David Daley’s book “Ratf**cked, Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” provides a cautionary tale for Democrats who may be underestimating the difficulty of retaking the House.
The story begins with Republican strategist Chris Janowski who came up with the plan REDMAP, Redistricting Majority Project, to target state legislatures in time for the 2010 elections. For the bargain price of $30 million, Republicans would control enough of the states to proceed with gerrymandering redistricting, thereby locking in Republican rule of Congress for the next decade and saving a lot of money on future elections.
The plan worked amazingly well, as can be seen by the table below:
In addition, Republicans won 700 seats nationwide in 2010; but the real payback came in 2012. Although Obama beat Romney 332-206 in electoral college votes with 3.5 milliion more popular votes, the Republcans emerged with a 33 seat advantage in the House, despite losing the overall popular vote by 1.4 million.
Republicans depended upon a software program called Mapitude to create partisan districts in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere. Data is available down to the block level and is based on past voting records, census data, household income, ethnicity, and online information gathered from online surfing, purchases, etc. — and not just from Facebook.
In Ohio, district maps were drawn behind closed doors in what became known as the “Bunker”, a hotel room where GOP operatives redrew two districts at the last minute to add areas where deep-pocketed business interests were located. These changes were made without any review by the Ohio legislators who had introduced the bill outlining the new map. Emails uncovered by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting detail the efforts to keep these proceedings secret. The redistricting plan worked well in 2012 when Democrats won more votes than Republicans in state house races, yet Republicans captured a supermajority of 60-39. In US House races, Republicans won 52% of the vote, but captured 75% of the seats (12 of 16).
Although things are looking better for a Blue Wave, a huge turnout is needed — enough to overcome Republican redistricting gerrymandering and voter suppression. A look at just one poll, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball projection (as of 4-11-18) shows Republicans with 164 safe seats plus 48 more likely or leaning Republican. 25 seats are rated as “toss-up”, which means that if the Republicans can hold the safe and likely/leaning seats, they would need only 6 of the toss-ups to maintain control of the House.
The above maps reflect the aftermath of the 2010 election only and don’t show any updates from court cases since that time. However, the cautionary tale still exists. I remember how we thought that the first female President was going to be elected in 2016. I don’t want to relive that horrid November outcome or to go through another two years enduring the current nightmare with complete Republican domination.
Turnout, turnout, turnout is the key.
BTW, I have put together a 16-slide Power Point presentation if anyone wants a copy. 3 of the slides appear above. Other slides include Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa plus some turnout statistics, solutions, and a great quote from Mark Twain. Please send a message with your email address, and I’l send it to you.
P.S. Thanks to Radiowalla for encouraging me to rework this article. It took me days to put the PP together, and it was discouraging to get only 4 recommends. Hopefully, this will fare better.