Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years.

They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide,
even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes.
They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.

Perhaps most importantly, they have entrenched hard-right lawmakers and insulated them from the ballot box,
allowing them to enact conservative policies on reproductive rights and public education that are rejected by majorities of voters.

Now Texas Republicans,
spurred by Donald Trump,
have readied a brazen mid-decade power grab
that would award them as many as five additional seats in Congress.

This would be a dramatic boost heading into the midterms,
since the GOP only holds a three-seat majority.

California has threatened to retaliate with a mid-decade redraw of its own.
Other blue state governors are talking tough as well.

But Republicans have more targets.
They won’t stop in Texas.
They will probably redraw Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and Florida as well.

How did we get here?
How did gerrymandered lines, rather than voters, gain the power to determine winners and losers?

The modern story really begins in 2008
with the election of Barack Obama
and a blue wave that delivered Democrats trifecta power and even a US Senate supermajority.

On television that election night,
even the sharpest Republican analysts spoke of unbreakable emerging coalitions and demographic changes
that could provide Democrats with majorities for a generation.

It didn’t exactly work that way.

💥A handful of savvy Republican strategists recognized that while 2008 may have been historic, 2010 could be much more consequential.

It would be a census year.

And after every census, the nation redistricts every state legislature and US House seat.

A lightbulb went off at the Republican state leadership committee (RSLC).

Executive director Chris Jankowski recognized the opportunity first:
target states where the legislature controls redistricting.

Pour millions into underfunded state legislative races.

Drown Democratic incumbents.

Flip as many chambers as possible.

Redraw the lines.

If Republicans could pull it off,
they would go from demographically challenged to the catbird seat for a decade.

“We should do this,” Jankowski remembered, in an interview for my book Ratf**ked.

“I think we can get millions – and you don’t have to do anything other than what you were going to do anyway.”

They called this #Redmap,
short for the Redistricting Majority Project.

It transformed the nation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/09/gerrymandering-republican-redistricting?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Important info and resource for any #USAmericans opposed to #Republican #gerrymandering, copied verbatim [except square bracket clarifications and hashtags] from Cory Doctorow on tumblr ( https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/190105888450/the-estranged-anarchist-daughter-of-the-republican )

* The estranged #anarchist daughter of the Republican gerrymandering mastermind inherited and dumped all his files

Thomas #Hofeller was the mastermind behind #REDMAP, the [tool] used by Republican dirty-tricksters to redraw state electoral maps after the 2010 census in order to deliver state and federal legislative seats to Republicans even when the majority of people voted Democrats.

Hofeller was a secretive sociopath and had long been estranged from his daughter, Stephanie, a self-described anarchist who only discovered her father had died in 2018 when she read the obit pages of the New York Times. When Stephanie recovered her father's possessions from his home, she came into possession of files detailing the REDMAP plans, files of the sort that he had long exhorted his co-conspirators not to create or retain.

Stephanie turned some of her father's files over to the government watchdog Common Cause for use in a lawsuit over North Carolina's redistricting; thanks to the frank admission of racially motivated voter suppression in Thomas's files, the court found that NC's redistricting was illegal.

Now, Stephanie has licensed all her father's files under an unspecified Creative Commons license [ http://www.thehofellerfiles.com/ ] and dumped them on Google Drive [ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Pw3lc2QPJ-eEeHszCdcfjbe3uZC1DbKz ] for anyone to use, exhorting others to "download and distribute this material, at will. It’s yours (be nice)."

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/06/gops-worst-nightmare.html

It is tiresome to see US Democrats and progressives lauding Republicans such as #Cheney.

These are precisely the type of persons who spent half a century getting the US to where it is today: #RedMap, #SouthernStrategy, #TeaParty, #CitizensUnited, #FreedomCaucus … they sowed ignorance, racism, conspiracy, and Abrahamic poppycock, and are now flabbergasted that …

"The Spirits they have summoned, their commands ignore."

J.W.v.Goethe, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

https://youtu.be/Nm3Gf8jKfFg #mtcross