There have been a number of recent stories that the GOP has announced an updated strategy, to be financed to the tune of $125 million, of their successful 2010 effort to literally gerrymander Congress. We have already endured the historically-unique phenomenon of electoral minority-government functioning as a nominally-legal majority for the past 8 years. That is a classic sign of rent-seeking manipulation of the electoral machinery. Politicians, upon winning office, turn around and are allowed to redraw the entire states district maps in a manner that disenfranchises the ability of the opposition party to compete in a fair contest. How? By using computational power (aka Big Data) to precisely identify preferred voters and put them in many small districts—and do it in a matter of weeks and months, at affordable rates, instead of the months and years it used to take before cheap computational power got involved. Each district gets a Congressional representative. Then, corral the opposition into a few large districts, also with its own Congressional representative.
Look closely at the graphic above. An electoral minority gets to seat a majority of a state’s congressional representatives. They call this “just politics”, and have — so far unsuccessfully, but with a straight face — tried to argue that politicians choosing their voters is somehow compatible with free and fair elections.
But anyone should be able recognize this as flat-out cheating. It’s dealing marked cards. It’s a race to the bottom and to hell with what the majority wants, needs, and expects from their public institutions.
The courts have overwhelmingly and repeatedly declared partisan gerrymandering to be unfair, unconstitutional, and detrimental to the spirit of responsible and responsive self-governance.
The GOP response? To begin using the language of ‘impeachment’ of judges deemed ‘biased’ simply because a judge or judges determined their argument to be wanting in light of case law and the Constitution. Rather than accede to the judgement of the 3rd branch of government, they openly seek to politicize the judiciary by requiring state judicial races to be privately-funded in the same manner as political races.
The DNC response?
In 2010 the Red Map Strategy was shrugged off by party leaders as likely inconsequential. The obstruction and subsequent destruction of President Obama’s presidency and legacy are stark proof of the folly of dismissing manipulation of the basic electoral machinery in the age of Big Data.
Thankfully, some leaders of the party recognized that folly, and have since formed the NDRC, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, in an attempt to counter the 2010 gerrymander of Congress, that has brought such dysfunction in government and social unrest through minority federal policies foisted on a majority of Americans.
But, as mentioned above, in recent days the RNC has publicly announced a return to an active strategy to strengthen partisanship over participation, by structurally disenfranchising millions of Americans right to expect their numbers as a collective majority to matter at all in the functioning of both state and federal government.
For the DNC not to make the RNC the bogeyman of free and fair elections—as a major, unifying, campaign issue for 2018—as a legitimate response to the GOP’s public rollout of Red Map 2020 is something akin to a dereliction of duty!
But go on to the DNC website. I dare you. Then, I challenge you to find anything to suggest that not just partisan Democrats and progressives with an agenda, but any American who gives a damn about fairness, good governance, and accountability in governance, should be voting Democrat in 2018.
If it’s there, it’s not easy to find (and please, show me where it is). There’s no sense of crisis. There’s no mention of Trump. There’s no litany of sins the GOP has stooped to in order to ‘win’ elections at all costs. There’s no mention of minority-led government abusing the legitimate expectations of a majority of Americans to have their votes count. Just shiny, happy, multicultural people under blue skies testifying to Democratic initiatives that either don’t exist yet, or are being actively-dismantled by the current regime in Washington.
The DNC is risking the fate of a nation in not making the Republican Party’s bottomless ability to defend the indefensible; to dare insult the intelligence of voters everywhere into believing that playing a game with marked cards is the same as fair play, a key part of the 2018 national strategy to win disaffected Republicans as well as independents and progressives into the party.
In the age of Trump and Big Data, the party needs to be more than just a coalition of interest groups jockeying for the mic. It needs to be a national movement that is fundamentally and openly about free and fair elections, favoring neither party, but serving democracy and the legitimate expectations of a majority of Americans to not be disenfranchised by partisan-minded electoral manipulation. After that’s done, leaders with electoral legitimacy will return to power, those on the fringe who should be handing out flyers in parking lots can go back to doing that, and normal politics can resume. Let the chips fall where they may.
But the DNC ignores the non-partisan resonance of ‘Electoral fairness’ as a central party platform at its peril.
(Apologies for publishing without supplying relevant links, I hope to find the time shortly. Until then, consider this an essay of something I needed to get off my chest.)