David Daley - Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy

UNRIGGED

UNRIGGED

HOW AMERICANS ARE
BATTLING BACK TO

SAVE DEMOCRACY

David Daley

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & CO.

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

For my wife, Jennifer Smedes, for everything

The right to vote freely for the candidate of ones choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government. And the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizens vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.

Reynolds v. Sims (1964),
Chief Justice Earl Warren, for the majority

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

Frederick Douglass

The people have the power.

Patti Smith

Despite months of pre-electoral hype and civic optimism, election night 2018 did not bring the much-hoped for clarity to the nations deep divisions. On one hand, Democrats claimed the U.S. House for the first time in a decade, netted more governorships than in any election since 1982, and also flipped control of six state legislative chambers and some 325 state house and senate seats nationwide. Across the aisle, Republicans expanded their majority in the U.S. Senate, knocking off incumbent Democrats in Indiana, North Dakota, Florida and Missouri. Ted Cruz extinguished liberal heartthrob Beto ORourke in Texass U.S. Senate race, and hopes that Georgia and Florida might elect their first black governors came to a bitter end, as well, with the defeats of Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum. On cable news, the nations top political analysts debated the key midterm takeaways and shrugged.

It is, of course, only natural to measure our politics in wins and losses, by blue waves and red firewallsespecially on election night. Its even possible for fair-minded pundits to examine the same results and view them as disheartening through one set of eyes and historic through another. But those usual frames of red versus blue failed to capture something far more important, even transformative: a nationwide awakening of small-d democratic fervor. For, this election night, Americas soul would not be discovered in ORourkes impassioned concession speech in El Paso; nor would it be found while watching the blue lights climb ever upward along Rockefeller Center, as NBC projected the real-time battle for Congress against the seventy-story art deco beauty. In this moment of civic crisis, democracy itself was on the ballot. While Americans devoured ominously-titled best-sellers about the impending death of government by and for the people, the biggest story was actually something far more optimistic: how determined ordinary citizens were to fix the nation.

It was a David and Goliath story for the twenty-first century. The barriers these citizens facedgerrymandering, draconian voter ID bills, racially motivated purges of voting rollswere massive and only grew more imposing. In 2017 alone, thirty-one state legislatures considered ninety-nine different bills that would make it harder for citizens to cast their votes.

But while one side deployed the electoral equivalent of Swinging Spikes between American voters and their democracy, citizens stood up and fought back. They took on the deepest structural inequities, the hardest battles that experts said could not be won. They pushed back against gerrymandering in Michigan, Utah, Colorado and Missouri, some of the most tilted and conservative states in the nationand won. They fought to restore voting rights to millions of former felons across the South who had served their time and paid their debtand won. In zinfandel-red Idaho, Utah and Nebraska, where legislatures refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, young people organized petition drives and pushed ballot initiativesand won. Nationwide, voters considered sixteen different initiatives and constitutional amendments that would make elections more open and fair. Fifteen of them94 percentpassed.

The winners on election night were all of us. Americans want their democracy back, and theyre doing something about it. This is their story.

In 2016, my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesnt Count broke the story of how Republicans weaponized gerrymandering, the oldest political trick in the book, into a precise yet blunt-force tool that entrenched GOP power in state legislatures and congressional delegations nationwide, even when the party earned far fewer votes. It revealed a national Republican strategy called REDMAPshort for the Redistricting Majority Projectkeyed around dozens of small-town legislative races during the 2010 election. The key to REDMAPs success in 2010 would be found in the U.S. Constitution, which requires that every state legislative and congressional district in the nation be redrawn every ten years, after the census, to account for population shifts. In three-quarters of all states, local legislatures draw those lines. Savvy Republicans, led by Chris Jankowski of the Republican State Leadership Committee, had a eureka moment not long after Barack Obamas 2008 victory, as they confronted the reality of Americas changing demographics (a nationwide transformation toward a voter profile that was historically more sympathetic to the Democratic Party) and tried to plot a path back to power. Conveniently for Jankowski and his colleagues, the census was coming. This would be their breakthrough: what if Republicans targeted inexpensive down-ballot state legislative races in closely Republicans won their wave, and with it the ability to design a decade of domination. They took full advantage.

The availability and easy manipulation of big data by powerful computers armed with sophisticated mapping software made it possible for Republicans to etch themselves a long-lasting edge. In those five swing-state targets alone, Republicans held 49 of 69 congressional seats by 2016, and Democrats had not flipped a single one all decade. They also held all ten legislative chambers in those states, some of them with veto-proof supermajorities, even surviving years when Democrats won more votes, including the 2018 wave.

After Donald Trumps surprising victory in 2016, I was often asked to explain how Republicans could hold the White House and both branches of Congress even in years when they received a minority of all votes, and also how, in a closely divided nation, Republicans could control nearly 70 percent of all state legislative chambers and a modern record of governors offices. The toxic combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws passed by newly unaccountable legislatures tied our democracy into a profoundly depressing double-knot of unfairness, and established nearly unbeatable minority rule in otherwise competitive states. It was not easy to see a path out of this antidemocratic crisis that contributed so dramatically to the extremism, polarization and hopelessness that plague our politics.

Then, later that November, I saw a Facebook post by a young Michigan woman named Katie Fahey.

Fahey doesnt look like a revolutionary, with her dark jeans, gray blazer and comfortable shoes. But dont let her broad, easy smile fool you: she is the Che Guevara of the gerrymander. The ballot initiative in Michiganwhich will bring an independent redistricting commission to one of the most gerrymandered states in the nationstarted with this Millennials social media post. Maybe it resonated so widely because of the smiley-face emoji that Fahey added at the end, or perhaps because gerrymandering in Michigan had severed the connection between the ballot box and the peoples will. But that single call to action, written by a twenty-seven-year-old woman who worked as a program manager for a recycling nonprofit, pioneered a winning redistricting revolution that marshaled over 4,000 volunteers, collected more than 400,000 signatures and raised almost $15 million.