Ebook and 5 off lit fest merchandise. Todays program will be broadcast live on cspan2s booktv. T if theres time at the end for a q a session with the author, we ask you to use the microphone locateed to your right. Before we begin todays program, we ask that you silence your cell phones and turn off yourdi cameras flashes. Please welcome associate professor at the university of chicago and todays interviewer, jean daley. [applause] hi, thank you. I am here with david daley, no relationing, who is the no relation, who is the editorinchief of salon and has published this new book. Theres been some controversy on how to say the title, but i think im just going to say rat fd. So thats quite a story. You tell us a bit about how you came to write the story. Absolutely, thank you. What really interested me was my own confusion over what happened in 2012. You have a president who was reelected with 332 electoral votes by 206, wins the popular vote by some 3. 5 million, the democrats take 25 of 33 senate seats up that year. They win the popular vote for the house of representatives in3 the aggregate by 1. 4 million, and that moved seven seats, and the republicans retained a seves 235205 majority. And as we all know, the house had become the key obstruction ist lever in the republican plan to block the obama agenda. And this was the First Time Since 1972 that the party that won the most votes in the aggregate did not, as a result, take control of the chamber. And i was curious to find out why. And as you look into it, your. Understand that there was an active plan put into place by the republicans during the election of 2010 and then followed up during the remapping of 2011 that radicallyelection reinvented gerrymandering in a brand new way and used it as a blunt tool of partisan force and remapped america. Right. So youre saying every ten years we have the census. The Congressional District lines are redrawn, and you Say Something this is something that happens every ten years. But youre saying that whatss happened in 2010 was different in kind from all of the other decennial remappings. Zero years always reverberate longer because the census mandates that every seat in state and federal legislative bodies be redrawn based on population. And jerry mearnding gerrymandering, as a tool, goes back to 1790. Its an ancient political dark art and has been used by both parties throughout that time. You know, sometimes in roguish ways but sometimes as an incumbent protection racket, other times as a way to shiv a political enemy. But what happened in 2010 was fundamentally different from any of the previous gerrymanders over the last 210 years. Its a combination of the dark money unleashed by citizens united, its brand new technological mapping tools that allow you to draw these lines with precision that you could have never before imagined. I mean, think of the different ways we texted each other in 2000 versus the way we did on a smartphone in 2010, and that is the kind of advances that you saw in Mapping Technology over those years. Between 1990 and 2000, even in those years youre still using par be. Ment to parchment to draw these lines and slow computers. Right. The technological weapons available changed it as did a really brilliant strategy by a handful of republican strategists. Right. So lets talk a little bit about that strategy and also what kind of data theyre putting into these programs. Because its not just how many registered voters there are, you know, how many people. Youre supposed to just count the people, right . So tell us a little bit about who are these people behind the 2010 gerrymander and whats thee data that theyre working with. What you have to do is you have to go back to the night that barack obama is elected president in 2008. Right down the road here in grant park, theres a tremendous celebration. And on television that night everybody pronounced the Republican Party dead, that the looming demographics were going to roll them over. 2008 was the fourth president ial election out of five that theyd lost the popular vote. On tv even the republican pundits are wringing their hands in disbelief at what has happened. The following summer chris genachowski, who is a brilliant southern strategist, is reading a story in the new york times, and he comes across a note about how 2010 is a census year, and what he already knows is president s tend to lose seats in a midterm year. And he says, boy, if i coulddy understand the redistricting process in all of these states, and if i could raise the money to go in and influence and flip state legislative chambers statf by state, we could radically alter the map were fighting on. And when you draw the map, you make the rules. And that is what they did. They identified about eight states that well, there were many more than that, but there were about eight states in which they had the most impact. And these are, essentially, you know, blue or purple states like ohio or michigan and wisconsin, North Carolina, florida. And in some ways it was the greatest political heist in history because for just 30 million, thats all it cost, they were able to go in and run negative ads in all of these, you know, small state legislative districts that weree not used to seeing that kind of money come in. And for a song, they were ablee to draw new maps and build themselves a firewall for the next decade. For a time they were able to draw new maps and build themselves a firewall for the next decade. So they use the money, they elected republicans to state legislator and then those peoplemake. Of those people in 2011, once you had control of the chambers and control of the process in each of these individual states, they hired brilliant mapping firms and people who really understand how every line matters. I went out and drove a bunch of these districts and you can see, turn by turn, exactly why they did some of these things that they did. On the map when you look at some of these districts they seem insane, it looks like a roche a test of some sort. The actual true meaning and intent of it all when you get close up is staggering. So you make a strong claim in the book that the intent behind the Republican Redistricting process was not simply to protecting covenants, which is the oldfashioned way, politicians dont like competition, they dont want to run for reelection every two years, they would rather have us a seat and we have seen instances of that, sternly by both parties in the past. Youre making a. Youre making a bigger claim than that. You are suggesting that the republican operatives who did this went in with the intent to erode popular democracy. The goal was nothing less than to build a firewall against popular democracy, yes. It held because in 2012 again, 1. 4 million more people vote for Democratic Candidates the republican candidates and they managed to hold onto the house thanks to this a plan that they enacted. What americans go to the voting booth and they express disfavor with the party in power and nothing happens, that is a deeply dangerous problem for a participatory democracy. You have a story about how the districts are done, a North Carolina district that has asheville in its, can you tell us, one of the things that happen particularly in the south is that moderate southern democrats, which is a must always synonymous with white southern democrats in that part of the country, have become extinct. Its true. Theyre pretty much entirely gone. There has been a twopart strategy that turn the south republican. The first piece of this begins in 1989, 1990 when out water takes on the Republican National committee and he hires a new counsel main name to ben ginsberg. Ginsberg says theyre going to do something about redistricting. What they come up with was dubbed the unholy alliance. It was an alliance between democrats in the south who were eager to increase the representation in congress and republicans with a lot of money and newfangled computer programs, and they worked together in many states in order to what was the interest of the black democrats working, it does some i cannot holy alliance. Well, they are able to build the africanamerican caucus in congress to the highest level since after reconstruction in 1992, 1994. Two, 1994. But the cost of that was that the republicans took many more seats so state like North Carolina which had been eightfour democrats with the 12 members, suddenly flipped eight for the other way. You pack all of the democratic voters into a couple of districts, you give yourself the rest. And so thats because the Voting Rights act. The Voting Rights act. Where you want to have these majority, minority district so you end up with all of the black democrats put into one circle and then what everybody else, and youre suggesting that black democrats actively cooperated with that plan. In many cases they did. You can understand why, africanamericans were probably one of the most essential voting blocs in the demand Democratic Party but there are radically underrepresented. But its a couple gated arrangement. Theres winners and losers of all. So lets talk about some of the winners and losers because one of the big losers at the moment is the Republican Party itself. You have talked to me about to the unintended consequences of some of this brand, this grand strategy for the Republican Party. Well, i think what happened is they created a caucus that they could not control. You mentioned asheville, what happened in asheville in 2010, asheville was represented by a moderate represented by a moderate conservative democrat named schuyler, when they redraw the line schuyler takes a look at the district and says i cant win here and knows it. He retires. He is replaced by a tea Party Conservative name to market meadows, who runs on a very angry campaign against barack obama and suggest he was born in kenya and months to send him back there. It is a horrible, horrible, ugly campaign. Meadows wins this district which is created because they cracked asheville and have a put half of the democratic votes in one city, im sorry in one district, and put the other. So divide and conquer. Exactly. Called cracking. And meadows gets elected and he becomes the renegade republican who makes the parliamentary move that ends up on boehner. This is where it gets good. So essentially what happens is the republicans creates noncompetitive districts across the country, in which the only election that matters is the republican primary. And as a result you end up with a different breed and they are not controlled by boehner and are barely controllable by paul ryan and the tenor and the tone of congress changes. When elections dont matter. So these are the guys and. , taliban. And they are also all white. And disproportionately to the south. These are the people who brought you, lets shut down over the debt ceiling. And theyre trying to investigate benghazi again and again. A medic came to lets overturn john boehner as a speaker of our party. You talk with meadows about the tenor of the elections and the language that is common for this extreme fashion of the Republican Party thats the core of the Republican Party. When you have a meadows c say elect me working to send barack obama back to kenya. That sounds to me like it just creates a nice path for our presumptive nominee. Its the republican Presumptive Republican nominee as if nobody can bring themselves to say. Thats exactly right you can draw line from the line they return congress to the presumptive nomination of donald trump. The Republican Party empowered their angriest, whitest space. They purged all the moderates and they created these districts that are so noncompetitive that you do not have to speak to the rest of the country. We have lost the art of persuasion, of trying to convince somebody else that your cases correct. Now that we are down to a dangerous handful of competitive districts in this country, maybe its two dozen, you dont have to talk to anybody on the other side. So you can completely understand how an angry white base might want to build a wall that is a beautiful and huge. So, you talk about this been republican strategy and it was a grand republican strategy that they were going to take the house, perpetually. There are then going to elect a republican president and that republican president in the senate wouldnt act the house agenda, the paul ryan agenda, we have Grover Norquist up at the very nicely about looking at 2012. He says looking at 2016 all republicans have to do is we just need a president assigned this stuff. Pick a republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. Thats the strategy. How is it working out for them . They thought thought it was going to work out perfectly. Paul ryan thought that he could be president as speaker of the house, essentially. It has not happened. First you have a caucus that may or may not even be on board with elements of the ryan agenda. Then essentially, all of the president s with working digits to hand over a pen that the establishment favored, whether that was jab bush, chris christie, john kasich, marco rubio, or scott walker, kasich, marco rubio, or scott walker, or anybody they thought would essentially execute the ryan agenda from the other side of pennsylvania avenue, we saw how they did, they crashed and burned. Now they have a nominee a nominee with small handholding. [laughter] i think in some ways that is the real concern that the Republican Party has with donald trump right now. I think it is probably naive to think that the party that created the southern strategy is all that upset at what he calls a judge. What concerns them is they dont know if he will execute the ryan agenda if elected. It seems like one issue that was really have been seen with Republican Party this year is reluctance to acknowledge the separation of powers in our republican, with a small are come our republican government. So we have a senate who will not a hearing to a Supreme Court nominee, nominated as per the constitution by a sitting president. We have a president who has resorted to stretching some of the executive powers in the face of the congress that will not do anything that he wants. Donald trump is promising the impossible. To the people who are voting for him. He just stands up and says im going to do this, im going to do that. They seem to either believe it, or like it, people are comparing him to a strongman which is apparently what the voters, for him, want. I think the success of wave of more deeply conservative republicans have made these promises that they were going to take care of obama care. That they were going to do something about immigration. And it did not happen. Because of separation and powers. They kept winning majorities and elections for now and they never delivered on things that they said there were going to. Even after rigging the game. So as a result, that angry base gets even angrier and someone comes along and says im going to do this and people are willing to give that a listen. People are also not interested in the jabs and other republican candidates that crush of her this year. They have seen that before, they did not trust it, they did not buy it. Again, you talk about this as a strategy for the republicans. They went into this with the goal of permanently maintaining control of the house which requires enunciation of participatory democracy. You talk to these people, the architects architects of this, do they seem bothered by the fact that they are undermining participatory democracy in the United States . They think think they were doing their jobs. Frankly. There is a gentleman who spent a lot of time with me knowing that i had different Political Parties than him, and i asked him that question. I said well, is this fair . And he said yes, i was doing my job, the other side was not doing theirs. He is completely right about that. This was a strategic failure on the part of the Democratic Party. They did not have the imagination or vision to see this coming even when karl rove announces the strategy in the pages of the wall street journal in march of 2010. He says, we he says, were going into the state legislative districts with the goal of effecting redistricting next year. Maybe the democrats dont read the wall street journal, i dont know. Hopefully they are all reading where were you guys on the story . So they simply did not plan, when he tells me in september and october that he is wondering where the democrats are. Hes in the state spending money and working on campaigns of theres no opposition. Steve israel steve israel who took over the Democratic Campaign committee after this a debacle for the democrats in 2011 theyre saying the dnc was whistling past the graveyard. They did not have the strategic mine to comprehend what was happening or the ability to block it even when the Republican Party announced a plan in big, flashing neon lights. That is disturbing. You do wonder what the democrats are thinking or what theyre doing. Its malpractice. So its political malpractice buyer Democratic Leaders like nancy pelosi. Why didnt they do anything . On one hand i think they lacked the imagination to see this because it had not been done before. Perhaps they simply did not imagine a. Nancy pelosi was in it very safe district, she she does not have to think really about redistricting. The democrats who, over, over the years did raise alarms about this or guys like john tainer tennessee, were or martin from texas. There were democrats in Southern States he recognized what was happening and wanted to do something about it. Nancy pelosi were less interested in it. They had opportunities. John tanner had a national, nonpartisan redistricting plan that he introduced i believe three congresses in a row including the two that democra