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Friday, January 18th, 2013

How Dark Money Helped Republicans Hold the House and Hurt Voters

Author:     OLGA PIERCE, JUSTIN ELLIOTT and THEODORIC MEYER
Source:     ProPublica
Publication Date:     Dec. 21, 2012, 2:36 p.m.
 Link: How Dark Money Helped Republicans Hold the House and Hurt Voters
Stephan:   It is yet further proof, if such were needed about how the Extreme Right of the Republican Party has been gnawing away at the foundations of American democracy. They aren't really even trying to hide it. Wednesday the Republican State Leadership Committee issued a report saying: 'President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents. But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress. How? One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. [T]he Republican firewall at the state legislative and congressional level held.' Here is the story of how this happened. Click through to see the chart.

In the November election, a million more Americans voted for Democrats seeking election to the U.S. House of Representatives than Republicans. But that popular vote advantage did not result in control of the chamber. Instead, despite getting fewer votes, Republicans have maintained a commanding control of the House. Such a disparity has happened only three times in the last century.

(Here’s a chart comparing 2010 and 2012.)

Analysts and others have identified redistricting as a key to the disparity. Republicans had a years-long strategy of winning state houses in order to control each state’s once-a-decade redistricting process. (Confused about redistricting? Check out our song.)

Republican strategist Karl Rove laid out the approach in a Wall Street Journal column in early 2010 headlined ‘He who controls redistricting can control Congress.’

The approach paid off. In 2010 state races, Republicans picked up 675 legislative seats, gaining complete control of 12 state legislatures. As a result, the GOP oversaw redrawing of lines for four times as many congressional districts as Democrats.

How did they dominate redistricting? A ProPublica investigation has found that the GOP relied on opaque nonprofits funded by dark money, supposedly nonpartisan campaign outfits, and millions in corporate donations to achieve Republican-friendly maps throughout the country. […]

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