Transcription
When did gerrymandering, or the act of creating districts that strongly favor one political party or another, become important in American history?
And, um, the concept, the idea of gerrymandering comes from Elbridge Gerry, spelled the same, pronounced differently. I don't know why. Um, but if you, if you, this is such a piece of trivia, but if you're driving in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the BBNN school there on the river, that road is actually Gary's Landing Road. Um, it's short, but, um, but your GPS will tell you it's Gary's Landing. And I think there's a sign for it. That's Elbridge Gerry, for whom we got the name gerrymandering. He didn't like it, uh, because, and it was called gerrymandering because the district that the, that his political party drew looked like a salamander. So it's a combination of Gerry and salamander. So we get gerrymander.
Um, that there was, so, so what you see from that is there was always this idea of wiggling a bit to try and get a district that favored your side versus another. But what computers have done is they have enabled, um, this sort of surgical gerrymandering to either crack or pack. Are the two major ways that you gerrymander. To crack a population is to say, and I'm going to say, use this as, um, I will say Democrats and Republicans. You could say oranges and apples or whatever. But you either take your opponents and you crack them. So if there's a, they have a majority, you break them apart and move them into districts so that they no longer have a majority, or you pack them. You take as many of your opponents as you possibly can and you shove them into one district. So, yeah, they're going to go ahead and be able to elect somebody in their one district, but not in any of the other places where they might otherwise have been. So it's cracking and packing.
And that really became the plan of the Republican party in 2010. So what happened is this. In, you know, Reagan wins in 1980 and takes office in 1981 with this idea that you can cut taxes dramatically and still maintain services because what he argued was that if you cut taxes, there would be such extraordinary investment, private investment in the economy, that the economy would grow hugely and the taxes that remained on that economic growth would be enough to continue to power all the other ways, uh, that people wanted the government to act. And even when he talked about it, people thought he, it wasn't going to work. And if you remember, if you're old enough to remember, the man who became his vice president, George H.W. Bush, called what he was talking about "voodoo economics." That's what he meant. He's like, "This doesn't work. This is voodoo economics." Well, in fact, it was voodoo economics. It's never actually worked. Never significantly gooseed, um, economic growth, and it never produced the kind of tax revenue it was supposed to. But it became sort of this article of faith among the Republicans that if you cut taxes, you were going to create economic growth that was going to make it possible to continue to have services, even though you weren't really getting, uh, you know, you weren't really, um, taxing corporations and the very wealthy.
And what's happened since 1981, between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But the first set of tax cuts happens in 1981, and the, the, the Republicans want to do another major tax cut in 1986. And they're aware that Americans don't like the cuts to regulations and the cuts to, um, to social programs that have happened in the first of Reagan's terms. So in 1986, the Republican party starts to manipulate the voters so that they can stay in power. And they're not hiding this. They, they talk about ballot integrity, is what they talk about, but they also say that rep, that Democrats are cheating with voter fraud, that that's how they're going to win is through voter fraud. It's always been a rhetorical device. There really, as I keep making the point, there is almost no voter fraud in the United States of America. There has traditionally been a lot of election fraud, which is when you try and steal an election by manipulating the way it works.
So, beginning in '86, they start to talk about ballot integrity, and they start to knock people, uh, talk about knocking, um, Democratic voters off the rolls, primarily black voters. And we have this because there was a lawsuit, and all the, the discovery showed their, their, um, their memos to each other talking about this. And then, uh, they, they quickly realize that they're not, what they're doing is not popular. And after Clinton gets elected in '92, um, because we have the George H.W. Bush presidency, and he says, "Dudes, we got to, we got to stop cutting taxes because look at the deficits, which have tripled under Reagan." And then Clinton gets elected in '92, and in '93, the Democrats, through the Motor Voter Act, make it easier to register to vote. And that really sends the, the radical Republicans sort of ballistic, saying they're planning to cheat, they're planning to cheat. And in '94, they accuse two Democrats of a rep, a senator and a member of the House of Representatives of cheating in order to, um, to be elected. And they hold open these investigations to prove that there was voter fraud going on. And they never turn anything up, but they keep it in the news all the time. And that's where you really start to see that pattern of using investigations to seed the idea of malfeasance on the part of the Democrats, um, just to sort of, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire, so we're going to keep this investigation going.
But what happens is that, um, you start to see this idea, and then of course, they impeach Clinton and expect that that's going to kill his candidacy. I mean, his presidency. And in fact, he's more powerful after the impeachment, more popular after the impeachment than he is before it. So anyway, they don't expect, um, after the election of, uh, 2000, when you get George W. Bush, that, um, that Americans are ever going to go back to the, the Democrats. And they're really thinking that this is going to be a permanent Republican majority and so on. And then voters elect Barack Obama. And this is a crisis for the radical Republican party in a number of different ways. But one of the ways in which it is a huge crisis is that they really thought they had a permanent lock on the presidency. And even to the point that, you know, the, the George W. Bush in 2000 didn't win the, the majority of the popular vote, but they had the popular vote through the electoral, I'm sorry, they had the electoral college. It's very hot here. And, and that, of course, that election that gave the presidency to George W. Bush is thanks to Florida, where more than a thousand people have been kicked off the rolls between 1998 and 2000, in addition to the hanging chads and so on and so forth.
But anyway, Obama gets elected, and this is such a huge crisis. So Obama gets elected in 2008, takes office in 2009. And what the Republicans say then, and these are the, I keep emphasizing that these are not traditional Republicans. These are not George H.W. Bush Republicans. Certainly not Eisenhower Republicans. These are the radicals who took over the party, um, in 2010. They go to their donors and they say, "We can make sure that we cont, we continue to maintain control of Congress even if we're going to lose the, the White House on occasion." And they do it through an something called Operation Red Map. And it stands for, it's, it's Operation is a normal kind of capitalization, but Red Map is all caps. And it stands for the Republican Redistricting Majority Project, Operation Red Map. And what they do is they make sure that the Republicans pour money into state legislatures in 2010. And this would be North Carolina and Michigan and Kansas and Ohio. And there's a lot of them. Um, and what they do is they, North Carolina, did I say that one? They take those states that are purple states and they guarantee that there is a Republican majority in the legislature for the 2010 redistricting. Because remember, according to the Constitution, we have a census every 10 years, and one of the things that census does is it enables the, um, the state legislatures to divvy up the state in districts, um, both for the Congress and for, uh, house, for, for state legislature seats that will enable them to represent the people in that state.
So after 2010, Operation Red Map was in place in, in these states, and they put in place extraordinary gerrymanders. So states like North Carolina, which is really purple. I mean, North Carolina is, is just pretty much 50/50 of a state. The, the Republicans could get the, you know, the vast majority of the seats because of redistricting. So it is a very long way to answer the idea that, um, this is, it was really 2010 when it goes off the charts, and it's been a long time sort of clawing that back in a number of states. But one of the things in those states is that nobody likes this except the people who get elected under it, quite literally. Even the, the Republicans who are advantaged by this, most of them don't want it either because what it does is it means that in a, in a district like Marjorie Taylor Greene's or Lauren Boebert's in, in, uh, Colorado, Colorado, I'm sorry, um, the, the people, you, those might be Republican districts for sure, but the Republicans who live there don't want to be represented by a wacko. They want somebody who shares their principles. But when you have that extremely gerrymandered, uh, district, what the lawmakers are afraid of is not that they will lose to a Democrat. They're worried they will lose to somebody more extreme than them because it is a Republican district. They are going to win. And so what it's done is it's dramatically pushed the Republican party to the right.
So what are you seeing right now? We do, we redistrict every 10 years after the census. And right now, President Donald Trump is trying to get Texas to redistrict now, in the middle of the decade, in such a way that it will enable the Republicans to pick up five more seats, even though there hasn't been a new census or anything. This is purely a power grab. And for the first time, you are seeing Democratic, um, governors saying, "If you do that in, in Florida, I'm sorry, if you do that in Texas, we will do it in California, Illinois, and New York, and we're going to, we're going to get rid of everything you can accomplish with these gerrymanders." And I will point out that, uh, at least one of the gerrymanders that was in place in 20, 2024, I'm all confused about what year we're in, um, was illegal, was found to be illegal, and the, the courts let it stay in place until after the election. And without those gerrymanders in those states, um, the, the Republicans would not have control of the House of Representatives. So, it matters. Senate's different, remember, because that's a statewide election. But the House of Representatives is really, is really moved by the, um, by the, the redistricting maps.