Gerrymandering is a way bigger deal than you already thought

This is a quick one: subscribe to Hari Kondabolu and W. Kamu Bell’s new podcast Politically Reactive. They’re only a few episodes in, but they’ve already hit a stride with a ton of super interesting guests. My favorite episodes so far are the Shane Bauer interview (he’s the Mother Jones reporter that went deep undercover to work in a private prison), and the Dream Hampton’s interview where she drops the mic on more subjects than I could count.

The latest episode is an interview with David Daley about his book “Ratfucked” which is about gerrymandering, and sure, it sounds extremely boring on the surface, but it is one of the most fascinating episodes they’ve done yet.

Here’s a quick summary of the highlights from this interview, each of which was enough to blow my mind, but all of them in total were so eye-opening that I wrote this up.

• Gerrymandering goes back to 1788, as politicians tried to re-draw voting district lines in the US to benefit their future elections.
• Gerrymandering was pretty standard from 1788–2010, and changed specifically in 2010 in a targeted campaign by the GOP.
• Redistricting happens every 10 years based on census, so getting control of state houses is vital to getting to redraw lines.
• The GOP figured out there were 18 states in the US in 2010 where control of the house could tip towards GOP if they won only 4 seats or less.
• Karl Rove helped push this initiative.
• The GIS app Maptitude lets you overlay voting data with demographics data, so once in control of states in a mid-term election year, they could redraw districts street by street based on strong-GOP aligned demographics data.
• Example of post-2010 gerrymandering: Michigan counted 240,000 more votes for democrats in state-wide elections but 9 of 14 congressional seats went to republicans that same year, due to gerrymandering.
• Redistricting by the GOP splits liberal cities with conservative suburbs while collecting all african-american neighborhoods into single voting blocs surrounded by older, white GOP-voting districts.
• 22 states have new voter ID laws on the books, 20 of those states are controlled by the GOP, who want to suppress voting.

It’s an interview that is worth listening to from end to end, and highlights how a surprise takeover at the state level has lead to polarized elections where things like the tea party and Trump can flourish even if the majority strongly oppose such ideas.