Jankowski knew the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections, the non-presidential years. Moreover, as you go down the ballot to statehouse races, he knew most people voted on party lines because they do not know the candidates. The GOP team he led, known as REDMAP, for REDistricting MAjority Project, looked at the country. It concluded that if Republican candidates won slightly more than one hundred state legislative races in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and a few governors’ races in 2010, that nothing could stop them from a virtually unassailable national comeback.
First, they had to win enough state races to get majorities in the legislative chambers that would redraw maps after the 2010 census. They identified 107 local races in sixteen states that accounted for 190 US House seats and jumped in. REDMAP launched some of the most vicious attacks seen in years in these states. These were radio and TV ads, or mailers landing ten days before 2010’s Election Day, when it was too late to respond with media buys. Democratic incumbent women were compared to prostitutes. Longtime incumbents who governed by making compromises were called the worst sellouts. Republicans won twenty-one state legislative chambers in 2010, enough to take over the redistricting process.
Republicans kept their eye on the prize. What does this process look like? Imagine sitting with consultants in front of a bank of computers in a law office—so all conversations are confidential under attorney-client privileges—or in hotel suites near the Capitol building. You stare at something akin to a Google map you can zoom in and out of. The goal is creating districts with roughly the same number of people when the seats are not statewide, countywide, or citywide. In the same way you drag a mouse to change a driving route following different highways, mapmakers could examine neighborhoods down to every block. Their software had voting histories of residents and other demographic data. Jankowski’s team tracked the GOP voters who backed their presidential nominee John McCain in 2008—a year they lost badly—and who voted in state elections. They identified their most reliable voters. In some southern states, they tracked voters by race, assuming most non-whites were Democrats.66
Based on that threshold of each party’s reliable base, they massaged, moved, or radically reset boundaries for state legislative and House races so turnout by Republicans would almost always defeat Democrats. They packed Democrats into blue epicenters, usually cities. That let the GOP to posture their maps as supporting minority candidates. (The Voting Rights Act of 1965 says that is the only allowable use of race—to create districts where minorities can elect representatives.) Republicans knew what they were doing. They would never win certain seats, but they intentionally concentrated more Democrats so the nearby districts would be more firmly red. In some states, black Democrats even cut deals with the GOP mapmakers to get winning House seats. Their state parties had spurned them.
The first hint of what was to come for the most of this decade was seen immediately after the 2012 election. Obama was reelected with a nationwide 5 million popular vote majority. That showed that Democrats could win majorities when there are no boundaries inside states. But when it came to the US House, even though Democrats cast 1.4 million more votes nationally, the GOP ended up with thirty-three more seats. Democrats who won House seats often had higher overall percentages than Republican victors, but the GOP took more seats. REDMAP successfully resegregated voters: by race, party, or both. They erased competitive districts. Most of these elections were over before they began.
As is always the case in politics, there are publicly given explanations to deflect the truth. One academic study in 2013 downplayed the impact of redistricting, saying Democrats got clobbered because they lived in cities—pushing the geography, not partisan intervention, explanation. But later studies by other experts, such as Princeton University mathematics professor Samuel Wang, found Democrats lost twenty-two seats in 2012 due to gerrymandering.67
Looking at each election this decade, a pattern has emerged and held firm. Republicans keep winning an outsized share of state legislative and US House seats despite the closeness of statewide contests. This continued in 2016. Republicans emerged with forty-seven more US House seats than Democrats. That’s nearly 11 percent more, when, nationwide, 1.1 percent more GOP votes were cast in House elections. In states targeted by REDMAP—where Trump and Clinton ran neck and neck—the results are stunning. Pennsylvania’s US House delegation is 13–5 red to blue. Ohio’s is 12–4. Michigan’s is 9–5. Virginia’s is 7–4. North Carolina’s is 10–3. Florida’s is 16–11. A May 2017 report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School concluded, “extreme partisan bias in congressional maps account for at least 16–17 Republican seats in the current Congress—a significant portion of the 24 seats Democrats would need to gain control of the House.”68
As bad as the congressional picture is, it’s worse in the state legislatures. Since World War II, the president’s party has typically lost 450 legislative seats as voter sentiment swings in the opposite direction during his term.69 Under Obama, Democrats have lost nearly one thousand seats. Daley writes the post-2010 redistricting is “the story of how Republicans turned a looming demographic disaster [its aging shrinking white base] into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 Census.” His book came out before the 2016 election.
“State legislative numbers have not budged over the course of this decade,” he said in 2017. “The Ohio House is 66–33 Republican. Pennsylvania is 121–82 Republican. Michigan is 63–47. But what’s really interesting to note is that it hasn’t budged in those states in 2012, 2014, 2016. It’s pretty much [at] the exact same place. They have taken all of the swing districts out of these states and Democrats have not been able to make even the slightest incremental gains in the most important states over this decade—to which I’d add North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Florida.”
How big a built-in lead do Republicans have? “It takes 55 to 56 percent of the popular vote [of reliable Democrats voting] to have a 50–50 chance” of winning, he said, adding that was an average and in some states it was higher. Other analysts like FiveThirtyEight.com’s Harry Enten said the GOP starting line advantage is closer to 8 percent.70 “The mapmakers know the voters who turn out,” Daley said. “These districts are drawn by people with all that information preloaded into their software. They draw lines knowing who turns out and knowing what kind of elections they turn out for.”
Other attempts to measure the impact of redistricting agree with these figures. A major development since Daley’s book is that federal courts have been looking at a wave of new redistricting lawsuits for the first time in years.71 With the exception of a GOP suit over a US House seat in Maryland, all of the cases have been filed against Republicans and date back to 2011 and REDMAP’s handiwork. In a Wisconsin lawsuit that will be heard by the Supreme Court in its fall 2017 term, voting rights advocates are using a relatively new measure called wasted votes, which is expressed as a percentage of voter turnout.72
It was developed by Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law professor leading the team that challenged Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander as illegally partisan. It looks at the percentage of one party’s votes that aren’t needed to win—that are wasted—when voters are packed into districts (or conversely diluted from winning majorities). That gap in Wisconsin was 13.3 percent in 2012 and 9.6 percent in 2014. Stanford University political scientist Simon Jackson issued a 2015 report based on the 2012 and 2014 cycles that found similar gaps of more than 10 percent in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Only two of these states are blue—New York and Rhode Island.73
By mid-2017, federal court rulings over 2011’s redistricting seemed to be articulating new rules for when gerrymandering was and wasn’t unconstitutional.74 There are two kinds of redistricting cases. The first involves partisan gree
d: grabbing as many seats as possible via jigsaw puzzle–like districts. That’s where the GOP lost in federal court in Wisconsin, the first ruling in a decade to throw out maps for partisan excess. The GOP’s appeal of that ruling was accepted by Supreme Court, which has never thrown out political maps citing excessive partisanship.75
The second category of redistricting cases involves the illegal use of race when creating districts. Republicans lost on that issue in lower federal court in Texas. In Virginia and Alabama, the Supreme Court told lower courts to go back and use different standards to examine how the GOP targeted voters by race.76 In May 2017, the Court—voting 5–3 without its newest member, conservative Neil Gorsuch, ruled that North Carolina had illegally used race to create two House districts. They added tens of thousands of black voters to seats where black congressmen were winning—a tactic to bleach surrounding districts and make them more solidly Republican.77
Before North Carolina’s ruling, the Court was hesitant to separate illegal racial factors from legal partisan actions. The majority rejected the Republican’s rhetoric that they were merely looking for McCain voters and were trying to comply with the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to help create black seats.78 The majority concluded that North Carolina’s GOP subverted the VRA because it first sorted voters by race, not party, and packed thousands into House districts where blacks were already winning. Dissenting justices said North Carolina’s GOP didn’t use race that way, accused the majority of looking for a “smoking gun,” and declared they had no problem with partisan redistricting “while some might find it distasteful.”79
Remarkably, the majority’s opinion also quantified the advantage that extreme redistricting brought North Carolina’s Republicans. It noted the GOP has consistently won House races with 56 percent of the vote this decade. In contrast, North Carolina’s three Democratic House members were reelected in 2016 with 67 to 69 percent of the vote. This disparity comes from “cracking” and “packing” voters, the slang used by political consultants. In June 2017, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that found North Carolina’s GOP also had racially gerrymandered twenty-eight state legislative districts. What happens next in the state, as well as in other states where federal courts have ruled against Republicans, is an open question. That is because GOP-run legislatures that have redrawn maps have been accused by Democrats of doing too little to restore balances. That’s been the case in Georgia,80 Alabama,81 and Texas.82
The REDMAP plan didn’t just seal a House majority for this decade. It also locked up state legislatures. This structural advantage has fueled ensuing red state rollbacks against voting rights, collective bargaining and union dues, women’s reproductive rights, and LGBT rights. It’s what has enabled red states’ lawsuits against Obamacare, affirmative action in higher education, and challenges to Obama’s climate change–related actions. Democrats in 2017 are saying they will never allow a REDMAP-like project to recur. They say the courts are siding with them and ordering red-run states to revise state and congressional districts before 2018. They are focusing on key legislative and gubernatorial races in 2017 and 2018. They say they will have a place at 2021’s redistricting and mapmaking tables—with Democratic governors to veto bad maps. We will see.83
Beyond the audaciousness and longtime thinking that Republicans saw and imposed on a nation with more Democratic voters, REDMAP underscores how the GOP view elections. They see a system and rules that can be bent to serve their party before all other concerns. April 2017’s vote by the Senate’s GOP majority to revoke the filibuster rule for Supreme Court confirmations is another example of this pattern. Until then, sixty votes—a bipartisan coalition—were needed to end debate and move to a Senate vote. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did everything to game the rules to get a right-wing court majority. The GOP blocked Obama’s nominee and changed the filibuster rule to seat Gorsuch. They put their party before country, played dirty, and won.
Democrats typically take more fair-minded approaches, such as expanding the electorate. They are generally more naive and less cynical, less ruthless. They express those values with voter registration drives in underrepresented communities, by filing lawsuits to uphold voting rights, and by trying to prompt new voters to turn out—especially the young and nonwhites. That’s wide-eyed compared to the surgical thinking executed by Jankowski and REDMAP. Targeting reliable proven voters is more concrete. Republicans do not solely rely on enlarging their base and getting out that vote.
It’s taken me a while to see this. I first heard the left’s registration boasts in Ohio in 2004, when EMILY’s List, the PAC for women candidates, said they helped register hundreds of thousands of voters. They did not know or appreciate that Ohio’s hyper-partisan secretary of state, Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, had overseen purges of large numbers of voters in the bluest cities. (From 2011–2016 under his GOP successor, Ohio has purged 2 million voters, more than any other state.84) That tactic was one of many that Blackwell used to undermine Democrats. EMILY’s List had perfectly good intentions. But they did not realize how far behind they were to start. They were optimistic they could get new voters to cast ballots. The Republican calculus was more precise and cutthroat. Jankowski’s tactics were an expression of his party’s do-everything-to-win philosophy.
No other voter suppression tactic scales with the impact of extreme redistricting. The GOP wants their voters to turn out and they work at it. They don’t mind if Democrats turn out as long as that’s in districts Democrats were going to win anyway—and the GOP controls the levers of state power and the US House. What’s revealing about the 2011 gerrymander is it’s the one strategy they are least likely to brag about—notwithstanding Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in March 2010. Compared to their rants about voter fraud and Democrats cheating, it is all but invisible. That affirms how significant it is.
In politics, insiders who know what’s going on have an unspoken code of silence. The rarest commodity in politics is trust. It’s only recently—mostly since Daley’s book in mid-2016—that REDMAP’s architects are telling their story. Other GOP mapmakers have kept mum. Some have been sued in states like Florida, where they recruited people to submit maps to supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commissions. A quarter of the states have these panels. These consultants are playing dumb in court by discounting the power and impact of gerrymandering. (They may not have to do that after the Supreme Court’s North Carolina ruling, where its conservatives said there was nothing illegal about partisan power grabs—the issue in the Wisconsin case.85)
While extreme redistricting is emerging from the shadows as 2018 and 2020 loom, we need to turn to other antidemocratic features the GOP has placed atop this foundation. But it is critical to hold onto the view that the playing field is not level at its starting line. It is not even close. The goddess of liberty is not holding one scale in each hand, awaiting voters to weigh in equally. Aided by no serious opposition from Democrats in 2010, Republicans segregated voters to regain power. They built a 6 to 8 percent starting-line head start for scores of state and federal contests. However, even that advantage wasn’t enough.
“The pattern is really, really clear. The first thing gerrymandered legislatures do in most of these states is try and limit voting rights. The second thing they do is go after labor rights. The third thing is women’s rights,” Daley said. “There is a deep connection. It makes it much easier to win closer statewide races when you can limit the Democratic turnout and minority turnout with new voter ID laws, by making it harder to register, by conducting purges of voting rolls, by eliminating early voting days, all that.”
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LOOKING FORWARD, NOT BACKWARD
SOME OF THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TRENDS in elections arrive with little fanfare. That was the case with the GOP’s extreme 2011 gerrymander. The same is true with their next serious attack: suppressing major Democratic voting blocs. Unlike the twentieth-century’s civil rights movement where the most visible bad guys were local p
olice using clubs and fire hoses, this century’s bad guys are a Brooks Brothers Riot of briefcase-carrying lawyers armed with shrill testimony and partisan propaganda. But they seek the same result: to keep the electorate from growing and diversifying by complicating the process and restricting who gets to vote.
A dozen years ago, I witnessed a moment marking the arrival of Republican’s fabricated crusade against what they call voter fraud. I remember thinking this cannot be serious. It was after 2004’s presidential election in Ohio, where Republicans vehemently went after Democratic voters. A little-known lawyer showed up at a poorly attended congressional field hearing to offer the GOP’s counter-narrative: cheating Democrats were the problem that needed fixing. Partisan accusations have been around forever. But his tirade had no basis. Hordes of imposters inundating the polls? Voting for Democrats but not getting caught? And all of this in red-run states such as Ohio?
This scenario was right out of nineteenth-century America. Then, urban machines and rural bosses paid so-called “repeaters” to do just this, as the University of Kentucky’s Tracy Campbell describes in his 2005 book, Deliver The Vote: A History of Election Fraud as an American Political Tradition—1742–2004.86 A century ago, little was akin to today’s statewide registration rolls, polling place voter lists, and check-in protocols. If you sign in to get a ballot with a fake name today, you are signing a perjury confession. That’s a serious crime, ticket to a large fine, and possibly jail.
This is not to say that individuals do not make mistakes or try to game the system. Every election sees a handful of ex-felons who have not regained their voting rights trying to cast a ballot. There are a handful of people who think they can vote in more than one state as long as they own property there. There also are a few people who try to impersonate another voter—the textbook GOP definition of voter fraud. They typically are a candidate’s relative or a local official seeking reelection.87 Those are real-world examples. But these incidents literally are once-in-a-million voter occurrences, infinitesimal exceptions in a nation where multimillions routinely vote. They are so rare, so inconsequential, compared to real margins swinging elections, that something else is going on. And indeed there is.
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