If Republicans are winning by rigging elections, can Democrats really afford to stay ethical and still win?
Democrats are at least 17 years late to the party and damn well better catch up soon if they want to win the House (or Senate) in next years election. The history and lack of Democratic response is shocking.
While a state must go to court to take away your gun, five Republicans on the US Supreme Court have refused to enforce the right to vote provisions of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 so states dont even have to notify you when they steal take away your vote.
And, wow, are Republicans committed to taking away your vote!
Back in 2008, following Barack Obamas win, Chris Jankowski of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) organized a program called REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) to create, as closely as possible with the aid of sophisticated computer analyses, a permanent Republican majority, both in control of individual state legislatures and in the US House of Representatives.
Theyd been running voter suppression scams for years, of course; an analysis by the Center for American Progress found that decades of gerrymandering had given Republicans a more-or-less permanent 19-seat advantage in the US House that they wouldnt have had without it.
But that wasnt enough for the GOP, which was facing the headwind of promoting unpopular policies like tax cuts for the rich and gutting the social safety net. So REDMAP was launched with the goal of creating a permanent Republican majority in the House.
The first step was to seize such complete control of a handful of decisive states that they could then engage in outrageous levels of partisan gerrymandering after the 2010 census; this was done with roughly $30 million (much from the US Chamber of Commerce) spent in usually sleepy state house and senate races.
That money spent on 107 state legislative races across 16 states, including pivotal then-swing states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida, flipped 19 legislative bodies from Democratic to Republican control.
As a result, following the 2010 election 10 of the 15 states that were set to redraw their congressional maps in 2011 were firmly in the hands of the GOP.
Then they set about surgically gerrymandering those ten states and the result, according to research done by the Brennan Center for Justice, was that Republicans picked up (and Democrats lost) 16 additional seats in the US House of Representatives and would be able to hold onto them with a high level of confidence in future elections.
REDMAP worked spectacularly: in the 2012 congressional elections, despite Democrats receiving over 1 million more votes for House members nationwide, that gerrymandering campaign helped Republicans capture a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That year in Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won 51% of the congressional vote but only 5 of 18 US House seats; in Ohio, Democrats also won 51% of the statewide congressional vote but because of the extreme gerrymander got only 4 of 16 seats in the House. In North Carolina, Democrats received 50.6% of the vote but ended up with only 4 House seats compared to 9 held by Republicans.
While Republicans were pulling off this evil deed, good government Democrats (encouraged by local rightwing media) were embracing an end to gerrymandering in their states with California, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington state, and Michigan putting nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions in charge of their redistricting to draw maps that are fair to both sides.
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