Ungerrymandering The States-- One By One

The governor of New Jersey is Phil Murphy, a Democrat. Both Houses of the state legislature are controlled by Democrats, the Senate 26-14 and the Assembly 54-26. There's just one New Jersey congressional district that elected a Republican in 2018. It would be easy as pie for New Jersey Democrats to gerrymander the map to make Chris Smith's 4th CD go from an R+8 district to a much more winnable R+1 or 2 or even an even district that a Democratic candidate could easily win. And that is exactly what they were planning on doing-- until Eric Holder shamed them into not doing it (according to Eric Holder).

This week, Time Magazine published an essay by Phillip Elliott, The Battle Line To Draw The Battle Lines. Today Democrats are doing what Republicans have long done-- investing millions off dollars into winning state legislative seats so that they'll have a hand in redrawing post-census district boundaries that will last for the next decade. The fight gets hot in less than two months when Virginia votes on all their legislative seats. Elliott reports that there are 91 Democratic candidates for the commonwealth’s 100 house races on Nov. 5, and 35 senate hopefuls for the chamber’s 40 spots, which include three senate districts that voted for Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 but are currently represented by Republicans. 'They are running to build the party,' house caucus executive director Trevor Southerland says."

The state Senate has 21 Republicans and 19 Democrats and the House of Delegates has 51 Republicans and 49 Democrats. The governor and Lt. Governor are Democrats. It should be easy to win enough seats to flip both chambers, right? Well, the Republicans are playing the same game-- working to flip Democratic seats and working to protect their own incumbents. Please consider contributing by clicking on the legislative thermometer on the right, especially in the Virginia races.

There are virtually no races in Virginia more important this cycle than the one to reelect Lee Carter in the House of Delegates and the one to replace Trumpist Richard Stuart with Qasim Rashid in the state Senate. This morning, Rashid, a human rights attorney, told us that "Free and fair elections mandate that we have districts that are just and honest. It is a mockery of democracy when districts are drawn to keep politicians in power. We must return voting power to citizens."

Lee Carter is the best member of the House and the Republicans are targeting him while the Democratic establishment ignores his race. This Democratic Socialist is fighting for working families, not for party establishments. "The legislative elections in Virginia in 2019 and the rest of the country in 2020 will determine the direction of the country for the next decade," he told me today. "The stakes are too high for anyone to sit this one out." I agree.

The path toward Republican dominance at the state level began more than three decades ago, when Democrats, in the wake of Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, focused their energy on presidential politics in the 1984 cycle. The current dynamic dates back to 2010, when Karl Rove wrote a Wall Street Journal column laying the groundwork for what came to be called the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP). The RSLC’s REDMAP program recruited and funded state-level candidates aggressively. REDMAP spent $30 million to the DLCC’s $8 million that year. The effort netted GOP total control of 11 legislatures and a trifecta in nine additional states. In turn, the party started drawing congressional districts it liked.

Republicans still start with a leg up in the battle for the states in 2020. The GOP controls 52% of seats in all state legislatures, with majorities in 62% of state legislative chambers and total control of state government in 22 states, to Democrats’ 14. But many of the chambers have narrow GOP edges. Democrats stand to pick up majorities in seven chambers-- including those in Minnesota, Arizona and Virginia-- if they can win 19 specific races.

Meanwhile, the gains Democrats have made in recent years may be difficult to defend. President Donald Trump was a liability for Republicans in 2018, when he wasn’t on the ballot and his approval sat at 40% in Gallup’s final pre-election survey. But Trump could wind up helping GOP candidates in 2020, when the party hopes his massive political machine will boost fortunes of candidates all the way down the ballot.

It’s also possible that existing Democratic-led statehouses overstep their mandates and provoke a backlash. In typically blue Illinois, for example, lawmakers declared abortion a fundamental right, no matter what the Supreme Court may say. When Republicans in the Colorado statehouse objected to the pace of change under Democratic control, they raised procedural hurdles and demanded the measures be read aloud. Democrats responded by having five computers read a 2,023-page bill simultaneously–so quickly the text was unintelligible. The issue went to court, where the Republicans won.

The party that wins control of Richmond in November and other state capitals in 2020 has decisions to make. Republicans may want to cluster African-American voters into one district to make the rest of the area easier to win. Democrats may want to spread those voters out more evenly. In Northern Virginia, both parties may want to minimize the number of seats that have to buy ad time in the expensive D.C. market. Armed with enough data, it’s possible to draw lines that enhance the odds of winning again and again. “We were so pleased as Democrats that we won this Congress,” Post says of the 2018 elections. “But the truth is, it’s just a rental.”

Speaking of which... late yesterday, the New Yorker blew the whistle on a racist GOP gerrymanderer, Thomas Hofeller, who died just over a year ago. Before dying he trained lots of other Republican racists in his secrets. The New Yorker examined 70,000 of his files and years of his e-mails proving, that among other things, the North Carolina district boundaries were specifically drawn to disadvantage African-Americans, which even the current Supreme Court agrees is a no-no.

Hofeller’s files include dozens of intensely detailed studies of North Carolina college students, broken down by race and cross-referenced against the state driver’s-license files to determine whether these students likely possessed the proper I.D. to vote. The studies are dated 2014 and 2015, the years before Hofeller helped Republicans in the state redraw its congressional districts in ways that voting-rights groups said discriminated on the basis of race. North Carolina Republicans said that the maps discriminated based on partisanship but not race. Hofeller’s hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps-- which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle-- might also be a racial gerrymander.

Other files provide new details about Hofeller’s work for Republicans across the country. Hofeller collected data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona, among other states, as far back as 2011. Hofeller was part of a Republican effort to add a citizenship question to the census, which would have allowed political parties to obtain more precise citizenship data ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle. State legislative lines could then have been drawn based on the number of citizen voters, which Hofeller believed would make it easier to pack Democrats and minorities into fewer districts, giving an advantage to Republicans... Additional files document his work in Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia, among other states.

E-mails also connect Hofeller to redistricting efforts in Florida. Top Republican officials in the state have denied that they played any official role in drawing the state’s legislative and congressional districts in 2011. A 2010 state constitutional amendment barred partisan gerrymandering in Florida. E-mails show that Hofeller communicated with and visited top G.O.P. political operatives in Florida in 2011. The operatives helped organize or draw state legislative and congressional maps that matched the districts that were later enacted. The operatives insisted, at a trial, that drawing the maps was only a hobby. A Florida judge found that argument unconvincing, concluding that the G.O.P. conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a “mockery” of the state’s constitutional amendments.

...E-mails also show that Hofeller worried that his redistricting handiwork could be undone by an anti-Trump wave in 2016 that handed state legislatures to Democrats. On September 6, 2016, a Republican lawyer e-mailed Hofeller a story from The Hill about Democratic efforts down-ballot. Hofeller’s reply: “Yes, maybe our redistricting ace card will be ‘trumped’ to use a bridge analogy.”

In an August, 2016, e-mail to a consultant to California Senate Republicans, Hofeller expressed frustration about Trump’s hold over the Party, and confidence that his maps would survive any blue wave. “Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”

E-mails suggest that Hofeller’s commitment to the Republican cause never wavered. The day after receiving a grim prognosis for lung cancer and a kidney tumor, Hofeller wrote a friend that he didn’t plan to slow down. “I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote, on May 21st. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”

Democrats have neglected state legislatures and seen Republicans put themselves into position to redrawn districts and take control of Congress with far fewer votes than Democrats have won. Let me give you some recent examples. In 2012 John Boehner retained the Speaker's gavel even though 59,645,531 voters (48.8%) backed Democratic candidates and just 58,228,253 voters (47.6%) backed Republican candidates, The Republicans wound up with 234 seats and the Democrats with 201. That's how gerrymandering works. And even when Democrats do well, they have to do really well to match the GOP. Like we just saw, the Republicans won 234 seats by taking 47.6% of the vote. In the big anti-red wave of 2018, there were 60,572,245 voters (53.5%) who picked Democrats and just 50,861,970 (44.8%) and yet Democrats only won 235 seats, only one more than the GOP won in 2012. That's got to be fixed. That why we're asking you to help the progressive Virginia candidates here.