The book is about US gerrymandering after 2010: how it works, who thought of it, and the imbalances it’s created in the government. On the topic it covers, Ratfucked is focused and authoritative. It expounds no grand political theory, sneaks in no pet projects. Daley simply reveals the contours of a nationwide redistricting project called REDMAP, pursued by the Republican Party after the last census and designed to create impenetrably red “firewalls” across the country.
What we find is an outrage. REDMAP corrupts the democratic process to ensure that Republicans are vastly overrepresented in American legislatures. It is one plausible cause of the GOP’s rightward slide, but that’s the extent to which the program interacts with any kind of ideology. There is nothing democratic about it, nothing philosophically affiliated with conservatism. There is nothing to defend. It is a data-driven scam cooked up by legal technicians for their customers in Republican political machines. The victim is the public.
The great GOP gerrymander of 2011 was extraordinary and precedent-shattering. It has, for all intents and purposes, put a chamber of Congress, the one ostensibly intended to mirror popular opinion and the public will, beyond the control of the voters. This is not, as some have said, because of the way the districts are drawn. It is because of how one party determined to draw them and the way it damaged the levers of representative government in the process. (238)
And look, it’s not like the Democrats wouldn’t do something like this — BLUEMAP, I guess — if they had any operatives smart enough to think of it back in 2010. (They did not.) Granted, it would look different. Instead of consolidating pockets of blue voters into ever fewer districts, the Democrats would create long, skinny districts radiating out from city centers, diluting the conservative suburban vote with minorities and cosmopolitan liberals. They would probably mix as many white people as possible with majority-minority areas, so as to be able to create matchups in those districts in which the only options to oppose Republicans would be moderate white Democrats like Joe Crowley.
In our actual, benighted timeline, the Republican Party got to this tactic first. Heading into the 2010 midterm election, Chris Jankowski and Ed Gillespie, who created an upstart organization called the Republican State Leadership Committee, pitched to “Wall Street donors, oil magnates, hedge-funders, Washington lobbyists and trade associations” (4) that the best use of their “investments” would be to state races, not the glamorous ones landing in DC. Why? Because 2010 was a census year, and that meant redistricting, a process that in 37 out of 50 states is handled by some combination of the legislature and the governor. In other words, a process that was up for grabs.
By winning a total of 25 off-the-radar races nationwide — Indiana House, NC senate, Wisconsin senate, etc — Jankowski could offer his customers more bang for their buck than ever before.
“There’s an access model [of fundraising] — which is always a certain amount of money,” said Jankowski. “But what we transitioned into for 2010 was something bigger than that. We weren’t selling access anymore. We were selling an outcome and an impact on the political system.” (6)
The Democrats presented no serious challenge to this, being out-fundraised 3-to-1 by Labor Day 2010, and basically never saw this coming. Ultimately, due in part to these campaign efforts and in part to anger over Obamacare, the GOP won far more races than they needed. They had massive control over redistricting — and they had the malice to make hay with it.
That takes us to the end of the introduction in Ratfucked. The rest of the book is a state by state Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! of wackily-shaped districts and the stories of how they got that way. Each is a tragic, sordid tale of curdled democracy.
The formula is simple. Plug demographic data into Maptitude or some other cartography software. Find or predict where Democratic voters live and imagine how, in your wildest College Republican wet dreams, you could either cancel their votes by drawing them into the same districts as sometimes faraway Republicans, or bundling them into the smallest possible number of heavily blue districts. (“Cracking and packing” is the term. Even the tactic got a frat name!) Step three: Draw maps with absolutely zero shame. I’m talking districts that weave through neighborhoods on a block-by-block level; districts that dendritically snake through other districts and balloon back out into large pockets; districts shaped like bacteria. Here's Maryland's 3rd District: "The Preying Mantis." Look at this shit. Some parts aren't even connected!
The maps that contain these proposals are created by purpose-built teams of experts, almost always in secret — “it’s as if mapmakers are involved in some sort of risky espionage work, rather than designing the basic contours of our democracy” (44) — and passed quietly by Repubilcan governors or whatever other puppet needs to give a signature.
Interestingly, one map-drawing tactic in the South gave Republicans common cause with black and brown politicians. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court averred that the Voting Rights Act “mandated the opportunity for minorities to ‘elect representatives of their choice’ in states with a pattern of racial-bloc voting.” (35) At the same time, Lee Atwater’s team discovered that since white Southern Democrats had controlled districting for decades, Southern maps had “created underrepresentation for two groups, Republicans and minority voters.” (36) This presented an opportunity to forge a “Machiavellian deal” with black legislators.
If Republicans could draw a map that increased the likelihood of black candidates getting elected, they would achieve three key things. One, the map would “pack” Democratic votes into concentrated majority-minority districts. Two, their preposterous maps — the first absolutely preposterous ones — would pass muster with liberals and the public, supported as they were by black political influencers. (One GOP operative outright offered the deal to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and they accepted it. [37]) And finally, most cynically, racism ensured that the surrounding districts would elect even more conservative candidates in reaction to their minority neighbors. The plan worked: almost 30 white Democrats in North Carolina alone were defeated between 1992 and 1994, thirteen new black legislators went to Congress — creating the largest black caucus since Reconstruction — and the GOP got to export the Southern Strategy all over the map.
So what are we to make of all this? I came out of this book with three conclusions.
First off, ideology has next to no role in the two-party system in the United States. The parties are locked in a game of institutional power. Nowhere in this book does a Republican operative, in the real-life smoke-filled backrooms where power brokers decide what happens to the little guy, defend his actions on the basis of ideology. He simply proposes schemes to drive ROI for his donors. The goal of this game may be to ultimately to lower taxes etc, but really, the prize is just access to power. And the input of the system is money. Straight up. On p. 188, Larry Lessig says that half the money in an election cycle comes from 400 families. There is no money “in” politics. Money is politics thanks to these ghouls.
You know who doesn’t understand this? Democrats. Which brings up the next conclusion: this party needs to either wake up, come to fucking play, or die off already.
I can’t blame them for wanting to live in a pure world. But how am I supposed to feel reading that in 2009, with redistricting coming up, Ohio’s then-Secretary of State, a Dem, “sponsored a statewide contest that gave citizens GIS mapping tools and urged them to draw lines based on the legal standards of compactness and contiguity, while keeping communities of interest together.” (92) Of course, within a year, the actual drawing was happening in a locked black site somewhere, with results so resounding that fellow Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner eventually took a swan dive out of his Speakership to avoid the bellicose idiocy of his reactionary caucus. Dems, you were too pure for this world.
Interesting thought on 99: “When a party loses this many governorships and state legislative seats, not only do they end up on the wrong side of redistricting, but the bench of future stars for higher office thins as well.”
Daley includes a really sad interview with former DCCC chairman Steve Israel, in which he gave up on the idea of entrusting any of this outrage to the public, let alone trying to fight with it. “This argument that you can take this [gerrymandering issue] to the public isn’t going to work. We’re in an economy right now where people are trying to figure out if their paychecks are going to stretch to the end of the month. You want me to talk about redistricting? Their response is, ‘What else is new? Stop telling me the deck is stacked against me. Tell me what your economic solutions are.’” (104)
This is not a guy who gets it. Similarly, Daley has commendably unrestrained annoyance for Barack Obama, another guy who’s bringing a debate to a fistfight. “It’s maddening that after three election cycles on these maps, and a lost second Obama term, that the White House that got so deeply ratfucked finds it impossible to use the word. If they can’t get angry about this, maybe they’re too bloodless to lead the fight.” 251
Obama yearns for common ground and rational fact-based arguments. Today’s Republicans, meanwhile, focus on strategies that deliver the power to enact an agenda. Classy speeches, appeals to reason, and Obama’s often maddening measured calm won’t salve our democratic disease. Democrats have such little hope of flipping legislative chambers in the key states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania that their only realistic hope for a seat at the table when maps are drawn after the 2020 census rests with winning 2018 governorships. (246)
Finally, the last takeaway from Ratfucked is that solving this problem — letting voters choose politicians instead of the other way around — would solve an ur-problem of our famously solutionless politics. It would protect the process of government and make it responsive to the citizenry.
To hear Daley tell it, gerrymandering is that thing we can't identify that poisoned our civic lives and made our country ungovernable. It's not spiritual rot at the center of the country; it's the process that has been broken, intentionally.
The problem with our politics is not that all of us are more partisan, or the Big Sort. It’s that we have been sorted — ratfucked — into districts where the middle does not matter, where the contest only comes down to the most ideological and rancorous on either side. Because the Republicans drew the majority of these lines, there are more rancorous Republicans than Democrats. And because Republicans such as Virginia congressman Eric Cantor and Utah senator Bob Bennett, and not Democrats, have been pushed from office from an ideologically motivated activist wing, it’s Republicans who have become more rigid and less willing to search for common ground. (109)
So much is solvable with a system of representative government that actually reflects the people. When the system is broken, people lose their faith in government. Fewer people vote. And the Republican Party, at its heart a fading ember, always performs better when people don’t vote, or when their vote doesn’t count.
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