Democratic Efforts In Texas Won't Make Up For The GOP's Plans For A Sweeping Effort To Steal The Electoral College

Were you giggling Wednesday when he said "If I was president...?" It's not a laughing matter

One of Blue America's biggest victories in the 2012 cycle was seeing Beto O'Rourke oust corrupt, conservative Democratic barnacle Silvestre Reyes in the Democratic primary in Texas and then go on to win a landslide (65.5%) victory in November to become a new congressman from El Paso. There are 5 Democratic freshmen from Texas this year. Besides Beto's big win, Charlie Gonzalez retired and was replaced by New Dem Joaquin Castro, another landslide (64%); Blue Dog Pete Gallego edged Republican incumbent Quico Conseco 50.3-45.5%; and two newly created seats also yielded Democratic landslides, one for Marc Veasey (72.5%) and one for New Dem Filemon Vela (62.2%). You probably read about the Democratic Party's new plans to turn Texas blue-- or at least purple. Texas is now a minority majority state, only 45% of the people there being non-Hispanic whites.

But the Democratic infrastructure in Texas has decayed over two decades of GOP ascendancy. Congressional and legislative redistricting has undercut the party’s efforts to rebuild there. Republicans control every statewide office, and Obama lost to Mitt Romney in the state by 16 points in November. No exit poll was taken in Texas last November, but Latinos have typically made up a smaller share of the electorate than the overall population.

Still, Democrats buoyed by the breadth of their 2012 victories are looking to Texas as a political holy grail: a prize so spectacular that it might just be worth a big, sustained investment of money and energy. If state and national party leaders committed the time and almost presidential-level resources required, the thinking goes, the most important cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral map could become competitive.

...Democratic Houston Mayor Annise Parker said her party couldn’t afford to wait passively for population change to turn Texas blue. Instead, they should dig in for a longer, harder campaign to make it a swing state.

“We have been waiting in Texas for a very long time for the Latino vote to come into its own and turn the tide. But many of us have decided that we can’t wait for that. We have to do the old-fashioned work of going out and talking to Texans,” said Parker, who didn’t rule out a statewide campaign “when I am done [being] mayor.”

“Do I think we’re going to turn Texas in two years? Probably not. Do I think we can turn Texas in four years? Absolutely, because I think the Republican Party in Texas is going to drive itself off a cliff,” Parker said. “You hear Republicans with rhetoric, literally talking about the jack-booted thugs coming and taking guns out of people’s homes, going door to door. You have legislators who will file, once again, virulently anti-immigrant legislation in the state House.”

Any new national group aimed at building up Texas Democrats would join a small but significant array of in-state organizations developing progressive infrastructure. In addition to the Lone Star Project and the germinal Battleground Texas effort, strategists pointed to the group Be One Texas as a significant player in their comeback effort.

...Republicans have consistently scoffed at Democratic attempts to woo the Texas electorate-- and with some cause. As strategists in both parties see it, national Democrats periodically find themselves gripped with excitement about competing there, only to find that the state is too big, too expensive and too culturally conservative for them to pull it off.

The party fielded a strong candidate for governor in 2010, former Houston Mayor Bill White, only to see him lose by 13 points to incumbent Gov. Rick Perry. Two years later, Democrats recruited retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez into the open-seat Senate race, presenting him as a candidate who could appeal to conservative voters and energize Latinos. Sanchez withdrew several months later after raising a paltry sum for the race.

From the deeply skeptical Republican perspective, Democratic hopes for flipping Texas-- even over the medium to long term-- recall the GOP’s short-lived aspirations to compete in California at the height of George W. Bush’s popularity.

Republican strategist Dave Carney, who has worked extensively in Texas and steered Perry’s 2010 reelection, dismissed mocked Democratic claims that a brand-new voter mobilization project would help transform the state. He called it a matter of “consultants coming up with a project to get paid.”

But the Republican Party isn't sitting around and waiting for the Democrats to fail in Texas. They're making their own moves for an electoral game-changer in several blue and purple states-- particularly Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, Michigan, Florida... gerrymandering the electoral college, the way they've gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts.

The electoral college was conceived by conservatives to put a check on the efforts of populists to use democracy to remake the country and infuse it with a spirit of equality. The electoral college was conceived as a way to thwart the will of the popular vote; period. It has no other function. And the GOP is looking to build on that anti-democracy spirit now.

The idea is to get state legislatures to change the way they allocate electoral votes. Instead of a winner-take-all scheme, which most states use, they want to institute a system where votes could be split between candidates. Now, on face, that might not seem so bad. It would mean that very Republican areas in very Democratic states-- think Orange County, California-- and very Democratic areas in Republican states-- think Austin, Texas-- wouldn't be essentially throwing their presidential votes away.

Certainly, there are longstanding critiques of the Electoral College. Recently they've mostly come from the left. The 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote, was a galvanizing moment. And there are plans to try to rectify the oddness of the Electoral College. For example, the National Popular Vote plan is a push to get states to sign on to a scheme in which they'd award all their electors to the winner of the most votes nationwide. The plan would only take effect once states representing at least half of the electoral votes have joined, guaranteeing its effectiveness.

So this GOP plan is a smart move, driven by politics but with a result that would better reflect the will of the majority, right? Not quite. Here's the twist: The proposal would award electoral votes based on who wins Congressional districts. (That's already how Maine and Nebraska work, but the two states only account for nine of the 538 total electoral votes.)

From a Republican perspective, this is genius, but it's evil genius. It would allow the party to gain electoral votes in swing states and near swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan that went for Obama in the last two elections but have large Republican constituencies. But you may also recall that the GOP maintained its majority in the House in November but actually won fewer votes than Democrats did in congressional elections overall. This is because the GOP has been extremely effective at gerrymandering House districts. One reason the 2010 election mattered so much is that the Tea Party wave handed control of redistricting after the 2010 Census to Republican-led legislatures in many states. And they didn't waste the opportunity. Now the lines won't be redrawn again until after the next census, in 2020. For more on this, read Robert Draper's story from the October issue of The Atlantic.

At the Washington Post, Aaron Blake shows how destabilizing these vote-allocation proposals could be to the status quo.

In fact, if every state awarded its electoral votes by congressional district, it's likely that Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 presidential election despite losing the popular vote by nearly four percentage points. (According to Fix projections and data from Daily Kos Elections, Romney won at least 227 congressional districts and 24 states, giving him 275 electoral votes-- more than the 270 he needed.)

In addition, if just the five states mentioned above changed their systems, Obama's 126-electoral-vote win would have shrunk to a 34-vote win-- close enough where a different result in Florida (which Obama won by less than one point) would have tipped the 2012 race in Romney's favor.

...[T]he plan would disenfranchise voters. Which ones? Mostly the minority ones in cities who helped Obama win this year. Most urban districts are going to vote Democratic, and most rural ones will go Republican. But if votes are quarantined in a single Congressional district, it doesn't matter if the turnout in a city is 50 percent, 70 percent, or 100 percent; there's only one electoral vote on the table, plus the two at-large electoral votes. This takes almost all the venom out of the formidable Democratic get-out-the-vote operation.

There's a certain nihilism here. One of the major storylines of the 2012 election was voter-ID laws and voting hours. While ostensibly formulated to stop voter fraud, there wasn't much voter fraud to stop, and the changed hours tended to affect mostly poorer and urban (and therefore Democratic) voters. In some cases, Republican officials put the changes in starkly honest ways. A Pennsylvania legislator said a voter-ID law would help Mitt Romney win the state (he was wrong), while an Ohio official said voting hours shouldn't be shaped to accommodate the "urban-- read African-American-- voter-turnout machine." For a variety of reasons, however, these pushes didn't work: courts struck down some laws, and voters were willing to wait in long lines to cast their ballots.

But hey, if disenfranchisement didn't work once, just try it again, right? It's not like the GOP's standing with minority and urban voters can get much worse.

How Does Congressional Gerrymandering Manifest Itself? Take Pennsylvania For Example

Pennsylvania has 18 congressional districts and the Republican-controlled legislature carved them up in such a way as to create 5 Democratic seats and 13 Republican seats, despite Pennsylvania having more Democratic voters than Republican voters. Obama took 2,990,274 votes in November (52%) and Romney took 2,680,434 (47%). Obama only won a dozen of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, but he won the big ones with the most population:

• Philadelphia- 1,526,006
• Allegheny- 1,223,348
• Montgomery- 799,874
• Bucks- 625,249
• Delaware- 558,979
• Lehigh- 349,497
• Luzerne- 320,918
• Nothampton- 297,735
• Erie- 280,566
• Dauphin- 268,100
• Lackawanna- 214,437
• Monroe- 169,842

Romney did manage to win Chester County (pop- 498,886), but it was a virtual tie 123,280-122,232. Many of the counties Romney won were the tiny, underpopulated ones like Cameron County (5,085), Sullivan County (6,428), Forest County (7,716), and Potter County (17,457).

Statewide, Bob Casey was reelected with 53% of the votes cast, while Republican multimillionaire Tom Smith took 45%. Casey won all the counties Obama did and added 5 more including Chester. But, of course, the place to look for tampering with the intentions of democracy are in the gerrymandered redrawn districts. As you can see in the Maddow video above around 83,000 more Pennsylvanians voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republican candidates and yet... the GOP won 13 House seats and the Democrats only won 5. (It was much worse in Michigan, where almost a quarter million more votes were cast for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans but where the GOP wound up with 9 seats and the Democrats wound up with only 5.) How did that happen? Glad you asked. Let's stick with Pennsylvania as our model.

The gerrymanderers drew the districts to pack as many Democratic voters-- particularly African-Americans and union households-- into just a few districts. The 5 Democratic winners are won by big margins, not because they are more popular than Republicans but because their districts were drawn to concentrate likely Democrats into them and keep them out of districts Republicans targeted as red. (For the sake of this discussion, I'm leaving out the incompetence and ideologically catastrophic choices made by DCCC chairman Steve Israel, who certainly exacerbated Democrats' problems everywhere in America and helped Republicans win seats they might have otherwise lost like Mike Kelly's, Charlie Dent's and especially Joe Pitts' in Pennsylvania.)

Here are the percentage wins in each district, from strongest to weakest:

• Chaka Fattah (D) 89%
• Robert Brady (D) 85%
• Mike Doyle (D) 77%
• Allyson Schwartz (D) 69%
• Tom Marino (R) 66%
• Tim Murphy (R) 64%
• Glenn Thompson (R) 63%
• Bill Shuster (R) 62%
• Matt Cartwright (D) 61% (non-incumbent)
• Scott Perry (R) 60% (non-incumbent)
• Patrick Meehan (R) 59%
• Lou Barletta (R) 58%
• Jim Gerlach (R) 57%
• Charlie Dent (R) 57%
• Michael Fitzpatrick (R) 57%
• Joe Pitts (R) 55%
• Mike Kelly (R) 55%
• Keith Rothfus (R) 52% (non-incumbent)

The pattern is clear: Democratic voters packed into a few districts while likely GOP voters are spread out just enough to make sure the Republican candidates win by comfortable, though not overwhelming, margins. This is exactly what Republican legislatures gave Republican governors in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio (and what Democrats certainly did in Illinois and Maryland). It's outrageous and it should be illegal. The idea of the Republicans attempting to rig presidential elections by using their gerrymandered districts to assign electoral votes is equally absurd. A real reform, in fact, would be to just do away with the electoral college system altogether, something most Americans agree with. Gallup yesterday:

Americans are nearly as open to major electoral reform when it comes to doing away with the Electoral College. Sixty-three percent would abolish this unique, but sometimes controversial, mechanism for electing presidents that was devised by the framers of the Constitution. While constitutional and statutory revisions have been made to the Electoral College since the nation's founding, numerous efforts to abolish it over the last 200+ years have met with little success.

There is even less partisan variation in support for this proposal than there is for term limits, with between 61% and 66% of all major party groups saying they would vote to do away with the Electoral College if they could. Similarly, between 60% and 69% of all major age groups take this position.

But the GOP doesn't want to abolish it; they want to pervert it so they can use it to steal presidential elections the same way they steal legislative and congressional elections. Imagine if we had a competent Democratic Party-- or one that was united behind the idea of standing up for working families!

By the way, there's an awful reality show I stumbled across on he Discovery Channel, The Amish Mafia. Really wretched but it certainly helps explain why Republicans do so well in Lancaster and York counties.

HOW REPUBLICANS WIN ELECTIONS

Republicans are obsessed that unionized workers or colored people or college students are going to vote twice. Or worse yet, that twenty million Mexicans are going to sneak over the border and vote on the first Tuesday in November... any November. They are hysterical about it. And the same folks who have convinced them that Christmas and Easter and their guns are under siege have brainwashed them into thinking the damn libruls are stealing the elections. In their minds that makes it ok to... steal the elections.

Allen Raymond has a book out, How to Rig An Election, Confessions of a Republican Operative, and he ought to know. He spent some time in prison for doing just that. Author Raymond was one of several Republicans who took the fall for the GOP theft of the 2002 New Hampshire senate election-- which threw Bush control of the Senate-- and gave right-winger John Sununu an undeserved victory. Today AlterNet published an interview with Raymond-- who was angry because Mehlman and the RNC asked his firm to jam Democratic phone lines, but would not defend him in court after Democrats fought back and pressed court charges. Raymond went to jail. Mehlman, Rove and Sununu still haven't.

ALTERNET: The title of your book is How to Rig an Election. Can elections be rigged?

RAYMOND:: Sure. We're not talking about what people often think about, like ballot box stuffing. Certainly, that stuff goes on here and there. What we are really talking about in the book is how messages are created and delivered to the voting public, in a way that orchestrates and manipulates response. It's all about feeling an emotion; it's not about raw issues and logic.

In the book I give a lot of examples of rigging elections by, put it this way, guys like me-- I used to be a campaign manager. Once you are all said and done and deliver a message, two plus two equals whatever I want it to equal. The facts and sometimes even contorting the facts to lead voters to conclusions that may not necessarily, if you step back, make any sense-- but, in context, make all the sense in the world.

There's that aspect of it. Then there's just the more raw aspect of it, which leads up to the culmination of the book, which is the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

Raymond thinks Republicans are about to pick McCain because it's "his turn. That's in the Republican DNA. You pick the guy whose turn it is. I think that's more of the dynamic going on." Alternet asked him what tactics he expects to see in the primary and the general out of the GOP. "In both, you see tactics that seek to tap into latent bigotry and racism. That's just part of the equation. And it's a horrible thing to say. But it's better to be candid and transparent to understand what is going on than ignore the elephant in the room. For instance, let's go back to 2000 and the South Carolina attack on Sen. McCain and his daughter, which was totally abhorrent, but that was meant to tap into a racist thread or strain in a segment in that electorate. It's going on again in South Carolina, this time targeted at Gov. Romney and his faith and tying that to polygamy. So that's bigotry."

Back to the GOP strategy of election theft, Alternet, of course, wanted to know how high up the chain of command it went. "Is everything tied to Karl Rove?" they asked.

RAYMOND: There is a difference between the line responsibility and the overall responsibility. So, a Karl Rove is going to be responsible for the overall strategic and tactical thinking. But when you get down in the trenches, there's line responsibility. And so most decisions don't go any higher than, say, the political director at the Republican National Committee.

But in my case, having worked there in those jobs, I knew two things, which was-- the first being, and I say that in the book, this (phone-jamming) was an unusual request. It prompted me to seek out an attorney. But what that tells me is such things don't see the light of day unless they have been vetted, particularly by someone who has worked at the RNC for as long as my co-conspirator had.

The GOP primary in South Carolina is a perfect way to observe American politics at it's very worst-- the way it was shaped by scumbags and soul-dead criminals like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

In the last week before its Jan. 19 primary, the Palmetto State is awash in stealth e-mail attacks, fake polling calls and other dirty tricks reminiscent of the scurrilous rumors that scuttled John McCain's candidacy in 2000.

The dubious tradition stretches back to native son Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who invented many of the modern techniques of negative campaigning, including the 1988 ad that linked Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis to the parole of murderer Willie Horton and contributed to the victory of President George H.W. Bush that year.

"Many understudies of Lee Atwater are still in this state, in the political-consulting business,'' said Blease Graham, a scholar of Southern politics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Among Republicans, the shenanigans this year include automated telephone pseudo-surveys trashing former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson's stance on abortion, mailings claiming Arizona Senator McCain turned his back on fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam and a phony Christmas card from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney extolling polygamy.

...Some practitioners of the dark political arts defend these tactics. In 2004, Warren Tompkins, a veteran South Carolina political strategist who worked the Bush campaign in 2000, was asked why operatives spread false rumors about McCain in that race. ``It worked, didn't it?'' said Tompkins, who now works for Romney.

From the It's-All-in-the-Fine-Print Dept.: In D.C. hate crimes are out of the DoD funding bill; in California the GOP electoral-vote grab goes on hold

It's official. The hate-crimes legislation that was to be attached to the Defense Department spending bill, has been stripped out in House-Senate conference.

The reasoning is a little curvy, so make sure your seat belt is securely fastened. For once it appears that the problem is not the do-nothing Senate, but the House--even though the hate-crimes provision actually passed the House in this session as a stand-alone bill. In an official statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explains:

I am strongly committed to sending the hate crimes legislation,
passed by the House earlier this year, to the President for his
signature. Democrats have worked exhaustively with advocacy groups
and polled Members repeatedly, but it is clear that attaching the
language to the DoD authorization bill would not create a successful
outcome in the House.

House Democratic leaders will work with our Senate colleagues to make
certain that a hate crimes bill passes the Senate and goes to the
President's desk.

From the Senate Democratic side the following statement was issued jointly by Sen. Edward Kennedy, author of the hate-crimes legislation passed in the Senate, and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee:

We are deeply disappointed that the House has decided not even to have a vote on the Conference Report on the Defense bill if it contains the hate crimes provision. With this decision, we've lost the best opportunity to enact hate crimes legislation in this Congress. This provision was adopted by the Senate with a vote of 60-39 during debate on the bill.

The inclusion of the hate crimes provision in the Defense bill was appropriate. Our military stands for America's ideals and fights for America's ideals. At a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to similar violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will strengthen our laws against hate crimes.

The hate crimes bill would have advanced those values and goals, and we're committed to getting it enacted. It's long past time for this measure to become law.

MEANWHILE IN CALIFORNIA, THE ON-AGAIN, OFF-AGAIN
ELECTORAL-VOTE-STEALING SCHEME IS OFF AGAIN . . .

But only for the June primary-election ballot.

As Julia Rosen is reporting on Calitics, the group that revived the previously defunct initiative to change the way California allots electoral votes in presidential elections, from winner-takes-all to a proportional system, has acknowledged that it has run out of time to submit the necessary signatures in time for vetting procedures that would qualify the initiative for the June ballot.

However, the 500,000 signatures already gathered can still be submitted in time to be considered for inclusion on the November general-election ballot. It's estimated that 700,000 signatures are needed to survive the vetting process and leave the necessary 500,000 valid signatures standing.

Opponents of the plan--which is clearly designed to undermine Democratic prospects by stripping away a near-certain bloc of electoral votes (with no prospect of offsetting gains in states where Republicans would continue to benefit from the standard winner-take-all electoral-vote arrangement)--argue the political pros and cons both ways.

Clearly the initiative will be easier to defeat in November, when voter turnout is expected to be massive, than in June, when turnout is likely to be light. On the other hand, the loss of the initiative in June, when its relatively high visibility might have driven turnout up, could be bad news in the fight against some nasty lower-profile initiatives that will be on the ballot.

You win some, you lose some, and sometimes it's a draw.

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