#redmap

Matt Royer at By The Ballot:

With national 24/7 news channels and wall-to-wall White House coverage, it’s always about flipping the Senate, taking back the House, or primarying someone on a federal level. That’s the shiny object. But the real battleground right now isn’t Congress—it’s the state legislatures. Those are the last line of defense. Republicans control 28 state legislatures, Democrats control 21 (excluding Nebraska’s unique setup). That means most states don’t have the same protection from Trump’s administration as Democratic states do. And Trump himself has said he’d rather let states decide their own laws. While it’s tempting to focus on getting more progressives into Congress, the biggest impact—and biggest gains to be made—are in the statehouses. And you know who’s understood this for decades? Republicans. The GOP has systematically stacked state legislatures, supreme courts, county boards, and school boards. It’s been a slow burn for years, and it’s now paying off. If Democrats want lasting, direct change, we need to build the infrastructure from the bottom up.

Direct Impacts

Though many state legislatures only meet for part of the year, their influence is enormous. They introduce far more bills than Congress—sometimes as much as 23 times more annually. The smaller district sizes and closer proximity to constituents means state reps and senators take up a wider variety of issues, including very local problems that would never reach the federal level. Think about it this way: in most companies, you’ve got your boss, your boss’s boss, and then the C-Suite, board of directors, and CEO. The C-Suite and board (Congress and the President) set the overall direction, but those decisions often take years to trickle down. Your boss’s boss (the Governor) influences things above you, but you’re only indirectly affected. Your boss (the state legislature) makes the decisions that shape your daily life immediately—what you work on, how your environment functions, and what rules you operate under. That’s the role of state legislatures in government. They control the “everyday levers” of policy, backed by the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers not given to the federal government for the states and the people. That means legislatures oversee:

Education – determining most school funding, setting curricula, and academic standards.

Healthcare – managing Medicaid, regulating health insurance, overseeing nursing homes.

Crime and safety – writing criminal codes, setting penalties, and supervising police.

Transportation – funding roads, maintaining infrastructure, regulating licenses and registration.

Elections – running voter registration, defining voting processes, and drawing districts.

And unlike Congress, state legislatures are often more efficient. Less partisan gridlock. Faster legislative sessions. Bills tailored to local problems. That means state laws usually take effect much faster than federal legislation, creating immediate changes in people’s lives.

Because districts are smaller, residents also have a much greater ability to influence outcomes. While a U.S. Senator may have staff to filter thousands of calls and emails, many state reps personally answer correspondence from constituents. A determined group of residents can move the needle in a statehouse in a way that would be almost impossible in Congress.

[...]

For over 13 years, Republicans have controlled nearly 60% of state legislatures, fueled by the perfect storm: REDMAP’s gerrymandering, ALEC’s bill mill, and Democrats’ complacency during the Obama years. While Democrats chased the glamour of Congress and the White House, Republicans were quietly building trenches in state capitals. By the time Democrats woke up, the battlefield was already rigged. We had a shot of adrenaline after Trump’s first term. Volunteers flooded the streets, statehouse campaigns saw unprecedented energy, and Democrats flipped chambers in Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Minnesota. But that fire dimmed under Biden, compounded by the pandemic, and Republicans seized the chance to dig in further. Now, with another Trump administration barreling ahead, Democrats are again at risk of missing the forest for the trees.

The truth is this: Congress is flashy, but state legislatures are where the change actually happens. That’s not just rhetoric; it’s how federalism was designed. The Tenth Amendment gives states sweeping power over education, healthcare, criminal law, transportation, and elections. The day-to-day struggles that make or break people’s lives aren’t set in Washington — they’re decided in Richmond, Tallahassee, Austin, Harrisburg, and Lansing. And Republicans know it. They’ve run everywhere, even in deep-blue states, and invested in infrastructure to support their candidates from school boards to statehouses. Democrats, meanwhile, often treat red districts as lost causes. That has to change. There’s a reason this year in Virginia made headlines: Democrats filed a candidate in every single one of the 100 House of Delegates seats. That forced Republicans to defend turf everywhere, draining their resources and keeping them from funneling money to battlegrounds. That’s the model we need to replicate nationwide. Imagine if we did that in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, or North Carolina. Even if we didn’t win all those seats, we’d make Republicans fight on every front instead of cherry-picking their battlegrounds.

The payoff isn’t just immediate — it’s generational. Once Democrats win back these chambers, we can redraw maps in 2030. Trump is already pressuring GOP legislatures to pass unconstitutional gerrymanders in 2025. So yes, Democrats must be willing to play hardball, too. If Republicans can twist maps into grotesque, snake-shaped caricatures of democracy, why shouldn’t we redraw them to empower working people, protect communities of color, and actually reflect voters?

[...] Republicans have spent decades building power from the bottom up — stacking state legislatures, courts, and local offices while Democrats focused too much on Washington. Tools like ALEC’s model bills and Karl Rove’s REDMAP gerrymandering strategy have locked in GOP dominance across the country, giving them control over everyday issues like schools, healthcare, and voting rights. If Democrats want lasting change, they must invest seriously in statehouse races — everywhere, not just in swing states. Running candidates in every district (like Virginia did this year) forces Republicans to fight everywhere, drains their resources, and sets Democrats up to redraw fair maps after the 2030 census. Governors with backbone, like Whitmer, Moore, and Shapiro, show how state-level leadership can defend against Trumpism.

Matt Royer has an excellent column in By The Ballot that the Democrats should learn the bottom-up approach in the state legislatures, where the day-to-day impacts are more direct than Congress and the Presidency.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 19, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 20, 2024

Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.

With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers. 

In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members. 

Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.

Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession. 

As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.

Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.

And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”

After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs. 

Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”

That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway. 

Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity.” “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.

And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.

But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject. 

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery. 

When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.    

The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.  

The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump. 

And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."

Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

In 2021, Apple updated its mobile OS so that users could opt out of app tracking with one click. More than 96% opted out, costing Facebook $10b in one year. The kicker? Even if you opted out, Apple continued to spy on you, just as invasively as Facebook had, as part of its competing targeted ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork

Mike Luckovich

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 25, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Pundits struggle to decide whether Trump’s rise represents something new in the United States or whether it is a continuation of the growing anti-democratic politics of the Republican Party. As a card-carrying Libra, I’m going to suggest it was both.

If yesterday’s letter was about how Trump’s turn to authoritarianism is unprecedented among major party political leaders, tonight’s is about how the Republican Party prepared the way for this moment in part by rigging the system through gerrymandering so that their politicians no longer need to appeal to voters. Those extreme gerrymanders threaten to skew the 2024 election and are contributing to the Republican Party’s inability to perform the most basic functions of government.

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing legislative districts to favor a political party. The practice was named for Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Political parties can gain an advantage in elections by either “packing” or “cracking” their opponents’ voters. Packing means stuffing the opposition party’s voters into districts so their votes are not distributed more widely; cracking means dividing opponents’ voters among multiple districts so there are too few of them in any district to have a chance of winning. 

The Constitution requires the government to take a census every ten years to see where people have moved, enabling the government to draw districts that should allow us to elect politicians that represent us. Political operatives have always carved up maps to serve themselves when they could, but today’s computers allow them to draw maps with surgical precision. 

That created a big change in 2010. Before that midterm election, hoping to hamstring President Barack Obama’s ability to accomplish anything by making sure he had a hostile Congress, Republican operatives raised money from corporate donors to swamp state elections with ads and campaign literature to elect Republicans to state legislatures. This Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, was a plan to take control of state houses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. 

It worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the legislatures in the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

The results of that effort are playing out today.

In Wisconsin the electoral districts are so gerrymandered that although the state’s population is nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans control nearly two thirds of the seats in the legislature and it is virtually impossible for Democrats ever to win control of the state legislature. In April, voters elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court by an astonishing margin of 11 points, in part thanks to her promise to reject the extreme gerrymandered maps. 

Protasiewicz’s election shifted the court majority away from the Republicans. Even before she was elected, one Republican senator suggested impeaching her, and now, because she has called the district maps “rigged” and said, “I don’t think you could sell to any reasonable person that the maps are fair,” Republicans are calling for her impeachment before she has even heard a case. (After saying the maps were rigged, she added: “I can't ever tell you what I’m going to do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and common sense tells you that it’s wrong.”)

Voters are also evenly split in North Carolina—illustrated by the fact that a statewide race elected Democrat Roy Cooper as governor—but there, too, gerrymandering has rigged the maps for the Republicans. After a Democrat switched sides to give the Republicans a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature, the House of Representatives last week passed laws taking away the governor’s power to make appointments to state and local election boards and removing the tiebreaker seat the governor appointed to the state board. 

Instead, the legislature has taken over the right to make those appointments itself, meaning that election rules could become entirely partisan. At the same time, the legislature exempted its legislators from complying with the state open-records law that requires redistricting documents be public.

In Ohio, almost 75% of voters agreed to amend the state constitution in 2018 to prohibit political gerrymanders. Nonetheless, when the Republican-dominated legislature drew district maps in 2021, they gave a strong advantage to Republicans. The state supreme court struck the maps down as unconstitutional, but the U.S. Supreme Court permitted them to stay in place for the 2022 election. The court will now revisit the question, but it has moved further to the right since 2022.

In Alabama, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that the maps in place in 2022 were likely unconstitutional and must be redrawn to include a second majority-Black district. But when the state legislature drew a new map the next month, it defied the court. The court was shocked at the refusal to comply, and appointed a special master, who today offered three options. Any of them would offer the Democrats a chance to pick up another seat, and the state is challenging the new maps.

Tennessee shows what gerrymandering does at the state level. There, Republicans tend to get about 60% of the votes but control 76% of the seats in the House and 82% of the seats in the Senate. This supermajority means that the Republicans can legislate as they wish. 

Gerrymandered seats mean that politicians do not have to answer to constituents; their purpose is to raise money and fire up true believers. Although more than 70% of Tennessee residents want gun safety legislation, for example, Republican legislators, who are certain to win in their gerrymandered districts, can safely ignore them. 

Tennessee shows the effects of gerrymandering at the national level as well. Although Republican congressional candidates in Tennessee get about 65% of the vote, they control 89% of Tennessee’s congressional delegation. In the elections of 2022, Florida, Alabama, and Ohio all used maps that courts have thrown out for having rigged the system to favor Republicans. The use of those unfair maps highlights that the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by only the slimmest of margins and explains why Republicans are determined to keep their gerrymanders.

Because their seats are safe, Republicans do not have to send particularly skilled politicians to Congress; they can send those whose roles are to raise money and push Republican ideology. That likely explains at least a part of why House Republicans are no closer to agreeing on a deal to fund the government than they have been for the past several months, even as the deadline is racing toward us, and why they are instead going to hold an impeachment hearing concerning President Joe Biden on Thursday. 

Michigan was one of the Operation REDMAP states, redistricted after the 2010 election into an extreme gerrymander designed by Republicans who bragged about stuffing “Dem garbage” into four districts so that Republicans would, as one said, stay in power for years. In 2016 a Michigan woman, Katie Fahey, started a movement to get rid of the partisan maps. In 2018, despite a Republican lawsuit to stop them, they successfully placed an initiative to create an independent redistricting commission on the ballot. It passed overwhelmingly. 

After the 2020 census the commission’s new maps still slightly favored Republicans because of the state’s demographic distribution—Democrats are concentrated in cities—but the parties were competitive. In 2022, Democrats took control of the state government, winning the House for the first time since 2008.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

बीजेपी वर्किंग कमेटी 7 जुलाई को प्रस्तावित, तय होगा यूपी मिशन 2022 का रोडमैप

UP Mission 2022 Agenda: बीजेपी प्रदेश कार्यसमिति की बैठक 7 जुलाई को प्रस्तावित है. जिसका एलान जल्द ही होगा. मार्च मे पिछली कार्यसमिति की बैठक लखनऊ मे हुई थी. इसमें यूपी मिशन 2022 का एजेंडा तय किया जाना है. Source link

Source: http://twitter.com/planetmoney/status/1005816391562399744

In 2010, Florida tried something pretty cool -- let citizens help define elections. Thousands of citizens flocked to town halls to share their ideas. But as Dan Smith listened to them, he got suspicious. https://t.co/zVnRrJtHCT pic.twitter.com/YhElUGyfGp

— NPR's Planet Money (@planetmoney) June 10, 2018

Note: This is the second episode in a series on elections and how they can be gamed. The first episode is #845: REDMAP. (You can listen in any order!)