The politicians are picking voters.

Today the Tennessee legislature carves up Memphis. Here’s the door the Court opened, and how we walk through it.

Today, the Tennessee legislature is coming back to Nashville to carve up Memphis.

Our failure of a governor called the session last Friday, the day after Trump posted that he’d spoken to him about a new map. The target is the 9th Congressional District, the only Tennessee seat held by a Democrat. (It was a 5-to-4 Dem majority until the 2010 gerrymandering.)

The plan they’ve floated would join parts of Memphis with rural counties two hours away in the middle of the state. The drive across that district would be over 200 miles. Politicians are drawing lines that decide outcomes.

The reason they can do this is that the Supreme Court spent the last year quietly killing the Voting Rights Act, and last week they finished the job. Louisiana v. Callais, 6-3, gutted Section 2, the part that for sixty years empowered Black voters in southern states to build electoral power.

The day after, Louisiana suspended its primary. They had already mailed ballots to overseas voters. Doesn’t matter. The day after that, Alabama filed an emergency motion and called a special session of its own. Today, Tennessee. By the end of summer it’ll be Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina. Southern Black congressional representation is getting wiped off the map in a couple of weeks.

It’s not just the South. Last year Texas redrew its map mid-decade because Trump told them to. California fought back. Then Missouri. Then North Carolina. Then Ohio and Utah. Then Virginia. Maybe Florida. Before this year, two states in the last 55 years had done mid-decade redistricting. In the last ten months, ten have done it or are doing it.

Democrats ran on saving democracy in 2024 and got whooped. Why?

Because, for too many of us, when we heard “save our democracy,” we thought, what democracy? Save what?

The elections flooded with unlimited corporate funds? The one where representatives pick their voters by drawing maps that make no logical sense? The thing where the only election that ever decides anything is a primary we didn’t know was happening? The thing where Congress is run by 80-year-olds because they’ve been there the longest? The thing where every politician I’ve ever heard of takes money from the same six industries?

That democracy?

The thing already broke. The Democrats could have run on rebuilding it. They didn’t, because the institutional class inside the Democratic Party benefits from the system as it is. They got their seats from it. They are not going to vote to take their own gavels away.

A lot of Democrats think 2024 was a turnout problem. If only more people had shown up, we would have been fine. That’s not what happened. People didn’t show up because the people asking them to show up were asking them to save a system that wasn’t working for them. The proof is sitting in our own caucus.

The Congressional Black Caucus is one of the most powerful blocs inside the Democratic Party. They run South Carolina. They run a chunk of Super Tuesday. They have chairs and ranking memberships and decades of seniority. And after all of that, Black Americans still earn less, hold less wealth, are policed harder, and are about to lose their congressional representation across the South in a single summer. A caucus that powerful, that long-tenured, that institutionally embedded, has not been able to materially reverse the extraction. That is not because the people in it don’t care. It’s because the caucus, as an institution, has attached itself to the system instead of going after it.

Same story with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Over a hundred members. The largest ideological bloc in the Democratic House. And when the moment came on Build Back Better, on Medicare for All, on Gaza, on every leverage point where they had the votes to actually move things, they folded. They got promises. They took the deal. The progressive caucus has spent the better part of a decade being the largest powerless caucus in Washington, because the people running it are still angling for the same gavels everyone else is angling for. The caucus title doesn’t change the incentive structure. The donors and the committee assignments and the leadership track do.

The trick works on every group. Black voters get told the caucus is the leverage. Progressives get told the caucus is the leverage. Every constituency the party can name and organize and hand a flag to gets told the same thing. The frame produces the feeling of power without any of the leverage. The system can absorb infinite caucus membership because caucus membership was never going to threaten it.

The white version of the same trick is more dangerous because more people fall for it. Poor whites are told that if they hold the line, if they push back on the minorities, if they wear the team colors, they’ll have power too. They won’t. I grew up one of them. I’d be one of them again if it weren’t for Substack subscribers. The team jersey is the trick. It keeps the poor white guy and the poor Black guy from noticing they’re getting taken by the same people.

The greatest irony of the maps being drawn this week is that they assume the working class will never come together. They assume Black and brown and white people sharing the same economic situation will never recognize themselves as a community of interest. The maps are a bet that the sort still holds.

Look at police violence. Black and Native Americans are killed by police at higher rates than anybody else. That’s true. Unarmed white people are killed by police too. The one thing almost every person killed by police has in common is that they were poor or powerless. We collect the data by race. We don’t collect it by class. That’s not an accident.

A real democracy is voters picking representatives. What we have is representatives picking voters.

The thing holding the institutional class together is a shared interest in the system that already paid them. Not ideology. Money. Relationships. Gavels. They came up under the same donors and the same arrangements and they are looking out for each other. It crosses party. It crosses race. It crosses wing.

David Scott of Georgia held the top Democratic spot on Agriculture for years on pharma money and bank money and almost nothing for his constituents. That’s the system. Maxine Waters, 87, openly told Punchbowl she doesn’t really think about term limits for chairs and wants to chair Financial Services again in 2027 if Democrats take the House. That’s the system. Henry Cuellar in Texas is under federal indictment for taking money from Azerbaijan, taking Big Oil money, voting against his own party on the basics. That’s the system. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina sits on a House AI commission while a $1.6 million super PAC funded by an AI company runs ads against her progressive primary challenger right now, after she took AIPAC money, after she took Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto money before he went to prison, taking pharmaceutical and defense contractor money the whole time she’s been in office. That’s the system.

Four Democrats have died in office during this Congress. Grijalva. Sylvester Turner. Gerry Connolly. David Scott, who cast his final vote the day before he died at 80, openly not up to the job at the end.

And we are seriously discussing whether the next chair of Financial Services in 2027 should be an 88-year-old who has been on the committee since George H.W. Bush was president. It’s not a strategy. It’s a courtesy. A deference to seniority and to relationships built in 1992. The cost of that courtesy is that we cannot turn the energy in the streets into anything legislative, because the people on our end of the phone came up in a different country and they don’t believe we need to go anywhere new.

This is why “save our democracy” didn’t work. The people delivering the message were the people the message was indicting.

Here is the door the Court opened. The same ruling that’s about to wipe out a generation of southern Black representation is also going to wipe out some of the most institutional, most corporate-friendly, most incumbency-protected members of the Democratic caucus. The new maps don’t care about seniority. They don’t care about gavels. They don’t care who’s owed what.

I’m not talking about the people who fight. Not Cori Bush before they took her out, not Summer Lee, not Ayanna Pressley, not Justin Pearson. Pearson is running against Steve Cohen in the Memphis primary right now. He’s a young Black state rep who got expelled from the Tennessee legislature for protesting gun violence on the House floor and got reseated by his constituents. The district he’s running in is the district about to be carved up today.

We can’t pick the maps. The Court took that. Eventually we fix the maps with math. No commissions. No bipartisan panels. No advisory bodies. No people. Any human lever you build into the process is a lever someone will pull. The procedure should know where people live and how to draw the shortest line that splits them in half. Population and geometry. Nothing else. You can write that into federal law.

But that takes power we don’t have yet. And we don’t get that power from the people who currently hold it.

We get it by picking who runs inside the lines they drew. We pick the candidates in the primaries, which are now, more than ever, the only elections that decide anything. We pick the people who refuse the AIPAC money and the AI super PAC money and the crypto money and the pharmaceutical money. We fund them ourselves, twenty bucks at a time. We show up on a primary Tuesday in March in numbers nobody’s seen for a midterm primary in fifty years. A coalition the mapmakers don’t think can exist is the one thing they can’t draw around.

They can move the lines. They can’t tell us who to put on the ballot inside them. And once we start sending people to Washington whose first loyalty is to the people who sent them, we can start fixing the rest. The maps. The money. The committees. The whole rotten machine.

We can start running, finally, on rebuilding a democracy instead of saving one that broke a long time ago.

That is a thing worth saving. A fight worth having. The thing we have right now is not.

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You can check out more here at afightworthhaving.com. Our list of candidates will be posted very soon. Luckily, there’s already more than 40 of them that are on the right track.

Corbin Trent