Eric Holder is a man with a plan
by Tom Sullivan
With twenty or so Democrats running for president in 2020, it must be lonely being Eric Holder. The former attorney general has taken up the cause of restoring legislative balance to states gerrymandered after the 2010 census. The Republican war on voting has expanded from promoting photo IDs to gerrymandering to rigging the census. Ari Berman reports for Mother Jones that Holder founded the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) to counter efforts to solidify minority Republican control in state after state.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country is absorbed with debates, polls, and candidates' 2020 fundraising. Holder is working on what happens in 2021 when states redraw their state and congressional districts.
The effort stems from hard lessons learned during the Obama administration. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats during Omama's two terms as president while it focused on health care and combating the T-party. Then in 2010, the GOP's $30 million REDMAP effort succeeded in flipping 63 U.S House seats and gaining control of 20 additional state legislative chambers, Berman explains. With control in a series of swing states, plus the help of the Citizens United decision, Republicans could draw "four times as many state legislative and House districts as Democrats."
Democrats fought voter disenfranchisement efforts successfully in the courts for years. But the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and last week's decision that federal courts could not block partisan gerrymandering have blunted accustomed legal tools.
With the help of Obama's Organizing for Action, Holder is belatedly trying to make up for Democrats' missteps. NDRC is organizing to regain control of state legislatures in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina:
When New Jersey Democrats proposed giving legislative leaders more power over the drawing of district lines last year, Holder quickly denounced the plan. “I’m here for a fair process, not to gerrymander for Democrats,” he told me.For years, Berman notes, Democrats did not worry about control of legislatures. A story I have told before illustrates that shortsightedness:
A friend tells a story about visiting the office of leading North Carolina lawmaker before Democrats lost control of the legislature in the 2010 election. She'd some to advocate for nonpartisan redistricting. He listened patiently, then leaned back in his chair and smiled, saying, "Democrats draw great districts." Soon after, they lost the ability to for the first time in decades. The rest, as they say....Holder's efforts to gain attention for the issue today competition as the presidential cycle heats up, drawing both eyeballs and dollars to more high-profile and sexier campaigns. Berman again:
Mark Gersh, a Democratic redistricting expert working with Holder’s group, said the team is “trying to figure out whether Trump’s plummeting popularity and behavior might enable us to go beyond the parts we know we can win, because there’s not enough of them. We won all the low-hanging fruit last time.”It is also harder to recruit Democrats to run, I'd add, in redder districts where there is little support from local Democratic committees both under-skilled and inexperienced in helping candidates win local races. If the most help prospective candidates can expect is money from out-of-district sources, their odds of winning lengthen. Their odds of running shrink as well. They need a competent local ground game behind them, something with which I am somewhat familiar. There is little money available for promoting that, either. It's effective, but it's not sexy.
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Democratic strategists working on down-ballot races say the presidential campaign is siphoning away resources. “It’s harder to recruit people [to run], it’s harder to get attention to these races, it’s harder to raise money for them,” said Amanda Litman, executive director of Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates for local offices. “Quite a few of the donors we work really closely with have been hesitant to reengage, either because they’re tapped out from 2018 or they’re waiting for the presidential race to shake out.”