“North Carolina Democrats could gain two congressional seats under a redistricting proposal promoted by Republican legislative leaders Thursday — but some of them say it is not enough,” the Washington Post reports.
“The new map is one of nearly two dozen proposals offered in recent days by state lawmakers, who began redrawing the lines of the state’s 13 congressional districts after a state court ruled earlier this month that the GOP illegally gerrymandered the lines for partisan gain.”
“North Carolina’s 2020 congressional elections must happen under new maps, a panel of judges ruled Monday evening, saying that the current Republican-drawn maps are unfair to many voters,” the Raleigh News and Observer reports.
“The legislature must now redraw the state’s 13 U.S. House districts. The judge — two Democrats and one Republican from different parts of North Carolina — wrote that the maps show signs of ‘extreme partisan gerrymandering’ which ‘is contrary to the fundamental right of North Carolina citizens to have elections conducted freely and honestly to ascertain, fairly and truthfully, the will of the people.'”
“Monday’s ruling, a preliminary injunction, said the state may not hold any elections for Congress using the current maps passed in 2016.”
“The reach of late Republican gerrymandering mastermind Thomas Hofeller may be longer than previously known,” The Intercept reports.
“While Hofeller was known for drawing maps to give Republicans an advantage and to limit the impact of voters of color in North Carolina, Texas, Missouri, and Virginia, the new documents reveal he also participated in the 2010 redistricting cycle in Alabama, Florida, and West Virginia.”
Newly acquired e-mails and records reveal that Republican Party operative Thomas Hofeller may have unconstitutionally used race data to draw congressional districts in 2016, the New Yorker reports.
“Hofeller’s files include dozens of intensely detailed studies of North Carolina college students, broken down by race and cross-referenced against the state driver’s-license files to determine whether these students likely possessed the proper I.D. to vote. The studies are dated 2014 and 2015, the years before Hofeller helped Republicans in the state redraw its congressional districts in ways that voting-rights groups said discriminated on the basis of race. North Carolina Republicans said that the maps discriminated based on partisanship but not race.”
“Hofeller’s hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps—which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle—might also be a racial gerrymander.”
Politico: “Democrats were caught napping before the last round of redistricting in 2010 — and it cost them control of Congress for nearly a decade. Now Republicans are warning the same thing could happen to them.”
“Senior Republicans concede they’re at risk of losing dozens of state-level elections that will determine who wields power over the post-2020 congressional map — and potentially which party controls the chamber for the following 10 years. While Republicans are establishing a massive national infrastructure devoted to reelecting President Donald Trump and winning congressional majorities, party officials say the state legislative races are being overlooked.”
State judges ruled that North Carolina’s political maps for the state legislature are unconstitutional and must be redrawn before the 2020 elections, the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
Rick Hasen: “This is a huge development that will put the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly in a tough position. Because this is decided as a matter of state constitutional law, it would be very hard to find a federal issue to take this to the United States Supreme Court for reversal.”
Sen. Kamala Harris decried recent immigration raids as part of the Trump administration’s “campaign of terror” that will distort the upcoming 2020 census, Politico reports.
Said Harris: “This administration has directed DHS to conduct these raids as part of what I believe is this administration’s campaign of terror, which is to make whole, whole populations of people afraid to go to work.”
The Week: “The creator of the Ugly Gerry typeface doesn’t identify themself on the Ugly Gerry website or Twitter feed. But they did blatantly call out the congressmembers representing those districts in tweets of each letter, and call on readers to ‘use the font to tell Congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.'”
“Republicans are suing to stop Michigan’s new citizen redistricting commission before it begins, alleging the voter-approved amendment is ‘blatantly unconstitutional’ and discriminates against participants based on political service or family ties,” the Detroit News reports.
“The amendment to the Michigan Constitution prohibits participation by anyone who in the last six years was a partisan candidate, elected official, political appointee, lobbyist, campaign consultant and officer or member of the governing body of a political party. It also excludes a parent, child or spouse of any of those individuals.”
Wisconsin Examiner: “Now Democrats and fair-maps advocates are worried that Republicans might make an end-run around Evers by means of a joint resolution, passing a new map through the Assembly and Senate. Because joint resolutions do not require the governor’s signature, the map could go into effect without any input from the governor.”
“The Trump administration has few realistic options to get a citizenship question onto next year’s census, but by keeping the issue in the public eye it could still trigger an undercount of residents in Democratic-leaning areas,” Reuters reports.
“Constant media coverage linking citizenship and census forms could scare undocumented immigrants away from responding and rally U.S. President Donald Trump’s base to participate, they said. That, in turn, would help redraw voting districts across the country in favor of his Republican party, encouraging the president to pursue a legal battle that he has little chance of winning.”
Washington Post: The Trump administration has changed its story on the census citizenship question at least 10 times in four months.
“President Trump just explained why he thinks we need a citizenship question on the census. But in doing so, he seems to have said the quiet part out loud — and conceivably could have undercut the Justice Department’s legal case,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “No. 1, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting. You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons.”
“Take note of that first one. Not only was a redistricting rationale not mentioned by the administration in its failed legal defense of the question; it was actually something that the other side argued was the administration’s true motivation. The plaintiffs in the case — and many who oppose the citizenship question — have argued that this is a thinly veiled attempt by Republicans to gain a potential game-changing tool in redistricting.”
New York Times: “While much of the country’s attention is focused on presidential politics, the gerrymandering ruling last week instantly raised the stakes for the nation’s state legislative races, which are often overlooked by voters, but can shape the course of policy from abortion rights to education.”
“Yet this cycle of legislative elections carries added significance: In most states, the political party that wins control of the legislature gains the power to draw once-a-decade maps setting district boundaries for state and congressional elections after a new census count. Acutely aware of that prize, which offers a chance to tilt political power further in one party’s favor, Republicans and Democrats are starting campaigns early, knocking on doors and rallying donors with the pitch that a tiny statehouse election in suburban Dallas or coastal Virginia could have national reverberations.”
Vox: Inside the battle to flip America’s state legislatures blue in 2020.
“The Justice Department said Wednesday that the government is looking for a way to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, just one day after it said it would drop that effort and was printing the form without it,” the Washington Post reports
}The course reversal came just hours after President Trump said he was ‘absolutely moving forward’ with adding the question, in a tweet that seemed to catch government lawyers off guard as they were summoned by two federal judges to explain the administration’s change of heart.”
“The Trump administration said Tuesday that it would be printing forms for the 2020 census without a question asking about citizenship, abandoning its quest to add the query after being blocked last week by the Supreme Court,” the New York Times reports.
“The decision is a victory for critics who said the question was part of an administration effort to skew the census results in favor of Republicans.”
Kevin Drum: “It seems like we don’t get good news very often these days. It’s nice to finally hear some.”
Rick Hasen: “The Supreme Court decision on Thursday in Rucho v. Common Cause purports to take federal courts out of the business of policingpartisan gerrymanders and leave the issue for states to handle.”
“But the decision will instead push federal courts further into the political thicket, and, in states with substantial minority voter populations, force courts to make logically impossible determinations about whether racial reasons or partisan motives predominate when a party gerrymanders for political advantage. It didn’t have to be this way.”
Former Reps. Steve Israel (D-NY) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) write in The Atlantic:
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution doesn’t bar even extreme partisan gerrymandering is the worst election-related decision since Citizens United, which in 2010 opened the floodgates for corporate money in campaigns. The Court just stacked the deck in favor of parties over voters—and laid the groundwork for yet more polarization.”
“President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials more time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump’s announcement, in a tweet sent from Japan, came hours after the Supreme Court put on hold his administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, saying it had provided a ‘contrived’ reason for wanting the information.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.