How Redistricting Is Upending America’s Midterms
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More To The Story: Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move that could disenfranchise Black voters. Meanwhile, Democrats were dealt a major blow last week when their own redistricting efforts in Virginia were struck down by the state Supreme Court. On this week’s More To The Story, Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy and host Al Letson try to make sense of this unprecedented midterm season, gauge the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress, and examine how President Donald Trump’s threats to the electoral system could play out in November.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
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Read: Can James Talarico Convince Democrats He’s the Fighter They Need? (Mother Jones)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What the Supreme Court did in its decision on the Louisiana maps, |
| 0:07.0 | where it effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, |
| 0:10.0 | is that it invited southern states to go back to the drawing board in mass and redraw their maps, |
| 0:17.0 | specifically with an eye toward eliminating black opportunity districts that were |
| 0:23.3 | the part of the Voting Rights Act. |
| 0:25.7 | Midterm primary elections are happening all across the country, and this election cycle |
| 0:30.8 | is both momentous and uncertain. |
| 0:33.7 | Coming up on more to the story, Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy on the Racist to Watch and how the Crippled Voting Rights Act is reshuffling the electoral map. |
| 0:43.6 | Stay with us. |
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