Rolling Stone: How Republicans Rig the Game

[babylonsister]

How Republicans Rig the Game
Through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to hold on to power while more and more Americans reject their candidates and their ideas


Illustration by Victor Juhasz
By Tim Dickinson
November 11, 2013 10:35 AM ET


As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.

How is this possible? National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.

Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that."

Did it ever. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates took 51 percent of the vote across the state's 18 districts, but only five of the seats. In Wang's model, the odds against Democrats emerging at an eight-seat disadvantage are 1,000-to-1. And Pennsylvania was not alone. According to the Election Consortium analysis, gerrymandering helped Republicans secure 13 seats in just six states – including Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina – that, under normal rules of engagement, Democrats would have won.

This tilting of the electoral playing field was the result of a sophisticated campaign coordinated at the highest levels of Republican politics through a group called the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – a Super-PAC-like entity chaired by Bush-era RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and backed by Karl Rove. Shortly after President Obama's first election, the RSLC launched the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) with an explicit strategy to "keep or win Republican control of state legislatures with the largest impact on congressional redistricting." The logic was simple. Every decade following the census, the task of redrawing federal congressional-district boundaries falls (with some exceptions) to the state legislatures. If Republicans could seize control of statehouses – and, where necessary, have GOP governors in place to rubber-stamp their redistricting maps – the party could lock in new districts that would favor Republican candidates for a decade. As Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal column in early 2010: "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."

more...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111

[Scuba]

1. When you can't win on policy ...

... cheat.

[spanone]

2. gerrymandering is an 'accepted' form of stacking the political deck

it's cheating. plain and simple.

[Number23]

3. A fabulous article. People who ignore demographics need to be kicked to the curb

The Repubs know this which is why they have so effectively gamed the system. Hard to get kicked to the curb when you keep moving it further out of reach.

[underpants]

4. +

marking for later read

[kentuck]

5. They are very fearful and paranoid...

...about losing power and disappearing into nothingness.

So whatever they do, by hook or crook, they see it as a means to surviving as a political Party.

They are fearful that progressivism is on the rise.

[sheshe2]

6. The GOP's War on Voting

From your link.

In a letter to state legislators, Jankowski wrote, "We have taken the initiative to retain a team of seasoned redistricting experts that we will make available to you at no cost to your caucus for assistance." The RSLC brought on GOP operative Tom Hofeller, who has been in the Republican redistricting game since the 1970s.

Employing computer software known as Maptitude, Hofeller and his team used sophisticated data-mining techniques to draw new districts that maximally disadvantaged Democrats. Maptitude advertises the ability to merge precinct-level returns from past elections with federal census data to "identify communities of interest," including "racial or ethnic enclaves that tend to have similar interests and vote as a bloc." Explicit racial gerrymandering is illegal under the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. So Hofeller used a proxy for race, redrawing boundaries by identifying the wards where President Obama received the highest returns in 2008. According to court documents, this approach "allowed black voters to be carved apart from their white neighbors and friends, on a block-by-block basis."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111page=2#ixzz2kNntVUNp
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The entire article makes my blood boil! As for Hofeller, he takes illegal, puts some new lipstick on it and makes it a fact. FU GOP! LIE CHEAT and STEAL. That is all this party has. They are a disgrace to this Country!

Thanks for posting this article, babylonsister. It needs to be read in it's entirety.

[Botany]

7. OH's 12th district is brutal

N. Columbus to Mansfield and then dipping S.E. to Zanesville and then back to Columbus but it goes around
the "dark neighborhoods."

[KamaAina]

12. Not to mention the 9th

which was strewn across Lake Erie for one reason: to throw Dennis Kucinich in with the popular Marcy Kaptur.

[grasswire]

8. kick to read later nt

[uponit7771]

9. +1

[Mnemosyne]

10. The Party of Loopholes. nt

[ffr]

11. K&R

[MissMillie]

13. should link this to the "Good Reads" page

because it is!

[certainot]

14. their invisible right wing radio monopoly is still their most important weapon. 1200 coordinated

radio stations reaching 50 mil a week with whatever the think tanks give them, practically free, with their liars protected by call screeners and aided by paid callers, and almost completely ignored by democracy-loving, thinking americans, who prefer music or nothing, because it gives them a headache to listen to it.

that weapon is seldom included in polls, cannot be read so it is ignored by media and political analysts, and is practically free for ALEC, koch bros, GOP, chamber of commerce, etc, (who give us the redistricting and teabagger/talk radio candidates) because they get a free speech free ride from the left, which, if it had any sense, would be expanding the stoprush boycotts to all RW radio stations, would be making sure state-funded universities weren't endorsing it with sports team logos, and would be including those limbaugh megastations in any protests.

thanks for the review - it should be criminal what they're doing- but they couldn't have done it without talk radio getting a free speech free ride from the left. this radical iteration of the republican party comes from dems liberals progressives not recognizing this simple fact: the tea party is the talk radio party is the republican 'base' of the last 25 years. that elephant in the cartoon might as well be one of a hundred major right wing talkers blasting their states with think tank coordinated propaganda.