texas by the White House > needs to be opposed by any means necessary.” The Democratic protest eventually came to a close as Democrats returned to Austin on Monday. But new drama quickly unfolded, with Republicans prohibiting Democrats from leaving the Capitol building unless they were accompanied by a police escort. Rep. Nicole Collier refused these terms and was forced to stay on the House floor for two days. “Those of you who feel like this is okay, get ready for the fight,” said Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins during her dissent. “Because the fight ain’t over. It’s not over until we’ve energized America to save Democracy.”

The state of Texas is currently mourning at least 120 lives lost due to horrific flooding in the Hill Country. But Texas Republicans appear focused on a different priority: re-gerrymandering their state to reduce Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House in 2026. After intense lobbying by the White House, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Wednesday that the GOP-dominated state legislature would reconvene this summer to redraw its Congressional districts. It’s a shocking move on multiple fronts. First, there’s the timing. Districts are typically redrawn after the decennial census at the beginning of the decade to account for population changes. And, given the scale of the devastation in the Hill Country and questions about the state and national preparedness to alert residents and combat the flooding, one would think that state leaders would be laser-focused on preventing another such tragedy. “While Texans battle tragic and deadly flooding, Governor Abbott and House Republicans are plotting a mid-decade gerrymander,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on X. “They should be modernizing emergency response—not rigging maps.” Then there’s the substance. Texas already has some of the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the country. Republicans control two-thirds of US House seats, even though in the 2024 election Trump only won 56 percent of the vote in the state. Texas gained 4 million people between 2010 and 2020, giving the state two new congressional seats. Ninety-five percent of the population growth came from people of color, but, in a brazen effort to forestall the impact of demographic changes, the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead. “The partisan effects of the maps are achieved by discriminating against communities of color,” Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice told me at the time. Both the Biden Justice Department and civil rights groups sued the state, alleging that the maps intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. A federal trial in that case just recently concluded, with the verdict pending. As if the current maps weren’t skewed enough, the Trump White House reportedly urged Texas Republicans to pursue an even more “ruthless” approach ahead of the midterms that could net the GOP four or five new seats. In fact, Trump’s Justice Department, which has dramatically reversed all voting rights enforcement, appears to have orchestrated the push to redraw the state’s US House districts. The department sent a letter to Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday alleging that four of Texas’s congressional districts were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Abbott then cited “constitutional concerns” as a reason to call a special redistricting session. > “I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, > to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.” “I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict,” says Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. It just so happens that all four of the districts singled out by the DOJ have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats. That raises the likelihood that Texas Republicans, in a bid to give their party more seats, will redraw their districts in a way that further reduces representation for voters of color, who are already severely underrepresented in the state where their numbers are growing. The DOJ is interpreting the Voting Rights Act, experts say, in an extremely dubious way that turns the purpose of the law on its head. Its letter claims that coalition districts like the ones in Texas, where minority groups together form a majority, “run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.” As evidence, it cites one major case, a 2023 ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country, in which it overruled a lower court opinion by a Trump-appointed judge striking down a county commissioners’ map in Galveston, Texas, that eliminated the only majority-minority district. The 5th Circuit’s opinion has not been upheld by the Supreme Court, nor adopted by any other appellate court. Levitt called the 5th Circuit’s decision “dead wrong” and the DOJ letter “embarrassing.” The GOP strategy, while potentially blunting Democratic efforts to retake the House, is not without risks. The last time Texas Republicans redrew their districts mid-decade, in 2003 under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, state legislative Democrats fled the state, leading to a lengthy political battle. It’s possible that could happen again. During the summer of 2021, they also decamped to Washington, DC, in an unsuccessful bid to prevent Republicans from passing new voting restrictions. It’s also possible that blue states like California or New York could retaliate by redrawing their own maps to counter the GOP. And Texas Republicans, by moving voters from safe Republican areas to target Democratic incumbents, could also endanger the reelection bids of some of their own members. “If the Republicans get too terribly greedy,” says Levitt, “they could end up achieving exactly the opposite of what they’re trying to achieve.”

After leaving DC, with his business empire suffering, his relationship with President Donald Trump fractured, and his DOGE efforts deemed broadly unpopular, Elon Musk is not quietly retreating to his Texas compound of pronatalists’ dreams. Instead, he announced on Saturday in a post on X that he will launch a new, third political party called the America Party. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk wrote. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” The announcement came a day after Trump’s former top adviser and the world’s richest man teased the potential launch, polling his X followers on whether they wanted the new party; the results show that out of approximately 1.25 million respondents, 65 percent said yes. Musk told followers in other posts that he plans to launch the party “next year,” which would be in time for the critical midterm elections, and floated the idea of focusing on “just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.” “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people,” he added. In another post, Musk said the party would have legislative discussions with both the Democratic and Republican parties and caucus independently. What sparked this? It seems that Trump signing his legislative agenda into law on Friday via the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill—which Musk had previously railed against, describing it as “utterly insane” and arguing it would undo some of the work of DOGE—pushed Musk over the edge. In response to someone on X asking how Musk went from loving Trump to trying to undermine him, Musk wrote: “Increasing the deficit from an already insane $2T under Biden to $2.5T. This will bankrupt the country.” Musk follows a long line of people who have attempted to launch a third party and discovered it was an uphill battle, due to ballot requirements and the need to build powerful political allies in a staunchly two-party system. In fact, Musk himself previously flirted with the idea in 2022 before seemingly abandoning it. As my colleagues wrote in a special issue of this magazine published last year, third parties’ electoral efforts have never been successful in America—at least, if you define success in terms of winning elections. And as David Corn wrote: > Third-party and independent candidates always talk about the legitimate need > to enlarge the political debate. But they also present the major parties, > billionaires, and even foreign governments with opportunities for political > mischief. Speaking of mischief, Musk’s massive wealth offers a unique form of power to potentially create it. The tech mogul, after all, spent more than $290 million on last year’s election to put Trump back in the White House, according to FEC filings. He also infamously spent $25 million earlier this year to try to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election; Musk’s preferred candidate lost, and the race also became a referendum on his attempts to buy elections. Nonetheless, when someone on X outlined the laundry list of demands he would have to satisfy to successfully launch the America Party, Musk responded, “Not hard tbh.” Trump does not appear to have weighed in yet, though earlier this week he floated the idea of having DOGE take a look at federal subsidies provided to Musk’s companies. “BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!” Trump wrote. Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. But some Trump- and third-party loyalists have already indicated they do not approve. Trump fan Roger Stone wrote on X that he “would rather see [Musk] pursue his efforts at electoral reform within the Republican Party primaries rather than having a new party splitting the vote of sane people and letting the Marxist Democrats gain control again.” The Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, Steven Nekhaila, wrote in another post, “Elon, building a new party isn’t the shortcut you think, it’s a multi-decade slog.” But he offered an easy alternative, imploring him instead to back the Libertarian Party, the country’s third-largest political party that has never managed to score more than 3 percent of the vote in a presidential election. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—who Musk reportedly sparred with  in the past—offered what appeared to be the Trump administration’s first comment on Musk’s new venture. “The principles of DOGE were very popular,” Bessent said. “I think, if you looked at the polling, Elon Musk was not.” > “The principles of DOGE were very popular. I think, if you looked at the > polling, Elon was not.” > > .@SecScottBessent responds to Elon Musk saying he’s launching a new political > party. pic.twitter.com/clsZXZOrjB > > — State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) July 6, 2025 If Musk’s recent activity on X is any indication, it looks like those who engage with him on the platform he owns will have a central role in shaping the party’s future. “When & where should we hold the inaugural American Party congress?” he wrote in one post early Sunday. “This will be super fun!” In another post responding to someone outlining a potential “America Party platform”—which listed “free speech,” “pro natalist,” and “reduce debt,” among other priorities—Musk simply wrote, “Yeah!”