Mark Brewer and Jeff Timmer open this week’s show with the inside view of efforts they are leading to disrupt statehouse Republicans:

They are then joined by one of the nation’s top experts in gerrymandering, the every-ten-years political exercise to influence election results through partisan map-drawing: author David Daley.

The U.S. Census Bureau released the first of its 2020 reports in the last few days and, as expected, Michigan is one of 7 states losing a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The population shifts and reallocation of House seats will set launch the every-ten-years battle over drawing congressional maps. Joining us today: an expert in the political gamesmanship of redistricting.

Daley is a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, which helped spark the recent drive to reform gerrymandering. Dave’s second book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, chronicles the victories and defeats in state efforts to reform elections and uphold voting rights. 

A frequent lecturer and media source about gerrymandering, he is the former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, and the former CEO and publisher of the Connecticut News Project. He is a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the Humanities and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Details, and he’s been on CNN and NPR. When writing for the Hartford Courant, he helped identify Mark Felt as the “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.