Somersaulting Voters: Stopping Rabid Gerrymandering

Ralph Nader

 May 18, 2026

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Image by Ernie Journeys.

“Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating Congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every ten years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t want politicians rigging the system to help one party win elections.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have played this partisan gerrymandering game for years. Recently, the Republicans have become more ruthlessly partisan and have outpaced the Democrats. That is why, for example, in Pennsylvania, Democrats substantially outvote the Republicans but have fewer seats in the House of Representatives.

In the past year, the gerrymandering race has run amok. It was ignited by Tyrant Trump, who told his buddy Texas Governor Greg Abbott to break with the decennial tradition and get the GOP legislature this year to redistrict Texas to knock out four or five Democrats who are now in Congress.

Then came the tit for tat race. California Governor Gavin Newsom led a voter referendum that authorized a redistricting that could gain the ruling Democrats an extra four or five seats now held by Republicans. Then more “red states” jumped in along with more “blue states.” The latter mostly did it by voter referendum, such as in Virginia, while the Republicans preferred to do it through GOP-dominated legislatures. Florida’s GOP even disregarded a 2010 state referendum that would have prohibited their recent actions.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that the recent redistricting referendum was unconstitutional. The biggest blow came from the six gerrymandering Injustices of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, further gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Their ruling, in effect, outlawed districts drawn to give minority voters a chance to have Black representatives in Congress and in state legislatures. Political pundits are predicting a dramatic decline, as soon as this November’s midterm elections, in the number of Black Representatives in the House, presently 59, and Hispanic Representatives, presently 48.

They reflect empirically under-nourished certitude. A couple of them are declaring that the Democrats could win the House of Representatives popular vote by four percentage points and still lose the House to the Republicans in November!

I think these pompous predictors are wrong because are ignoring too many factors.

First, they are not weighing the prospects of greater voter turnout by minorities due to the indignation they are expressing against the Supreme Court decision and the follow-up by red state legislatures. Many Black voters agree with their leaders that this decision, and others earlier by an unelected court, may drive them back to the Jim Crow years. A ten to twenty percent greater turnout by Black voters could, however, make up for these redrawn districts that favor greater white majorities in the House and state legislatures.

The Hispanic vote was trending toward Trump because many Hispanic voters believed his lies and fake promises during the 2024 campaign (read the front-page article in the Washington Post, May 11, 2026, by Teo Armus titled “New Congressional Map Draws ire among Puerto Rican voters in Florida.”) There are, however, millions of Latinos in central Florida alone. Many are expressing their anger by saying, “our voice shouldn’t get diluted” or that their “community is being torn apart.”

Second, the pundits rarely talk about candidates and supporters highlighting long-overdue, highly-popular reforms, agendas, and social safety nets that improve the lives and livelihoods of all voters where they live, work, and raise their families. Mobilizing voters from the right and left around “common ground” advances, such as raising the minimum wage and unfreezing Social Security benefits or providing adequate child tax credits, could break millions of voters out of their knee-jerk attachment to political labels. I’m circulating, for example, a “Winning Compact for America” of 10 proposals backed by a majority of voters, in some cases, a huge majority of left-right voters.

The Winning Compact for America includes:

1. Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.

2. Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, and paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson, the bill’s champion, can provide additional details.

3. Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.

4. Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.

5. Repealing Trump’s cuts in Medicaid and SNAP programs that were benefiting tens of millions of Americans.

6. Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.

7. Adopting social safety nets for families, long available in Western Europe and Canada.

8. Passing labor law and campaign finance reforms put forth decades ago.

9. Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.

10. Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super-rich and large corporations (85% approval) and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.

Perhaps the pundits ignore these appealing agendas because the Democratic Party has contracted out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who subdue such progressive manifestos or ‘Compacts for America’ to avoid upsetting corporate campaign donors.

Another understated factor hails from Trump himself, who every day fuels outrage even among many of his supporters who feel betrayed. The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies.  Moreover, going after Pope Leo twice with street language isn’t endearing him to many Catholics. Trump can’t control his fevered mind and mouth.

This entire madness of mega-gerrymandering could be ended if members of the House ran at large from their state. Let’s say a state has ten members of the House. They would run at large, and the top ten vote-getters would be elected to the House. That is how the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, the great Jeanette Rankin from Montana, won her seat. The two House members ran statewide, and she came in second. Some cities have city-wide or at-large elections.

Political scholar Lee Drutman called for Congress to enact a form of proportional representation, which is inherently race-neutral and is operational within other democracies in Western Europe. (See his Substack piece titled, “The Supreme Court killed voting rights and escalated the gerrymandering wars. Here’s what Congress needs to do in response.” May 1, 2026). PR also helps to “break the two-party doom loop that’s driving our insane political death spiral,” he writes.

A more modest existing reform comes from states that have adopted non-partisan electoral commissions, e.g., Iowa and Michigan, by referendum. Voters like this approach better than the politicians’ slicing and dicing their voters to make districts safe for only one party.

Landslide elections – such as Reagan over Carter in 1980 – overwhelmed many gerrymandered districts. If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants and run on a specific ‘Compact for America,’ they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

The Nakba Never Stopped

Monadel Herzallah

 May 20, 2026

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“Arab residents being forced out of Haifa, by the armed Haganah men, April, 1948.” per Haaretz – Public Domain

My grandmother used to keep a rusted iron key in a small wooden box lined with faded velvet. As a child, I thought it was just a broken relic, but every time she held it, her eyes would grow distant. That key, she told me, once opened the front door of their family home that I have never seen in Beir Al Sabaa —  in a neighborhood now erased from every map but the one burned into our memory. When my grandparents were forced to leave in 1948, they carried that key, the clothes on their backs, and the unshakable conviction that they would return in a week or two. Seventy-eight years later, that key still sits in a box, and we are still waiting.

The Nakba — the catastrophe — did not end in 1948. It continued in different forms, deepening Palestinian suffering while also sharpening a new awareness: among Palestinians, yes, but also among a global generation that refuses to unsee what it has witnessed. What we do with that awareness, together, will determine whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or just another chapter of outrage that fades.

For millions of Palestinians, May 15 is not an abstract date. It is a wound that never closed. The 1948 Nakba was the violent expulsion of over 750,000 people, the destruction of more than 500 villages, and a deliberate campaign of terror designed to erase a society. But as the Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani taught us through his analysis of the 1936–1939 revolt, the catastrophe did not come out of nowhere. It was prepared by years of colonial manipulation, internal division, and a reliance on outside forces that ultimately betrayed the struggle. The defeat of that revolt, Kanafani argued, was a blueprint for understanding how liberation movements fail — not from a lack of courage, but from a lack of unified strategy, self-reliance, and clear-eyed analysis. It is a lesson that applies not only to Palestinians but to every solidarity movement that wants to be more than a moment of moral feeling.

And the Nakba never stopped. It simply changed uniforms. In September 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed, marketed to a weary people and a hopeful world as the path to peace. Instead, Oslo became a major defeat for the resistance. It fragmented Palestinian territory into zones of control, transformed a liberation movement into a security subcontractor for the occupation, and removed the refugees and the right of return from the negotiating table entirely. As one Arab analyst wrote, “Imposed peace — peace by coercion and criminality — is utterly void, a humiliating surrender.” Oslo was exactly that: an attempt to impose peace through power, to replace national rights with a deal that dissolved the cause into administrative zones. But history proves you cannot bomb collective memory into submission. National rights do not die. Identity cannot be erased by settlement agreements, no matter how many signatures are forced onto them.

Today, the most savage form of the continuing Nakba is unfolding in Gaza. Since October 2023, a genocidal state has been carrying out an all-out war that is nothing less than the accelerated ethnic cleansing of an entire population. Mass killing, deliberate starvation, the annihilation of entire family lines, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities — all funded and armed by Western governments. For US taxpayers, this is not a foreign tragedy in which you have no part; it is a crime enabled by your tax dollars, your political institutions, and your silence. The outrage that has poured into the streets around the world is righteous, but outrage alone cannot stop a genocide that is produced by long-standing structures of power. We all — Palestinians and every person who seeks justice — must transform this immense energy of determination and anger into energy that actually changes the world we live in, the world that has so far proven incapable of stopping the slaughter.

This is the hard truth that solidarity must now confront. Many of us have participated in marches, shared infographics, or pressured our representatives, yet the bombs continue to fall. This does not mean our actions are meaningless; it means we have not yet built the kind of sustained, strategic, and disruptive movement required to shift the calculations of empire. Kanafani’s analysis of 1936–1939 is again instructive here. He showed that a revolt can burn brightly and still be crushed if it lacks unified political leadership, independent resources, and a strategy that targets the enemy’s structural vulnerabilities rather than just reacting to its provocations. Solidarity today faces a similar challenge: to move beyond episodic moral expression toward long-term, organized pressure capable of severing the military, economic, and diplomatic arteries that keep the occupation and its genocide on life support.

This means, concretely, that commemorating the Nakba cannot remain an annual ritual of memory alone — whether in a refugee camp or at a rally in a Western capital. Memory is essential; it is the condition of survival for an uprooted people. The keys to the old homes must still be held high. But memory becomes a trap when it substitutes for the hard work of building institutions, knowledge, and strategic campaigns. We need, as another writer urged, to turn the commemoration of the Nakba into a space of collective labor: oral history projects, legal documentation, political education in camps and community centers, and the construction of independent research institutions that can arm the movement with data and strategies that outlast any single news cycle.

This essay is not only for Palestinians. It is for everyone who, over the past months, has filled the streets of London, New York, Sana’a, Johannesburg, and a hundred other cities, outraged by a genocide unfolding in real time. It is for the activist in Chicago who feels their protest has not yet stopped the bombs, and for the taxpayer in Boston beginning to realize that their money is directly funding the destruction of children’s bodies in Gaza. If you have ever asked yourself what more you can do, this is for you.

For supporters of the Palestinian struggle, this means reorienting our solidarity from a posture of pity or guilt to one of partnership and strategic alignment. It means understanding that the right of return is not a metaphor; it is a legal and political demand that must be studied, explained, and advocated for in our own societies. It means challenging the anti-Palestinian frameworks embedded in Western media, academia, and legislation — not just once a year, but as an ongoing campaign. And it means recognizing that the same systems that displace and kill Palestinians are also connected to wars, austerity, and surveillance at home. Our liberation is bound together.

Seventy-eight years of ongoing Nakba have not extinguished the right of return; they have clarified it. And the global uprising of conscience we witnessed in recent months has shown that millions of people are ready to be part of this clarification. What is needed now is not to let that fire dissipate into despair or mere commemoration, but to channel it into the unglamorous, patient, and coordinated work of building political force. As Kanafani insisted, the question is not whether justice is on our side — it is whether we are prepared to organize with the same seriousness as those who deny it.

Notes.

Al-Nakba — “the catastrophe” — refers to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and more than 500 villages destroyed, creating the world’s most protracted refugee crisis.

The 1936–1939 Palestinian revolt was a mass anti-colonial uprising against British rule and Zionist settlement, whose defeat, analyzed in depth by Ghassan Kanafani, revealed strategic weaknesses that would pave the way for the Nakba a decade later.

Citation.

Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine. (Originally published as Thawrat 1936–1939.

Monadel Herzallah, Ed.D., is a co-founder of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN). He is an educator and labor organizer. and a life-long activist for a Free Palestine and the liberation of all peoples.

 

New economics study finds ICE activity upended the US childcare workforce

Labor research shows immigration enforcement reshaped the size and structure of the childcare workforce—with implications for families, workers, and the economy

University of Vermont

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Erkmen Aslim is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Vermont.

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Credit: Photo courtesy of Erkmen Aslim.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations come to town it can create a landscape of fear, chilling commerce and school attendance, and now, new research shows it affects childcare workers.

A team from the University of Vermont, Yale University, Arizona State University, and American University examined how changes in ICE tactics between 2023 and 2025 has influenced the childcare workforce—a vital sector of the economy that employs nearly one million workers across the country and generates $7.2 billion in quarterly wages and is comprised of roughly 20% immigrant labor. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy on May 22.

“When ICE enforcement intensified, the formal childcare sector lost capacity: centers reduced enrollment, closed classrooms, and in some cases shut down entirely,” says lead author Erkmen Aslim, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Vermont. “That has real consequences for American families, particularly working mothers, who rely on stable, affordable childcare to hold down jobs.”

The study finds that increased ICE activity led to significant declines in employment among immigrant women, particularly those working in more regulated and publicly visible settings, such as childcare centers. This population is more likely than their native-born peers to hold advanced certifications, and the researchers found limited evidence that immigrant workers are being broadly replaced by native-born workers.

The team also found that significant labor shifts among childcare workers towards private household childcare—sites that are less regulated and typically have fewer protections for workers and more volatile wages. According to the researchers, this may negatively affect both childcare workers and the families who rely on them.

“Reallocation into less-regulated household care likely reduces the average quality and stability of care, given that center-based settings are subject to licensing, staff-to-child ratios, training requirements, and curricular standards that home-based arrangements typically are not,” Aslim explains. “This is an industry that already operates with high turnover and chronic staff shortages, so it has very little slack to absorb a shock of this kind.”

Overall, the results show that immigration enforcement reshapes not only the size but also the structure of the childcare workforce, with important potential implications for families, childcare workers, and labor markets.

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed monthly Current Population Survey reports, comparing them with ICE arrest records from the Deportation Data Project. The data showed upticks in enforcement activity coincided with employment drops in childcare centers and increases in employment in private households. These effects strengthened markedly after early 2025, a period characterized by a sharp rise in ICE arrests and heightened public attention to immigration enforcement. Areas previously considered off-limits become targets, including schools and daycare centers.

The authors of the study, including Janet Currie, the David Swensen Professor of Economics at Yale, write it may also drive up the cost of care as centers lose staff and potentially children from mixed status homes whose families pull them from care. Moreover, the families least able to afford to make private arrangements could bear the brunt as center-based classrooms shrink. And the study likely represents a conservative undercount of the impacts of ICE enforcement on the childcare sector since it relies on some of the people most at risk of being detained by ICE officials to fill out a survey.

Aslim stresses that changes in the childcare sector have a ripple effect across the labor market, particularly for lower- and middle-income parents who are less able to absorb the impact of rising costs and day-to-day uncertainty. In short, problems in the childcare sector are problems for everyone.

“The workforce that cares for young children in this country is deeply intertwined with the foreign-born labor force, and disruptions to that workforce show up as fewer childcare slots, higher prices, and harder choices for parents,” Aslim says. “The takeaway is that immigration policy is, in a very practical sense, also childcare policy and family policy.”

 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2602686123 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

How rising ICE activity influences the childcare workforce

Article Publication Date

22-May-2026