Mother Jones – July-August 2019

JULY / AUGUST 2019 | MOTHER JONES 29

National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie

and advised by strategists like Karl Rove.

“He who controls redistricting can con­

trol Congress,” Rove wrote in the Wall

Street Journal at the time.

Massively aided by the Supreme

Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision

that allowed unlimited corporate polit­

ical spending, redmap raised $30 million,

including from oil, tobacco, and health

insurance companies, three times as

much as its Democratic counterpart.

Republicans hoped to flip 25 to 30 House

seats occupied by Democrats. They

ended up winning 63, plus 20 new leg­

islative chambers, giving them control of

nearly every important swing state and

the power to draw four times as many

state legislative and House districts

as Democrats. Nearly a decade later,

Republi cans still control every legisla­

tive chamber in heavily gerry mandered

states like Michigan, North Carolina,

Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Democrats had no comparable strat­

egy. And when the party controlled

the White House and Congress after

Obama’s 2008 victory, it paid little at­

tention to the states. By the end of

Obama’s second term, Democrats had

lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats.

“This has been one of the big failures

of our party,” said former Virginia Gov.

Terry McAuliffe, who led the Democratic

National Committee from 2001 to 2005.

“We have not paid attention to the im­

portance of redistricting—haven’t put

the time in historically.”

“One of the great deficiencies of the

Obama operation during the eight years

he was president,” said Obama’s former

chief strategist, David Axelrod, “was that

not enough attention was paid to legisla­

tive races.” The president, consumed by

the financial crisis and the Obamacare

fight, didn’t sustain a political operation

that could combat the tea party wave

and the gop’s surgical targeting of state

races. Now, Axelrod said, this deficiency

is something Obama, a former state sen­

ator, “feels acutely, feels some respon­

sibility for, and wants to help remedy.”

McAuliffe and House Democratic

leader Nancy Pelosi convened dis­

cussions during the 2016 Democratic

Nation al Convention about creating a

group focused solely on redistricting.

The initiative took on new urgency after

Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race

even as she won the popular vote, re­

inforcing the imperative that Demo­

crats regain power at the state level.

After the election, McAuliffe, Pelosi,

and Senate Democratic leader Chuck

Schumer visited the White House to get

Obama’s blessing. “It was the president

who said, ‘I’ll bring Eric in,’” McAuliffe

recalled. Obama decided to make re­

districting reform a central focus of his

post­ presidency and tapped Holder as

his top lieutenant. Obama has hosted

fundraisers for the effort, endorsed can­

didates in races the ndrc has targeted,

WIN, LOSE, REDRAW

Republicans flipped a dozen state legislatures in 2010. Thanks in part to the electoral
maps drawn the following year, Democrats still haven’t recovered.

Does not include Nebraska’s unicameral, nonpartisan legislature

Source: National Conference of State Legislatures

Party control of state legislatures

Republican

control

Democratic

control

Divided

control

’99

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35 states

’01 ’03 ’05 ’07 ’09 ’11 ’13 ’15 ’17 ’19

In some Republican-con-
trolled states, gerryman-
dering has made it all but
impossible for Democrats
to retake assemblies, even
when they win a majority
of the statewide vote.

More votes, fewer seats

Democratic share of state

assembly votes, 2018

Republican share of state

assembly votes, 2018

Democratic share of state

assembly seats, 2019

Republican share of state

assembly seats, 2019

Michigan

52%

47%

53%

47%

North Carolina

51%

46%

54%

48%

Source: State election data, Ballotpedia

Wisconsin

53%

36%

64%

45%

Ohio

51%

38%

62%

48%