Daley - Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Americas Democracy

For my dad, Donald H. Daley, whose passions and belief inspired everything, with endless thanks, admiration, and love

The decayed condition of American democracy is difficult to grasp, not because the facts are secret, but because the facts are visible everywhere.

William Greider, Who Will Tell the People

CONTENTS

Wearing a resplendent red tie, the color of the Republican Party, Barack Obama delivered his victory speech on November 4, 2008. The nations first African American first family joined him, celebrating together the historic evening. Watch Obamas Grant Park speech eight years later, and its not only his youth and the jubilant throngs that make the moment so electrifying. Its that sense of post-partisan possibilities that matched Obamas carefully chosen metaphor. If there is anyone out there, Obama told the nation, who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

As it turned out, Obama captured Republican stronghold after stronghold that early November evening. Down South, he picked off North Carolina and Virginia. In the Midwest, he grabbed Indiana. He won the two states where Democratic dreams had died hard in 2000 and 2004Florida and Ohiothen added Colorado and Nevada for good measure, conjuring liberals visions of a future western majority. As polls closed late in Oregon, Alaska and Minnesota, and Republican incumbents went down, pundits, professors and politicians marveled at the new Democratic supermajority in the Senate and spoke of emergingeven unbreakablecoalitions. On television and on the front pages of newspapers, they openly questioned how the GOP would survive to the next election.

The question now becomes what is the future of the Republican party nationally, wondered one political science professor in the New York Times. The mood turned grim on Fox News, where Bill OReilly bemoaned, Barack Obama is a star.... The Republicans have, who? Sarah Palin? Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham bluntly called the Republican beatdown well deserved. Weve seen a lack of competence at every level of government, frankly, under Republican rule, she opined.

Its a party adrift. Its a party lost, added longtime Republican communications adviser Torie Clarke on ABC News. Over on CNN, Wolf Blitzer and John King peered deeper into the blue map and found suburban Pennsylvania counties, like Bucks, Montgomery and Chesterpreviously reliable for George W. Bushnow tipping toward Obama by double digits. If you are the Republicans looking at this map this morning, observed King, you are very troubled.

One of those concerned conservatives, Rich Lowry, the editor of William F. Buckleys National Review, didnt like what he saw either in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia. Its a bad thing for the Republicans when you drill down into these states, he said. Its like, where did all the Republicans go? Did they all move to Utah?

The 2008 election looked like a transformative moment, a wave election that announced an ascendant new movement. Even the brightest conservative thinkers thought it signaled danger for the GOP. And it might have. What no one knewnot even despairing Republicans eyeing Fox News through a fuzzy third-cocktail hazewas that the truly transformative election was two years away. It would not be celebrated live around the world from a Grant Park awash in klieg lights, but in VFW halls and Holiday Inn ballrooms and strip-mall party headquarters as hundreds of new Republican state legislators claimed victoriesin those very states Lowry feared were lost forever.

This is the story of the audacious Republican plan which not only penned in the Obama presidency but managed, in spite of jubilant 2008 Democratic expectations, to create supermajorities for conservative policies in otherwise blue and purple states. This is the story of the actual redrawing of the American political map and of our democracy itself. Its the story of how Republicans turned a looming demographic disaster into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census. It is the story of new mapping technologies so exact that theyve re-sorted and resegregated Americans, while creating congressional districts where the only competition comes from someone more extreme.

Its legal, its breathtaking, and much of it happened in plain sight. The Democratic majority was ratfucked.

I n politics, a ratfuck is a dirty deed done dirt cheap. You can trace the term back as far as Edmund Wilsons The Twenties. It was used decades later in All the Presidents Men, the story of how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought about the resignation of Richard Nixon. They quoted Donald Segretti, an operative tied to Nixons reelection campaign, as using the colorful term to describe political sabotage and the early shenanigans of seamy strategists linked to the burglars who bungled the Watergate break-in. The operatives who quite legally changed the complexion of Congress worked in a far more sophisticated fashion.

This twenty-first-century version begins in 2009, when Chris Jankowski awoke on July 22 at his Richmond home still feeling kicked in the gut by the election results. He sat down with the morning New York Times, and buried inside a story about state legislatures and census projections he read something that snapped him back to action. After reading past a downcast first sentence whose truth he knew far too wellRepublicans in search of good news these days have had to rely on bad news for the White HouseJankowski found this, by Times correspondent Adam Nagourney:

2010 is not just any election year: it is crucial given that this class of governors will be in charge as their states draw Congressional and state legislative districts as part of the reapportionment process after the next census. And given historical trends in midterm elections and the lopsided majority Democrats enjoy in Congress, the possibility that Republicans could make gains in House races next year could give the party a psychological boost at the halfway point of Mr. Obamas term.

Jankowski immediately recognized the opportunity. As provided in the Constitution, every state redraws all of its district lines every ten years, that is, after the census. That means elections in zero years matter more than others. Jankowski realized it would be possible to target states where the legislature is in charge of redistricting, flip as many chambers as possible, take control of the process, and redraw the lines. Boom. Just like thatif Republicans could pull it offthe GOP would go from demographically challenged to the catbird seat for a decade. At least.

As one of the leading tacticians behind the Republican State Leadership Committee, Jankowski has few peers as a strategist, even if Karl Rove and Frank Luntz then vacuumed up all the TV airtime. State government has always been his passion. He had spent years trying to arm-twist GOP strategists and donors to spend more time and money on down-ballot races: state houses, state attorneys general, local judges. Those might not be the sexy elections to invest inno wealthy player feels like a kingmaker or a Koch brother by writing a check to the Republican running for state representative in Pennsylvanias 130thbut he proved time and again that they often provided the best value. Donations that would be a mere drop in the bucket to a presidential or Senate candidate might make all the difference at the local level. And policy outcomes, he would readily discern, could actually be influenced in state capitalsunlike in gridlocked Washington, DC.