I was coming home tonight listening to NPR when Karen Duffin reminded me of the old story of Chris Jankowski who perfected targeted smear campaigns based on wanton lies that blindsided candidates and derailed many campaigns. The man is quite proud of himself and his stealth effort, being the amoral creature of obsessive self-interest that he is.
The other thing to get out of this is how inept the DNC has been to confront such efforts and to come up with a clear message that enunciates the need for a rededication to rationally resolving problems based on truthful facts and a bit of respect for each other's humanity.
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Posted by Aaron Keck | Mar 7, 2017 | The Hill, 97.9 WCHL, Chapelboro, NC
Author of “The Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Democracy,” David Daley speaks with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.
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June 15, 2018, Karen Duffin, All Things Considered
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November 28, 2016, Melissa Sandgren, Huffington Post
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October 31, 2016, Fusion TV, Naked Truth
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June 27, 2016 Issue, By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker
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June 15, 2016, Dave Davies, Fresh Air Interview, NPR, 32:12 min
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June 13, 2016, Paul Rosenberg, Salon
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April 24, 2016, David Daley, ELECTION 2016, The New Yorker
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Apr 5, 2014, Winston-Salem Journal, The Associated Press
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November 11, 2013, By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
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October 10, 2013, By Michael Sargeant,
Below the fold I share quotes from the above listed articles.
How A Political Consultant Changed Voting Districts Nationally
As the Supreme Court is set to rule on two gerrymandering cases, NPR's Planet Money looks at how one political consultant changed the national maps by investing in state elections. …
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March 7, 2017, Posted by Aaron Keck | The Hill, 97.9 WCHL Chapelboro, N.C.
Gerrymandering: New Book Explores How GOP Took Over – And Why It Might Not Last
Author of “The Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Democracy,” David Daley speaks with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.
The 2010 midterm election was a sweep year for the Republican Party, with big GOP gains in state legislatures as well as Congress. The following year, after the 2010 census, those state legislatures – now GOP-controlled – got to redraw legislative district lines across the country. The maps they drew – using increasingly sophisticated precinct-level voting data – effectively guaranteed GOP super-majorities in state legislatures nationwide, even in evenly-split “purple” states like North Carolina.
And a new book by a UNC alum contends that this was a deliberate strategy from the beginning.
The book is called “Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.” (The title refers to a Nixon-era term for dirty tricks.)
Written by former Salon.com editor-in-chief David Daley, “Ratf**ked” describes how a small group of key players worked behind the scenes to redraw the nation’s district maps to lock in a GOP legislative majority. (It was called the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP – and it wasn’t illegal, or even all that secret. REDMAP’s architect, Chris Jankowski, happily cooperated with Daley on the book, and Daley says they’re still collaborating on future projects.)
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July 17, 2017, By David Daley • American Conservative
This is Why the GOP House is Safe in 2018
But the legacy of REDMAP may be darker than you thought.
The question on my mind for months—as Trump vanquished the GOP field and dispatched the likes of Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush; threatened to torch the Republican Party; and jeopardized seemingly insurmountable Republican legislative majorities—has been whether Jankowski has been tossing and turning in fear not only that Trump would destroy his handiwork, but that his REDMAP strategy set this Frankenstein-monster-turned-president loose. Donald Trump’s election did not occur for any one reason. But many key factors—an angry and empowered conservative base, frustration with Washington gridlock and dysfunction, the evolution of the GOP into a largely white party, the decline of common ground in our political debates, the siloing of Americans into red and blue and the disappearance of the middle— were all exacerbated or fueled by REDMAP’s radical redistricting.
CC: No where do they mention that a healthy civil functioning society requires constructively and rationally dealing with real problems. Which is something that requires all of us to honestly represent our opponent’s positions. But, seems honesty and the concept of being truthful doesn’t show up on their radar at all, everything is reduced to self-interest and winning.
Thus the GOP has sold its soul to the Devil and dedicated itself to EGO and malicious campaigns based on strategically manufactured lies dedicated to committing wanton cold blooded character assassination against all opponents. Now with the absolutist Trump Cult, they are on steroids.
In a time when truth has been reduced to irrelevance, tell me America isn’t in the middle of its most threatening Constitutional Crisis in modern times!
The only thing standing between us and Trump’s World - of obsessive paranoia and a vicious delusional war against Intellectual Enlightenment and Progressive Ideals - is this November’s Election.
Remember this Election is the only time every two years that your opinions actually matter to politicians. You can be guaranteed that everyone of the Trump cult will be fired up and voting.
Your vote is desperately needed to loosen trump’s strangle hold and to make a statement, that We The People won’t allow our country to be turned into the oligarchs’ private Corporation of Amerika, which is clearly the GOP’s intention!
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USA's First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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November 28, 2016, Melissa Sandgren, Huffington Post
The Dismantling Of Progressive America. Why The 2018 Elections And 2020 Census Matter.
The 2018 and 2020 elections are critically important, because they align to a “zero” year, or a year when the census is taken. Correlated with every census is the reappropriation and redistricting process of state and federal districts. Sounds boring, right? No. Those who draw the lines, draw the power. In fact, in 2010 - 2011, these powers were so abused that we are now seeing some of this gerrymandering ruled “unconstitutional” by federal district courts. …
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October 31, 2016, Fusion TV, Naked Truth
Even the GOP’s top gerrymanderer says they could ‘pay a price’ for their election tactics
In 2012, Democrats won over 1 million more votes than Republicans in US House races, yet they won only a minority of the congressional seats—201 to the Republicans’ 234. It was Republicans’ second-largest majority since World War II, and only the second time a party won more votes and won fewer House races than their opponents.
Chris Jankowski is partly to thank for that. As a top tactician on the Republican State Leadership Committee, he spent years preparing Republicans for 2010’s post-Census redistricting fight — in which conservatives, long dominant in state legislatures and governors’ mansions, successfully gerrymandered a number of states’ congressional districts to maximize benefits for their own politicians.
“Do I think [partisan redistricting] is fair?” he says. “I think it’s a natural consequence of both parties playing by the rules and maximizing their advantage.”
But Jankowski adds that his work can end up being undemocratic. “I think that it can be taken to the point of being, you know, unfair,” he says. “Do I think there have been overreaches this cycle in the redistricting? Absolutely.” …
To learn more about how political operatives like Jankowski try to engineer election outcomes, watch Rigged and read the full investigation online …
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June 27, 2016 Issue, By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
Drawing the Line
How redistricting turned America from blue to red.
… Today, when party functionaries draw district lines, they have at their disposal detailed census results, precinct-level voter tallies, and a cloud’s worth of consumer choices. The result, David Daley argues in “Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy” (Liveright), is a system so rigged that it hardly matters anymore who’s running for office.
Much of “Ratf**ked” is devoted to a Republican scheme optimistically called redmap, for Redistricting Majority Project. redmap was created in early 2010, at a point when the country’s electoral map was largely blue. In twenty-seven states, …
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June 15, 2016, Dave Davies, Fresh Air Interview, NPR, 32:12 minutes
Understanding Congressional Gerrymandering: 'It's Moneyball Applied To Politics'
Ratf**ked author David Daley says that Republicans targeted key state legislative races in 2010 in an effort to control state houses, and, eventually, Congressional redistricting. …
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June 13, 2016, Paul Rosenberg, Salon
This is how the GOP rigged Congress: The secret plan that handcuffed Obama’s presidency, but backfired in Donald Trump
GOP stole the House with old trick in a brilliant modern form. A new book by Salon’s editor lays out every detail
The Republican Party is in crisis. It's an ongoing story played out in multiple episodes a day in recent weeks, and it's been a growing concern throughout this election cycle.
But the Democratic Party is profoundly broken as well—most notably in the Legislative branch, both in Congress and in state legislatures. After holding the House for four decades, Democrats lost control in the 1994 midterms, and have only held it for four years since then.
The 2010 midterm was even more disastrous than 1994, but with an added twist—it was a census year, meaning that the winners that year could gerrymander themselves into power for a full 10 years. And, of course, that also meant a leg up on controlling the next decade of maps. The Republicans did exactly that in an electoral heist both brazen and dangerous--as a new book by Salon's editor-in-chief David Daley explains …
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April 24, 2016, David Daley, ELECTION 2016, The New Yorker
The House the GOP Built: How Republicans Used Soft Money, Big Data, and High-Tech Mapping to Take Control of Congress and Increase Partisanship
… The annual report by Jankowski’s organization, the Republican State Leadership Committee, laid out the mission for the world to see: “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.”
“Our pitch document said, look, there are 25 true swing congressional districts,” Jankowski told me as we sat in the conference room of his Richmond offices. “We went back to those races from 2002 to 2008, and we found that $115 million had been spent on those 25 congressional races. All hard dollars. We had a graphic on the screen: 115 million hard dollars or $20 million in soft and we can fix it. We can take control of these 25 districts. We can take them off the table.” They called their project REDMAP.
Jankowski’s foresight wasn’t the only factor in the GOP’s ensuing control of Congress. The party was also able to take advantage of massive new amounts of public data drawn from social media that allowed them to pinpoint likely voters with more accuracy than ever before, and advances in mapping technology that made it possible to redraw districts precisely around the location of those voters. …
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April 5, 2014, Winston-Salem Journal, The Associated Press
GOP gambit remade N.C. political map
Even if Democrats recruit great candidates, raise gobs of money and run smart campaigns, they face an uphill fight to retake control of the U.S. House in this year's congressional elections, regardless of the political climate in November.
The reason? Republican strategists across the country spent years developing a plan to take advantage of the 2010 census, first by winning key state legislatures and then redrawing House districts to tilt the playing field in their favor.
In states like Ohio, Michigan and North Carolina, Republicans were able to shape congressional maps to pack as many Democratic voters as possible into the fewest House districts. The process, called gerrymandering, …
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November 11, 2013, By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
How Republicans Rig the Game
As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote.
What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.
How is this possible? National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.
Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, …
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October 10, 2013, By Michael Sargeant, Huffington Post
Finally: A Republican Prediction That Came True
I give credit when Republicans are right.
Following the 2012 elections, when Democrats made historic gains in state legislatures across the country, Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) President Chris Jankowski — whose mission, in part, is to elect Republican state legislators — said, “2012 was about as close to a fair fight as you get, and we lost on operations and tactics. There’s no getting around that.”
He was correct, and I respect his honesty.
This summer, Mr. Jankowski hit the nail on the head again when he presciently wrote that “someday the diverging paths taken by Minnesota and Wisconsin after the 2010 election will make a fascinating political science case study …
… Just like his analysis of the 2012 elections, Mr. Jankowski was completely, 100 percent right. In fact, “someday” may actually be today.
But first, a bit of history. …
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“Intelligent People Debate”
Chris Jankowski
Republican Strategist & former Executive Director, REDMAP Project
Chris Jankowski is a leading Republican strategist in state elections, state policy issues, and state government. In 2010 Jankowski served as the executive director of the REDMAP Project at the Republican State Leadership Committee. This project was a strategic effort to win Republican control of state legislatures immediately prior to the decennial redrawing of Congressional district lines.
Under Jankowski’s direction, Republicans gained control of twenty additional legislative chambers and saw a net gain of approximately 700 state legislative seats. REDMAP is widely credited with providing a strategic advantage in the 2012 Congressional elections, resulting in a 33-seat Republican margin in the 113th Congress. Jankowski went on to serve as president of the RSLC for three years in Washington, D.C. In 2014 Jankowski returned to Richmond, Virginia where he runs a political consulting firm.
Join the Debate:
CC: Ditto my above comment. From what I looked at, ethics; need for honest exchange of information; importance of truthfulness in a civil society, not a blip. All eyes seemed focused on power politics and winning justifies all, more than anything else, though admittedly I had no time to wade through their entire debate, seemed to pointless anyways.
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