How Republicans Get Away With Fleecing Their Own Voters

Gerrymandering is part of the answer. State legislative seats are so safe that nearly half of all incumbent state legislators face no primary challenges, and 35 percent go unchallenged in both primary and general elections, Klas and Silverman report, citing research from Saint Louis University political scientist Steven Rogers. Most of this can be attributed to Republican redistricting after the 2010 election. That election flipped 20 state government chambers from Democratic to Republican and doubled the number of Republican trifectas from nine to 22. In Wisconsin, a Democratic trifecta became a Republican trifecta, and, thanks to gerrymandering, remained so until 2019. In 2012, the first election after the Wisconsin legislature’s Republican majority redrew state legislative districts, the GOP managed the remarkable feat of filling 74 percent of all contested state Assembly seats with just 52 percent of the vote, and 55 percent of all contested state Senate seats with just 49 percent of the vote.

In his 2017 book Ratf**ked (coy asterisks his, not mine), David Daley assigns much of the credit for this Republican realignment to Chris Jankowski, executive director of a project of the Republican State Leadership Committee called the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP. In 2010 Jankowski raised $30 million for the project, “the cost of one U.S. Senate seat these days,” Daley writes. The plan was to flip state legislatures, redraw legislative districts to favor Republicans, then harvest secure Republican majorities. “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy,” Karl Rove, former top political aide to President George W. Bush, reportedly told potential donors at one fundraising meeting, “but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy.” Now it was time to get serious, and that’s what REDMAP did.

Klas and Silverman don’t discuss the extent to which Democrats manipulate the redistricting process for partisan gain, but the answer is “not that much.” A survey by the Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab and Represent US, an anti-corruption nonprofit, shows that among blue states, only Illinois and Georgia rate D’s and F’s on redistricting; the other blue states get A’s and B’s. Red states out West score A’s and B’s too, and so do Indiana and Kentucky. But red states in the South almost uniformly get D’s and F’s, as do Kansas and Ohio. The inescapable conclusion is that gerrymandering is almost entirely a Republican problem.