Ep. 14 - Let AI Fix Congress

The fight over Congress doesn’t start on election day; it starts on the map. We unpack how gerrymandering turns general elections into afterthoughts, supercharges primaries, and rewards the loudest voices over the most effective problem solvers. Using Texas and California as a live case study, we follow the mid-decade redraw arms race and show how safe seats harden polarization, fuel budget brinkmanship, and make shutdowns more likely. The throughline is simple and uncomfortable: when politicians pick their voters, voters get less power and the center gets squeezed out.

So what would it take to flip the incentive structure? We make the case for AI-drawn districts that follow clear, public rules already anchored in law: equal population, contiguity, compactness, community boundaries, and Voting Rights Act protections. No partisan data. No thumb on the scale. Just transparent code, auditable outputs, and a nonpartisan technical committee setting parameters. Think of it as using technology to enforce the rules humans keep bending, with courts and the public able to test and challenge the results.

Skeptical? We address the biggest objections head-on: algorithmic bias, democratic control, and constitutional footing. Then we lay out a practical path to proof: run AI side-by-side with current methods, publish hundreds of valid map options, and let independent experts score compactness and compliance. If neutral maps create more competitive districts, parties will be forced to recruit candidates who can win broad coalitions, exactly the kind of moderates who can pass budgets and tackle issues like healthcare and debt without constant crisis.

If you want less theater and more governing, start with the game board. Listen, share, and tell us where you stand. And if this sparks ideas, spread the word and reach out, we’re building space for smarter fixes. If you found value here, subscribe, leave a review, and send this to someone who’s tired of rigged incentives and ready for better maps.

Transcript

New Year, Midterms, Stakes

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back, everyone, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien, and it's a new year. It's January 2026, which means we have midterm elections. You may be hoping for that if you're wanting a change in leadership, if you're wanting a check on presidential power, or you may not be that excited about it if you feel like uh President Trump has a lot more to accomplish in addition to his big, beautiful bill and the things he's trying to do, you know, with efforts with ICE, et cetera. You may think, oh, the Democrats are gonna maybe get back the House, or maybe worse, and it's gonna stop the progress of President Trump. Regardless of where you stand on those partisan issues, you do recognize that we do get to vote. And we have elections this country, congressional elections, every two years. You know, these are the off-year elections because the president isn't running and there's typically, well, there's always less turnout in a non-presidential year, but you still get to vote. You you still, your voice still gets to be heard. And today, I want to dive into, though, what are your real choices and not just in terms of candidates? Because if you're if there's a you live in a congressional district, you're gonna have a choice, but is it gonna be a meaningful choice? Because one of the questions is do you live in a swing district? Do you live in a district that could really go back and forth between a Democrat or a Republican, not to mention the fact that you you don't have any other real choices? You don't ever see any true independents uh that win in Congress. And this episode was actually at a request uh for one of my listeners, Ethan. So if you're listening, you had uh talked to me a month or two ago about maybe I should do an episode on gerrymandering and redistricting. So that's what we're gonna do today. Now, my uh my thesis to you is that we don't really uh in this country, we don't lack moderates in Congress because Americans are extreme. We lack moderates because our map drawing system in this country really filters the moderates out. And so for those of you, you know, who don't know just a ton about it, the Constitution prescribes redistricting. Typically, we do it after a census every 10 years. As we've learned, you know, you don't have to do it every 10 years, you can do it more often. And there's supposed to be uh basic rules of the game, and I'll get into that later. But that is how you draw the maps. You know, that's how you set the rules. And one of the things I've learned in life is it's kind of the golden rule. Whoever has the gold rules. So if you set the rule for any type of system, and in this case, drawing a map, it's gonna have big downstream consequences of the results later on, and in many cases, which political party is going to uh control Congress. So one of the things that was in the news quite a bit in 2025 is that states started saying, hey, even though we've probably drawn maps a certain way, uh, we can we can do it even in a more defined or extreme way to get the results we want. It's almost always the state legislature that is drawing the map, so that's what we're talking about. And I don't know if it completely started with Texas, but Texas was absolutely where you heard uh the most discussion uh about this, and or Democrats tried to stop the process, but ultimately were unable. And basically, Texas, which of course is a very red state, it votes for uh president, uh is it votes Republican for president reliably. Uh both senators are Republican, and both, you know, there's been efforts by Democrats to try to win that state, but they haven't really come all that close. And so they, of course, their congressional members are also very Republican. And that's because the Texas legislature drew the maps that way, but it's also because it's a very red state, understandably so. One thing leads to another. But in 2025, the Republicans went back and said, we can make it even more Republican. Like we can squeeze out, I don't know, four or five more seats somehow, in an effort, really, in a way, to just try to rig the system. Well, in California, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, all you know, opposite side of the spectrum, an incredibly blue state. They vote reliably, uh Democrat for president, two U.S. senators, et cetera, an overwhelming number of Congresspeople are Democrats. And so, however, Gavin Newsom, who I'm sure is going to run for president in 2028, he went back to the California legislature and said, well, actually, not to the legislature. He had to get an amendment passed because I think it was Governor Schwarzenegger who had passed an amendment kind of creating uh, and whether it was Schwarzenegger or not, I know that he was big, I'm trying to keep it this way, but it an amendment to say we're gonna have this kind of nonpartisan commission draw the lines, which it in is really a great idea, actually. And and that's there would be one thing that maybe every state could do if you could actually find a nonpartisan commission, which which I do have skepticism about that. But the bottom line was California looked at what Texas was doing and said, we're not gonna let you create Republican seats that didn't exist before, halfway through a decade when it's uncommon, at least, to say that you're gonna redraw redraw lines because what we're gonna do is the exact same that you're doing, Texas. We're gonna redraw lines for Democrats and kind of cancel you out. And then a lot of states looked at it. I will notably say that Indiana looked at it. I'm pretty sure that President Trump was had communicated to the governor and state legislators in Indiana that he wanted more Republican seats there. And at least as the time of this taping, uh, the state rejected it. They said no, and they didn't vote uh to go back through the redistricting process. And good for them, I guess. But I say I guess because what are we really doing here? You know, at the end of the day, what are we really doing? And so that's that's what's been in the news. Now, I want to break it down a little bit more to go back just a second. What's the significance of all this? Well, you know, we had a 43-day government shutdown in the fall of 2025. And I've said before that it was a big waste of time, and I think had real negative economic consequences for individual people. Uh, and it was just a bad thing. And why do you get that sort of behavior? Well, you get that sort of behavior because the United States Congress cannot work together. They just cannot work together. And it doesn't matter if you get a Democrat president and both branches of of uh Congress are Democrat, or if you've got what we have now, where a Republican president and both branches are led by Republicans, they just can't get along. And uh because there's certain things that have to, like in the Senate specifically, they have to require 60 votes, but they just can't get along, period. And so that's why you have government shutdowns. That's why you don't have answers for our healthcare system and and and on and on and on. We get all that, but but where does all this start? Right? Like, how did we get to this position? And it reminded me uh of going to college in Fayetteville, Northwest Arkansas, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And oh my, how the state has changed. So at that time, every significant elected official, you know, on a state level and the U.S. senators were Democrat. Um, this was a time period when Bill Clinton was governor of the state. And so I'm laughing because I lived in the one congressional district that was Republican. There are four congressional districts in Arkansas. Three of them were Democrat, one was Republican, and then the two U.S. senators and the governor were all Democrat, not to mention all the constitutional officers were Democrats. But the one I lived in was represented by a guy named John Paul Hammerschmidt. He had been there for decades, and he was kind of your, your, what I would say, I don't know, I would, I don't even know if he was a country club Republican. I just say he was an old-style Republican and he really valued things like constituent work. And one of the big things that he did was he was on the transportation committee for decades, really, and he earmarked a lot of money so they could build a big, beautiful interstate connecting I-40 and go over the mountains. And it was a huge deal because it there used to be, well, there's still these roads that are terrifying and windy and curvy, and you get on US 71 and it would say, This is how many people have died this year on this road, please be careful. And now you have this amazing highway that when I go down to Little Rock, I get to drive on. And it really has a lot to do with this guy, John Paul Hammerschmidt. But he was a Republican because this was the only part of the state that elected Republicans. But he was what I would say is generally pretty moderate. You didn't hear the guy making a lot of news, you didn't hear him being extreme. He he would do things like mail you this really long survey that said, What do you want me to do as your congressman? And I got the thing. It's it's several pages long. I bet it had a hundred questions. And a lot of it was, you know, do you want better roads? Well, sure, I want better roads, etc. But it was, it was just a different time period. You know, so just let's say about 1990, when this is going on, he was doing the people's work. He was, he was uh thinking to himself, this is my job. And I'm sure some of that goes on these days, but everything's kind of been nationalized. And so that brings us back to who are we electing and why. I think the deal is that um, you know, it it comes down to the fact that the redistricting is done by people. Those people are incentivized to gerrymander. They're incentivized to stack the deck for their party. So if you live in California, you're gonna stack the deck for Democrats. If you live in Texas, you're gonna stack the deck for Republicans, and so on and so forth. And what it creates is there's not a lot of competition at the general uh election. The real competition is in the primaries. And so the the Republicans, they might have eight people run if it's a if it's a heavy Republican district, they're gonna have eight people run in the primary. The Democrats are just gonna put out one person because there's not, they know they're not gonna win. And and again, vice versa in a Democratic district. And so what the incentives are bad, which is really gonna be my my big point on this episode, is that gerrymandering doesn't just pick winners, it picks the types of politicians that you're gonna get. It if you got a safe district, that means you don't have to do what John Paul Hammerschmidt did, which is listen to your constituents and try to understand what they want from you, or have a long-term approach like building this interstate, which helped companies like Tyson and Walmart uh really accelerate their growth, which has been massive for Northwest Arkansas. You instead you have people being responsive to their base, to the activist, and that sort of thing. And there's nothing wrong with activism at all, but it just tends to be much more extreme. And you get you get things like uh the terms like rhino, Republican in name only, you know, because you're worried, politicians are worried that they're going to be put in this box which says they're not loyal enough to their party, which what that really means is they're not extreme enough for their party. And the people, I would say at least 60% of the people like me and you who are in the middle get shut out from the process. And so, you know, one way to think about it is when the only election that matters is the primary, the most intense voters become the most powerful voters. And while that sounds okay in theory, the results you get from that is federal government shutdowns. It is the type of rhetoric that elevates people for saying very outlandish and shocking things. It's the fact that we never pass budgets in this country. I mean, literally, we never pass budgets. Everything's a concurrent resolution that just keeps going on and on. We don't tackle big, huge problems like healthcare, like our debt, et cetera. The incentives are wrong. The game is rigged, folks. The game is rigged. So, what are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? Here's my big idea for the week leading into 2026 that just probably has no idea of passing anytime soon. But my big idea is to turn it over to AI. Turn the drawing of congressional districts over to AI. Now, this isn't about letting machines rule democracy. It's about letting machines enforce rules that humans keep breaking. It's like saving, let AI save us from ourselves. Because you can create parameters that do this. Now, I think if you're gonna have like a nonpartisan board that's gonna that's gonna be a part of this process, that nonpartisan board would be setting the parameters for the AI. Because AI, my dealings with it, it can be benign and neutral in its its thought process and it can call you out, you know, if if you're doing the wrong thing. It's new and tested, et cetera, in many ways, but but let's go down this, just follow me for a minute on this journey. Let's go down uh this road for a second. So what if congressional districts were generated by AI? Not to optimize the partisan outcomes, but to apply the governing principles that are part of the Constitution and part of federal law. So the constraint here is that AI does not invent values. It's going to enforce existing ones. So, what are the constitutional and legal inputs that uh AI could be required to use? Well, these are all things that are coming from established law or the constitution itself, but primarily from a lot of Supreme Court rulings over the years. Equal population means one person, one vote, et cetera. Contiguous districts, compact districts, respect for political subdivisions like uh counties or city lines. The Voting Rights Act protections could all be put in there, the equal rights protection principles could all be putting in there. And you wouldn't, you you wouldn't do partisan inputs. Like you wouldn't say, well, this district votes Democrat or Republican. Now let me come back to that for a second because I know that um I know some of you are saying, oh, Pat, he's just he likes to throw some big thing out there that's just completely unrealistic. I I don't know that it really is. You know, maybe it's unrealistic now because of, you know, no no one's gonna go for this now, but within a few years, we're gonna have redistricting coming again, and AI is gonna be far more established than it is at this time in three to four years from now. So it's very possible. It really is, and I think it's something that we need to consider primarily because nothing else has worked. Now, you might be saying to yourself, I don't want machines or you know, somebody's gonna tamper with the data and all that. I don't want that making these decisions. And there can always be some checks and balances here, but what I want to tell you is that's already what happens. So I ran for uh Secretary of State in 2010 and lost. But if I had won, I would have been part of a uh three-member board that drew the uh the lines for state house and state senate. Now that's not what I'm talking about here, uh, but it's a similar process and to what is done to draw congressional lines. It's called the you know, the redistricting board. That's how it works in Arkansas. But I'd seen it happen and and in terms of like from a technological standpoint, and what happens is we already had the technology even back in 2011 to know what kind what a district was going to look like, how it was gonna vote. And you knew how much people made, their ethnenticity, all the things. And that was 15 years ago. So we got so much more now. And people were already putting their thumb on the scale using the technology. And then you go back, I mean, you go back a hundred years, how many ever you want. I mean, the term gerrymandering, you can look it up yourself, but I mean comes from a very specific situation where incredibly odd districts that make no sense at all except to elect a certain person or political party. That's the only reason they were designed. So the thumb has been on the scale since the very beginning. And then the technology that we currently are using is not benign. It is absolutely, and it's not because the people making the decisions have an agenda. And and I if it had I been the second Democrat Secretary of State, I probably would have had that thought of thinking myself at that time. I don't now because 15 years have passed, and I see I'm not part of the matrix anymore. Like I'm seeing it from the outside, and I realize that it's bad for our country to have the division that we do. And I truly believe that if you had fair districts that were drawn with common sense, you would dramatically increase the amount of moderation in the United States Congress because there would be so much higher incentives to put candidates forward that were moderate. Because here's what would happen. Let's say that you got a pretty good swing district, and in any given time, depending on the performance of the president and that political party, it's going to go either way. Let's say, in this case, let's say the Democrats are like, we want this round, we want ideologically, ideological purity. We want somebody who's going. To be pretty far left and universal health care and no guns and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm I'm obviously being dramatic here to explain the position, but let's just say what the Democrats want. And then the Republicans said, look, the Democrats are going to have a really extreme candidate. Let's put up a moderate and let's win the actual seat. So the Democrats would fight amongst themselves, produce a really extreme candidate on one side, and then they would lose the general election. And it could go the opposite way. The point I'm trying to make is you want the political parties to be incentivized to put up people who think from a moderate standpoint first. That's what you want. That's how we get out of this thing. And you can't, that's never going to happen under the current system. I mean, 2025 is just an example of how much this thing can boil over with what Texas and California were did to change the rules of the game. And Indiana, and we'll see if they get all the way to the election without changing the rules. But they actually, they thought that was such a bad idea that they stood up to President Trump and said, no, we're not going to let this happen. So how would you do it? You know, Congress and state legislatures, and it would probably definitely probably require some kind of constitutional amendment, which would be incredibly hard to pass. But you could set transparent criteria. You could um have AI generate hundreds of valid maps that people could look at. They'd all be publicly published. You could have, you know, the courts are always going to be involved. Like I said, you could have this nonpartisan tech committee that could help set the parameters. By the way, if if you uh I'm married to somebody in tech. So they they have kind of an engineering mind. And you just find find a few good IT people and they'll help us solve this problem. They really will, because that's where they start from, is they want the data to work. They want the code to work. So I think this is something that we could really do if we set our minds to it. Um you here's what you want: you want the power shifting from the politicians choosing their voters to the voters choosing their politicians. Not because AI is wise, but because you can create restraints with AI that you simply cannot create with humans. It's it's just proven. Humans, they don't have the willpower to see through handling this process uh in a way that would be beneficial to all. So yeah, let's let's j let AI, you know, do it better than the humans do. That that's my logic uh behind this. And so, you know, how would this happen? Again, you definitely have to have some kind of constitutional amendment. I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon, but I think there's advantages to it. The first advantage would be I think you could constrain the AI with its uh with its you know criteria to not be self-interested. There's not a re-election fear, you know, like it that you have when the legislature is picking the congressmen, because they all know each other. I mean, they, you know, these are people who rely upon each other for everything. You would decrease what you know, what I'll call tribal loyalty and and and extremism. So we don't need the AI to be moral, okay? We need the AI to be boring and draw really boring maps and and then let us vote. Now, I can anticipate uh some objections to this, I'm sure, quite a few. You know, the first objection AI can be biased. Well, yes, of course it can. Um, but so can humans. And in fact, we know that uh, you know, the human bias is very difficult to prove, um, whereas the AI bias can be audited. And I think you can you can again set criteria that that shows, okay, that would, you know, the code didn't work in that instance. Second, this removes democratic control somehow. I I don't agree with that because we've been using technology to build these maps for a long time. And all that the the only thing that's happening here is you're removing a lot of uh the partisan uh valuation that goes into the way that these districts are drawn. And so map drawing is not democracy. Map drawing is neutral or should be. Voting is democracy. And I think that, you know, one of the issues that we do have is a lot of people who are moderate are not passionate. They're not radical like me. And they sit on the sidelines and they do that because they don't believe they think the whole thing is rigged anyways. And they're like, it doesn't matter if I go vote. I mean, how many times have you heard somebody say that? It doesn't matter if I vote. Well, that's easier to say when you know that the system is rigged. I mean, when Texas goes out and says, we're going to find five more Republicans, and California goes out and says, we're going to find five more Democrats for Congress, then you know the system is rigged, and you're just reinforcing uh to people who could vote but don't, that their vote doesn't matter. And so I think it could have a positive effect on creating more trust in the system. You know, the next objection might be well, the Constitution doesn't mention AI. Well, it doesn't mention the internet or iPhones or anything like that. And I understand that, you know, the Supreme Court, unless if this was just a congressional action, it would definitely go to the Supreme Court if it was an amendment. I mean, it'd go to the Supreme Court, but if the language was clear, it would work. I believe look, tools change. Okay, tools change, principles don't. And so I think we we can use that criteria earlier that I stated earlier of the compactness, the contiguousness, the blending in all equal protection, civil rights uh principles into this, and and it could work. So, you know, I I kind of view this podcast as a way to provoke thought, to generate ideas. I'm not elected to anything. I don't have any power beyond hopefully uh talking some sense now and again, and people say, you know what, he's kind of onto something there. And so it doesn't have to be exact, anytime I say something in this podcast, it doesn't have to be exactly the way I say it. It's more thinking, look, we've got AI. We have these tools. We could constrain it. We could, we could at least give people an option, right? Maybe, maybe uh one thing I'm thinking here is you could you could have both systems for a while. And you could have the people system, the way we've done it forever, that we essentially know is rigged, and then you could compare it to the AI system and see what those two realities look like. So at least it would start developing more choice. So kind of here's what I'm thinking. If we want a Congress with more moderates, we don't need to beg politicians to behave better. I just don't, I think we've been doing that, and I it's not happening. Instead, we need to stop designing a system that punishes them for doing so. Gerrymandering didn't polarize America overnight, but it quietly trained our politicians and toward the extremes. The radical idea isn't trusting AI to somehow save our democracy. It's admitted, it's admitting that humans shouldn't be trusted to rig it. That's what I'm saying. And I I want to thank uh my listener, Ethan, for coming up with this. It made me think, how do I want to approach it? You know, and and as I go down this journey with this podcast, um I really, I guess, starting to believe my own uh Kool-Aid a little bit. And what I mean by that is I'm just throwing some ideas out there. Somebody who's listening to this needs to take some action with it. And and it doesn't have to be immediate action. I don't know. You could be listening to this in 2031, you know, five, six years from now, and say, wait a second, there were people talking about this that long ago. This can be done. And if we get enough people who are willing to ask the questions, who are willing to throw out some radical ideas, I think before you know it, people say that's that's not that crazy. The the crazy thing is is not changing what we're doing. The crazy thing is continuing to do the thing that doesn't work and then grousing about it, complains like, why don't we fix the system? Well, we're not even trying something different. So that's you know, trial and error, entrepreneurial spirit. That's how we're gonna get out of this. So let's let's try something different. Um, if nothing else, if nothing else, let's run some AI models and just kind of see what it might look like. Well, folks, uh our Congress is a real problem. I think we're probably all gonna agree on that. And uh if you've got ideas, I don't have channels yet of how to people can really interact with me in a big way. I've got a YouTube channel, et cetera. I hope I think in the next month or two, I'm gonna start kind of producing some ways that you can give me more feedback because I'd love to hear it. For now, just help me spread the word. Uh and if you got some great ideas, you can Google Pat O'Brien. I'm sure you can figure out how to get a hold of me. Uh it won't be that hard. Thank you for listening and uh for this episode. That's the the POV of POBIC.