Bernie’s month of campaigning in California and the state’s party’s rules of letting independents vote in its primary made a difference, though not enough for him to win. That is a much-overlooked capstone to his performance in California. Think about it: starting with Iowa’s caucuses, Sanders encountered a series of state party rules and other decisions that favored his opponent and did little to embrace the millions of voters who were drawn to him. The voters who sent 45 percent of elected delegates to Philadelphia’s convention were underestimated, underrepresented, and marginalized by their party’s leaders.
On top of that, Sanders faced the institutional clumsiness of the voting process. In caucus states, inept precinct captains and states’ chairs were not up to the task of running contests with presidential nominations at stake. In primary states, many key elements overseen by county government officials—registration deadlines, voter list maintenance and purges, precinct locations, voter lists—complicated rather than clarified voting, especially for first-time voters and independents. Together, what Sanders and his base experienced was that winning takes much more than embracing a candidate you believe in.
6
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE
BUT THE BIGGEST BARRIER TO SANDERS breaking through was the party culture and its leaders. These are political pros that know better, know what nefarious behavior is and isn’t, and whose biases blinded them to not just Sanders but to the party’s antidemocratic rules.
When DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was interviewed in February 2016 by CNN after Iowa and New Hampshire, she fiercely defended the superdelegate system.41 They “exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” she said. Wasserman Schultz did not see superdelegates as affirmative action for insiders, but said they were to ensure that diverse constituencies have a say in the party. Superdelegates have never departed from primary and caucus results, she said, and chosen a different nominee. This breezy explanation ducked the bigger issues at play, including her loyalty to Clinton.
In politics, real motives are usually not what is said in public. On the weekend before the Democratic National Convention opened in Philadelphia, Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign after WikiLeaks released emails from her top staff showing plots to attack Sanders—such as questioning his religious beliefs.42 This was the last straw, because, even if Hillary loyalists smoldered that Sanders had refused to warmly endorse her after California, it told Sanders’s supporters, nearly half the party, that they were to be stepped on and sidelined.43
Of course, the DNC’s bias was evident before the first votes were cast. Beyond its superdelegates, most of whom were Clinton supporters before Iowa and stayed that way, were other candidate-centered aggressions and antidemocratic slights. The DNC cut off Sanders’s access to its national voter database as his fundraising peaked in late 2015. It scheduled debates on weekends, when fewer people would become familiar with him as a candidate and his policies, as well as his critiques of Clinton. The DNC created a joint fund-raising effort with the Clinton campaign before the 2016 nominee was known. WikiLeaks showed that Donna Brazile, the ex-DNC chair who was then a CNN analyst, shared debate questions with the Clinton campaign before its primary debate.44 Incredibly, Brazile took the DNC helm after Wasserman Schultz resigned in disgrace.
Another open admission came in February 2017 when the soon-to-be elected DNC chairman, Obama’s former labor secretary Tom Perez, told Kansas lawmakers that 2016 was rigged from the inside. “We heard loudly and clearly yesterday from Bernie supporters that the process was rigged, and it was,” Perez said. “You’ve got to be honest about it. That’s why we need a chair who is transparent.” Needless to say, Perez immediately got flack for that honesty and later tweeted that he “misspoke.”45
The notion that political ends justify the means, and doing whatever it takes is loyal and patriotic, is as old as politics itself. But the modern Democratic Party is supposed to be the party fighting voter suppression, not deploying it. It is the party that keeps going into court to defend voting rights from Republican attacks. To run its presidential nominating contest as inside ball violates what the party says it stands for. Take Wasserman Schultz’s defense of superdelegates to ensure minority representation. That definition excluded the grassroots, which, as it turned out, were up for grabs in 2016 and which Trump deftly exploited.
Sanders chose his words carefully when he discussed voter suppression in his post-2016 book. As you would expect, he first noted how Supreme Court campaign finance rulings have empowered billionaires to single-handedly finance candidates. But Sanders then turned to the Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act. That 1965 law was passed after many states, mostly in the South, adopted rules to keep blacks from voting. However, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, said voter suppression was no longer a problem that required the federal government to sign off on any new election law or procedure in covered states. In response, GOP-run states moved very quickly to pass a series of laws making it harder for Democrats to vote.
Sanders is unsparing in his criticism of those who would rig the rules rather than win by the power of their ideas. “Political cowards are doing everything they can to keep people from voting,” he wrote. “They are making it harder for people to register and to participate in the political process.”46
Many of the things that Sanders correctly criticizes the GOP for—creating voting barriers, hiding behind opaque rules and procedures, failing to ensure election administration is fully modernized and professional, and ensuring accurate and verifiable counts—have analogues in the Democrats’ nominating process. While the Republicans are far more accomplished in the dark arts of undermining voting and elections, one has to wonder if voters experiencing a more open Democratic contest would bring about fairer and more accountable elections.
“Democracy should be easy,” Sanders wrote. “All adults must have the right to vote. We can and should spend the money necessary to defend democracy by making sure polling places are adequately staffed, that voting machines function well, and that however voting is tabulated, there are paper ballots that can be counted and audited in cases where the voting is close or contested.”47
That sounds simple, but it isn’t simple in a nation where our constitutional system has its roots and retains key characteristics of the late 1700s, when slavery, racism, classism, sexism, and other hard lines enshrined economic elites, while excluding those who challenge that order.
Today, there is a party that believes the country does not benefit when every eligible adult votes and unapologetically keeps passing laws and adopting rules in that antidemocratic spirit. That is the Republicans. Its path to power starts with creating red-state monopolies and extends to dominating the US House and presidential swing states. Until their game plan and tactics are understood, unmasked, and bested, a minority party that consistently elicits fewer popular votes nationally, will not be relegated to history.
SECTION II
THE REPUBLICANS
7
GAMING THE RULES OF POLITICS
IT’S TIME TO SET ASIDE THE notion that American democracy is based on free and fair elections, epitomized by one-person–one-vote. Instead, we need to recognize the frame that the nation’s founders created: a system that elevates elites and manipulates the rules of voting to shape outcomes.48 This legacy endures today, despite twentieth-century US Supreme Court decisions affirming the ideal of one person, one vote.
Perhaps the best-known example of this enduring legacy is the Senate. Wyoming, with less than six hundred thousand residents, has the same representation as California with 37 million residents. Another is the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause in Article 1, which allocated House seats based on a state’s population and counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Historians have noted that ugly formula gave more clout to sl
ave states via overrepresentation.49 But its shadow continues today in the Electoral College, where each state’s president-selecting vote is based on its congressional delegation’s size. Tinkering with underlying rules for elections by insiders acting on “superior knowledge” and “sufficient virtue” is as old as America. It just takes new forms: some more obvious and some more odious.
In American politics, there have always been factions who argue that allowing free and fair elections invites mob rule.50 That’s why the state legislatures appointed the US Senate (almost uniformly wealthy white men) until the Seventeenth Amendment was enacted in 1913. There are right-wingers today that want to go back to that way of selecting US senators,51 just as House members like Florida Republican Ted Yolo believe that only property owners should vote. Pundits and scholars say politics has always been this way: whoever holds power will publicly offer high-minded words about democratic principles, but behind closed doors use every available advantage to game the system’s operating rules. To expect anything else is naive.
Most political reporting looks at the results in elections, not the underlying “porous and partisan” structures, rules, and administration that feed into the outcomes, as voting rights attorney Michael Waldman described it in his 2016 book, The Fight to Vote.52 Yet, in order to understand why the nation has had the Republican-majority House and red supermajority state governments this decade, we must examine the less-visible features of voting that do not treat all citizens equally, or technicalities that benefit Republicans or GOP rule. These are especially important in close races when public enthusiasm is waning because they decisively affect voting blocs.
No matter which verb you pick—biasing, tilting, gaming, rigging—the outcome in many races is unfairly handicapped before the votes are cast. This is why a Democratic president could be reelected in 2012 with 5 million more popular votes, and 1.4 million more Democrats than Republicans voted for House candidates nationwide, yet the GOP emerged with 33 more House seats.53 That same “red shift” persisted in November 2016, when Clinton won 2.9 million more popular votes than Trump, but the GOP won a forty-seven-seat US House majority54 and ended up with full control of thirty-two state legislatures.55
What Democrats did to Bernie and progressives was bad. But compared to what the GOP has done to all voters this past decade, it was child’s play. There is little on the Democratic side of the aisle that compares to what Republicans have done on a national scale to build a structural advantage into winning key state legislatures and House races. The GOP crafted a pre-Election Day advantage that boosts their starting-line odds of winning. Beyond that baseline, the party has been pushing and passing scores of state laws that further erode Democratic voting blocs at key steps in the voting process. In state after state, they have ruthlessly targeted the same voters Democrats are seeking through its registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts—nonwhites, students, and the poor. The GOP’s motives are clear: hold onto power and protect its shrinking and aging white base. (In 1992, nonwhites were 13 percent of the national electorate. In 2016, it was nearly a third.)
Remarkably, the most impactful Republican action to restructure the electoral landscape flew below the national media’s radar and was ignored by Democrats until recently—years after it began. Data analysts, however, say that by 2016, the GOP had created upwards of a 6–8 percent56 built-in lead for many of its candidates for state legislatures and the House. How did they do that? They saw and seized an old but audacious way to resegregate each party’s most reliable voters. These are voters who turn out for local, state, and congressional races—not just presidential elections. Republicans identified each party’s reliable voters in enough key states, and drew election district lines where more Republicans were likely to show up and vote than Democrats. Because they saturated these districts with their voters and diluted the Democratic base, Republicans could much more easily reach winning majorities.
“The Democrats fell asleep at the switch,” said David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy,57 which details how a small team of Republicans foresaw, plotted, and created that advantage after losing nationally in 2008. “They [Democrats] did not pay attention to it. They did not pay attention to it even after Karl Rove laid out the playbook in the Wall Street Journal [in March 2010]. They didn’t have the strategic imagination to come up with a plan or even the tactical ability to play defense once Karl Rove spelled it out on the op-ed page of the country’s largest newspaper. That’s bad. And they have paid the consequences for that this entire decade.”58
The Republicans assembled majorities by concentrating as many Democrats as they could in few urban districts while spreading out the rest in seats where they would not reach winning majorities. They did that by drilling down and literally choosing which neighborhoods were included in state legislative and House districts. These are not statewide races, such as for governor or US senator or president. These are the jigsaw-puzzle shape districts that elect state legislators and House members. A handful of astute, well-organized Republicans sensed this opportunity in 2009. They realized whichever party held majority power in state legislatures after the 2010 election59 would redraw political boundaries lasting for the next decade, as most redistricting follows the once-a-decade US census (which recurs in 2020).
The GOP did not have to draw lines that followed logical demarcations like county lines, school districts, or population centers. They forged enough bizarrely shaped districts with a predictably higher Republican turnout to win state legislative majorities and keep the US House red. As Richard Wolf, one of the few national reporters who follows redistricting wrote for USA Today, the results were seen immediately. “In 2012, Republicans won 53 percent of the vote but 72 percent of the House seats in [twenty] states where they drew the lines.”60
This is called gerrymandering—or extreme redistricting. It’s wonky, little understood, and underappreciated. But everyone has seen its impact. Think of 2016’s presidential results. In Pennsylvania, Trump won statewide by forty-four thousand votes. In Wisconsin, it was by twenty-three thousand votes. In Michigan, it was by eleven thousand votes. In these states, the presidential result—the statewide vote—was split nearly 50–50. That reveals these states are evenly divided before cracking them into smaller pieces. Yet, in these and other purple states this decade, the GOP has routinely won two-thirds or more of state legislative and House seats. How can that be?
The answer is their political maps. There are some instances of Democrats doing this to Republicans—such as a 2011 Maryland ploy to oust a ten-term, Republican congressman (which both parties have litigated and the Supreme Court may hear in 2018). But these are not part of a national Democratic strategy. What Democrats and their allies have typically done in cycle after cycle is register voters, do polling that shapes political advertising and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, and hope this will coalesce. The Republicans are more aggressive and cynical. They register voters, do analytics, messaging and GOTV, but they don’t stop there. They want more certainty and a proven baseline. Redistricting gives them that edge.
8
CREATING PARTISAN GHETTOS
THIS DECADE’S REPUBLICAN STRATEGY STARTS WITH extreme redistricting: deciding beforehand which electoral races each party’s base will vote in. Redistricting is not the elephant in the living room, that is to say, a large and unacknowledged presence we don’t want to talk about. Redistricting is the living room. It is the field and stage upon which everything else follows.
Redistricting is the biggest verifiable way Republicans have gamed and added points for their side in state and federal elections before candidates are known and voters chime in. That is not all they have done. They keep hyping virtually nonexistent voter impersonation fraud to justify new state-based anti-voter laws such as stricter ID requirements in order to get a ballot at polling places, which nonpartisan analysts such as the US Government Accountability Office found
shaves another 2–3 percentage points off the November turnout.61 Other GOP tactics that reduce turnout include partisan purges of voter lists, limiting early voting, barring same-day registration and voting, and restricting voting by mail.62 But those suppressive tactics come later, long after extreme redistricting sets the stage.
Extreme is the key word here. Republicans have not abided by what the federal courts have long said should be the standard. It is not even close. A half century ago, at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1962, the Supreme Court issued a ruling, Baker v. Carr, which articulated the ideal of one person one vote when drawing political districts.63 In 2004, in one of its last decisions before Republicans seized this process in 2011, the court urged partisans to behave. “The orderly working of our Republic, and the democratic process, depends on a sense of decorum and restraint in all branches of government, and in the citizenry itself,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority in Vieth v. Jubelirer.64 What the GOP did seven years later, however—where the cases and maps coming before federal courts today originated—showed no restraint or decorum. It was the rawest of power plays, where they saw and executed a ruthless strategy to win.
Daley’s book, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, describes what unfolded in excruciating and brilliant detail.65 A small team, starting with a handful of political junkie consultants, envisioned and executed a two-part plan. Much like the way Democrats felt after 2016’s pounding, most Republicans concluded they were headed for political exile after Obama’s 2008 landslide victory and the Democrats’ sweep of Congress. But a respected Republican political consultant who specialized in tracking state-based campaigns, Chris Jankowski, saw a path back into power.
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