Washington Wednesday: Chips, votes, and maps

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 20th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday. Joining us is political scientist and WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker.

Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: The Trump administration is proposing to convert nearly eight billion dollars in CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake—possibly around ten percent—in the American chipmaker Intel. Quick background: The CHIPS Act came about in 2022 providing more than $50 billion in subsidies, tax credits, and research funding in an effort to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on CNBC this week. Listen:

BESSENT: The last thing we want is a Huawei Belt and Road, where Huawei is selling chips to the rest of the world and U.S. technology is excluded.

Belt and road. He’s talking about China, and so too was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, same network.

LUTNICK: We need to make our own chips here. We cannot rely on Taiwan, which is 9,500 miles away from us and only 80 miles from China. You can’t have 99% of leading-edge chips made in Taiwan. We want to make them here.

Do we, Hunter, and why?

BAKER: Yeah. So typically if you have sort of a free market orientation, you would say, I don't want this kind of industrial policy. I don't want the United States government, you know, subsidizing or taking a stake in a company like Intel. But this is a little bit different. As you pointed out, Taiwan has become sort of the epicenter of chip manufacturing in the world.

And we all know how important microchips are to everything that we're doing in life today. And so typically even, even the most ardent sort of free market people would accept sort of a national defense kind of an argument that there are certain industries that we have to have viable within our own borders. The steel industry is often one of those that we would talk about. Well, microchips are now in that conversation and there are people who are realizing that we need a company like an Intel not to fail, right? And to be strong in this area.

EICHER: So it’s hard to contradict the national security case, but what about the taking of the equity stake. It’s not totally clear to me how that necessarily helps, especially given Secretary Lutnick’s statement that the White House is not seeking a governance voice within the company. Again, from CNBC, here’s how he positioned the move:

SOTNICK: We want equity for the money. If we’re going to give you the money, we want a piece of the action for the American taxpayer.

He specifically dismissed criticism from The Wall Street Journal that this is Democrat-style “industrial policy” and picking winners and losers. He said it isn’t. He says it’s just an alternative to pumping free money into big tech. But if there’s no governance leverage, how does that advance the national security goal?

BAKER: Well, it helps the company. The United States government taking a stake in Intel shows a certain amount of confidence. And actually, it's better for the taxpayer this way because previously they were going to get something like maybe $8 billion just in grants. This way, the United States government actually has a stake in the company.

And the U.S. government has entered companies before and then exited. I think that's happened with General Motors in the past. And of course, you also have European countries that are involved with Airbus and that partnership has been quite successful and going better than Boeing lately. So I think it's wise to have them do this. It secures the taxpayers' interest much better than a grant because when all is said and done, it's very likely that the government will be able to exit the stake if it wants to and to get its money back and probably with a reasonable return.

MAST: Fourteen months still until the 2026 midterms, but lots of maneuvering around the country in advance. President Trump said this week he wants to do away with both mail-in voting and voting machines.

TRUMP: We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt and uh you know that we're the only country in the world, I believe I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what's happened, massive fraud all over the place. The other thing we want change are the machines.

The President also claims states are an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes and must do what the Government tells them. How far can the President go in changing these systems, Hunter? Are there legitimate concerns here?

BAKER: Well, I don't totally agree with his characterization of things. I mean, the states are actually sort of the dominant entities when it comes to running elections. It is true that there is room for Congress to act if there are real concerns about the way elections are carried out in the states. But traditionally, the states have been the dominant actors and probably should stay that way.

Now, with regard to these questions about mail-in voting and voting machines, I would say that the Republicans were pretty successful in 2024 encouraging voters to do those things, right? You know, to engage in early voting, to engage in mail voting is actually very successful. I don't think that it's a winning tactic or strategy for Donald Trump to discourage people of the validity of those systems. Now, there are a lot of things you can do to make voting to take care of fraud, right? To have systems that are more reliable, whether mail-in or early voting or other methods. I think voter ID being another one of those. And so I think that the right thing to do is to do everything you can to nail down that process and to make it as free of manipulation as possible.

EICHER: Hunter, also this week, the fight over redistricting has now extended far beyond Texas.

AUDIO: “A quorum is present.”

Democrats in the Texas House have ended their quorum break, returning to vote on congressional district maps that favor Republicans. But the clash has drawn national attention.

Former President Barack Obama weighed in. Interesting statement. Audio from ABC News:

OBAMA: California responding, other states looking at what they can do to offset this mid-decade gerrymandering that is highly irregular and is not what we should be doing to balance out the maps for this upcoming election.

So, highly irregular, not what we should be doing, but I guess suggesting California’s just “responding.” And here’s that response from California governor Gavin Newsom.

GAVIN NEWSOM: We'll be asking for the people on November 4th - a special election coinciding with a lot of local municipal elections - to provide a temporary pathway for congressional maps. We will affirm our commitment to the state independent redistricting after the 2030 census. But we're asking the voters for their consent to do midterm redistricting in 2026, 2028, and 2030 for the congressional maps to respond to what's happening in Texas.

So Hunter, is there really a political imbalance?

BAKER: There's a lot of different ways you can look at this. The case that a lot of Republicans have made is you look at a state like Massachusetts. Massachusetts fairly recently has had a Republican governor. They have had, you know, elected a Republican senator some time ago, and yet the state of Massachusetts has zero congressional members, congressional representatives currently, right? There is not a single district in Massachusetts that is a Republican district. So I think that some Republicans are saying, we need to maximize states like Texas any way we can. The Democrats have sort of fully gerrymandered and redistricted to the maximum amount and that we need to do the same. I'm very concerned. I mean, from my perspective, I think that redistricting halfway through a 10-year cycle is indeed highly irregular.

And now California is going to respond with even greater irregularity, right? They are proposing to redistrict halfway through, and not only that, but to ignore their existing nonpartisan commission that is supposed to draw the lines, right? I mean, really, this is kind of just a thing that continues to escalate and escalate. I wrote a piece in WORLD Opinions arguing against these kinds of practices. I think that nationwide we should seek reform.

And this is the same sort of a question as what we're talking about with voting practices. We all need to feel like we have a principled neutral process, sort of a level playing field upon which our elections take place.

MAST: Hunter, I'm curious, what sort of reforms would you look for for a nationwide movement?

BAKER: Yeah, so first of all, I like the idea of having these nonpartisan commissions that draw the lines. We have a lot of technology that allows us to examine the demographics and to try to achieve that. There are some simple principles saying we don't want any districts that have these bizarre shapes. We want the districts to be relatively compact.

If the district can take in an existing community of interest, we want it to, right? So for example, if a county can fairly easily become a district, let's do that. There are just a number of common sense ways to avoid these bizarre shapes that are designed to maximize party advantage.

MAST: And speaking of Obama, let’s turn again to New York, and the mayoral race there.

“SHOW ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE / THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE / WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN"

It seems like it’s shaping up to be as much about national politics as it is the city. Here’s sound from a recent rally with mayoral frontrunner, the socialist candidate Zoran Mamdani.

MAMDANI: We are standing in front of Federal Plaza, the very site where New Yorkers are being stolen, whether from their families, their friends, or from the city that they call home. It is at this very site that we understand the cost of this news that former Governor Cuomo has been conspiring with President Trump about the fate of this city, about the future of this City, about the facts of this race. It is knowledge that is a betrayal of everything that we stand for as New Yorkers.

The New York Times published an Opinion piece last week about the implications of a phone call from Obama to Mamdani. It says many in Obamaworld seem to be embracing him, and that could mean mainstream Democrats will follow.

Hunter, what do you think: Is this a test to see where the party is? And what would the next couple of years look like with Mamdani at the top?

BAKER: Yes, there's always a tension within a political party. The same exists on the Republican side. And the tension is, is that you have the people who are sort of the real ideological diehards. And those people tend to believe that if we pushed harder in our preferred direction, whether to the right or the left, right, conservatives, if we would just be more conservative, we would develop a better following.

Or on the left, you know, there are many who believe if we would be more socialist, for example, that we would attract a greater following among the American people. And then you have the ones who are in the center who sort of believe that American politics is like a bell curve and most of the voters are in the middle. Right. And so when I look at Obama talking to Mamdani, there are two ways I could interpret it. One is, is that he is trying to protect the Democratic Party from damaging electoral consequences from him becoming too radical. But the other is, is that I've always sort of thought that in his heart of hearts, that President Obama was fairly sympathetic to the socialist viewpoint and that maybe he wants to talk to Mamdani about how he just thinks he can be more effective as he pursues those goals.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and provost at North Greenville University and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.