How Republicans Rig the Game


Illustration by Victor Juhasz
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As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.



Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that."



In short order, the RSLC raised more than $30 million to fund Rove's vision while its hapless counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, raised barely one-third of that amount. "The Obama people simply didn't understand what was happening to them in 2010," says a prominent Democrat. "They just sat it out, and Republicans ran up the score."

The RSLC was particularly focused on states that stood to gain or lose seats. Ohio, for example, would lose two to states with faster population growth. Instead of tweaking the boundaries of existing districts, mapmakers would be empowered in these states to draw new boundaries more or less from scratch – providing "maximum opportunity for mischief," in the words of RSLC president and former REDMAP executive director Chris Jankowski. "You certainly don't want your opponent drawing those lines." On election night in 2010, propelled by Tea Party anger and the RSLC's millions, the GOP seized full-party control of 21 state governments – up from nine the previous year and enough to put the party in charge of redistricting 173 House seats. "Democrats," bragged Jankowski, "will not soon recover from what happened to them on a state level last night."

In past elections, a gentleman's agreement prevailed among sitting politicians of both parties that redistricting would keep them safe. But in 2010, Gillespie told reporters, the Republican strategy would be "to maximize gains." Incumbent seats would be made somewhat less safe in service of spreading the GOP's advantage more broadly. "You'd go from these [incumbent] seats that would carve at 60 percent to seats that get carved at 54 percent," he said.


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In a letter to state legislators, Jankowski wrote, "We have taken the initiative to retain a team of seasoned redistricting experts that we will make available to you at no cost to your caucus for assistance." The RSLC brought on GOP operative Tom Hofeller, who has been in the Republican redistricting game since the 1970s.

Employing computer software known as Maptitude, Hofeller and his team used sophisticated data-mining techniques to draw new districts that maximally disadvantaged Democrats. Maptitude advertises the ability to merge precinct-level returns from past elections with federal census data to "identify communities of interest," including "racial or ethnic enclaves that tend to have similar interests and vote as a bloc." Explicit racial gerrymandering is illegal under the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. So Hofeller used a proxy for race, redrawing boundaries by identifying the wards where President Obama received the highest returns in 2008. According to court documents, this approach "allowed black voters to be carved apart from their white neighbors and friends, on a block-by-block basis."

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The triumphant GOP made no effort to conceal these machinations. "REDMAP's effect on the 2012 election is plain," reads a post-election RSLC report. "Pennsylvanians cast 83,000 more votes for Democratic U.S. House candidates . . . but elected a 13-5 Republican majority to represent them in Washington; Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress." In Wisconsin, where $1.1 million in RSLC cash helped flip both chambers of the state legislature, empowering union-busting governor Scott Walker, Republicans prevailed by a five-to-three margin in House seats despite losing the popular vote by more than 43,000. In Ohio, only 52 percent of voters cast ballots for Republicans, but thanks to maps drawn in a Columbus-area Doubletree Hotel, referred to by GOP operatives in court documents as "the bunker," John Boehner's home-state delegation swings 12-4 for the GOP.

Republican redistricting has made a mockery of the ideal of "one man, one vote." To take back the House next year, 100 Democratic voters would have to turn out for every 94 Republicans. "Given the GOP-tilted nature of the congressional map," writes David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, "Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by between six and seven points in order to win the barest possible House majority."




The modern filibuster has only been in place since 1917, but McConnell defends the procedure as though it were central to the creation of the republic. "The founders purposefully crafted the Senate to be a deliberate, thoughtful body," McConnell said during a 2010 hearing. "A supermajority requirement," he said, "ensures that wise purpose." In reality, the founders railed against the dangers of supermajority rule. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton warned of the "tedious delays" and "contemptible compromises of the public good" that result when "a minority can control the opinion of the majority."


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"You'd see a massive shift of electoral votes," a senior Republican official who backed the proposal told the National Journal, emphasizing that the change would be much less work than persuading a majority of voters to back the GOP candidate: "There's no kind of . . . outreach," the official said, "that can grab us those electoral votes that quickly." In September, a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to implement the scheme in the biggest swing-state prize in the land, Florida. Had it been in place in each of the states that have introduced the plan – including Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – Mitt Romney would be president, despite receiving 5 million fewer votes than Obama.


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In fact, activist judges at the highest level are abetting the GOP's efforts to disenfranchise millions of Americans of color. Since the 1960s, Southern states with a history of voter suppression have had to submit proposed changes in elections law to a review by the federal government. The 2011 redistricting map drawn by the Republican state legislature in Texas was thrown out by a three-judge federal panel because it had been "enacted with discriminatory purpose." (Texas had gained four House seats because of population growth that was 90 percent minority. In the legislature's map, three of the four new districts were gerrymandered to favor Anglo Republicans.) Federal judges also struck down Texas' voter-ID law, the most restrictive in the nation, for imposing "unforgiving burdens" on "racial minorities . . . disproportionately likely to live in poverty."


Such trickery has come to define the GOP's approach to federal elections where Republicans can no longer prevail in a fair fight. Strict voter-ID laws have now been passed in more than a dozen states, most recently North Carolina. There, a county-­level Republican Party Executive Committee member named Don Yelton recently committed a gaffe of truth-telling, admitting on national television that the driving purpose of the state's voter-ID law is to "kick the Democrats in the butt." If the law disenfranchises college students without photo IDs or "hurts a bunch of lazy blacks," Yelton said, "so be it."

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From The Archives Issue 1196: November 21, 2013