Without Gerrymandering, Republicans Would Have Lost their Congressional Majority

Republicans aren’t even trying to deny this.  It was all spelled out in a memo from the Republican State Leadership Committee.  The GOP took control of a lot of state legislatures and governorships in the 2010 election, and this enabled them to gerrymander most of those states’ Democratic representatives into just a few districts.

So now these states have more Republican districts than Democratic, even
though Republican voters are outnumbered by Democrats.  For example, nine of Michigan’s fourteen congressional districts went Republican last November, even though Michigan’s Democratic candidates got 240,000 more votes than Republican candidates.

The RSLC memo was titled “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013.”  The memo brags about spending most of their campaign money on ensuring statehouse victors in swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

From the memo:

“The rationale was straightforward.  Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.”

And there you have it.  Not a word about connecting with voters, staying up-to-date on the issues or modifying some of their medieval rhetoric.  Nope, it all boils down to “how can we keep winning elections even though everybody hates us.”

And this isn’t the end of it.  As you know from earlier posts on this blog — and numerous other news sites — some swing state legislatures are planning to rig the Electoral College so that electoral votes are handed out by congressional district instead of statewide.  A Republican candidate could get trounced in a state’s popular vote but still win that state’s electoral votes by winning more congressional districts.

How conveeenient.