Ratf**ked : the true story behind the secret plan to steal America's democracy /

MOST AMERICANS ARE probably familiar with the, ahem, vibrant title of this book thanks to a copy (print or DVD) of Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men," a term employed equally by conniving frat boys and Nixon-era political strategists to denote fraudulent election shenanigans. But the practical implications of the word today would make the very same Watergate baddies blush. In his new book, David Daley, the editor in chief of Salon, describes what the Republican strategist Ben Ginsberg has called "Project Rat_the strategy of shadowy (but thus far legal) packing, splicing and dicing of congressional districts to secure Republican domination and, in turn, subvert the will of the American voter. In its more modest form of gerrymandering, the practice has been in play for decades and used by both parties alike. But Daley proposes that this particular strain of manipulation is unprecedented in its sophistication, its permanence and its virulence. Of the myriad theories about why, precisely, American democracy seems so broken - increasing socioeconomic divides, media bifurcation, voter suppression efforts - Daley points to this Republican-led district distortion as the truly original sin, and the one from which our democracy is unlikely to recover anytime soon. He illustrates this using the examples of six grossly manipulated states: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin, where the drawing of district lines has been rigged to such a perverted degree that the resulting congressional delegation bears little resemblance to the actual votes cast. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a league of largely unknown but nonetheless hugely influential local politicians and strategists who, beginning mostly in 2010, on the heels of the last census, engage in a variety of nefarious and oftentimes comedically crooked practices to subvert electoral reality. There are off-site bunkers, duped innocents and wild smear campaigns, including one that accuses a Democratic rival of trying to build a $600 million "Taj Mahal library" in honor of former Senator Arlen Specter. Assisted by increasingly sophisticated technology (there is a brief but intriguing chapter on mapmaking) and mountains of voter information data (including party affiliation, education levels and commute times), these (mostly) men have collected and analyzed the figures to draw preferential maps, funded by post-Citizens United dark money, and supported in their efforts by Republican governors and conservative courts. Democrats and likely Democrats have been systematically packed together to ensure landslide victories in a handful of districts, sometimes with the help of underrepresented Democratic minorities looking to secure a seat in Congress - a shortsighted strategy of tragic proportions. Republican voters and those leaning conservative, in turn, have been spread out to maximize their voting power across as much territory as possible. Sandra Day O'Connor referred to the separation by race, which often amounts to separation by party affiliation, as "political apartheid," and indeed, the carve-outs are exotic and pernicious. Pennsylvania's Seventh District, thanks to this manipulation, is drawn in such a way that it looks like "Donald Duck kicking Goofy." While the metaphor is funny, it's also devastating: This is not what the founders meant by "a more perfect union." As for the results? In the election of 2012, Barack Obama won the state of Pennsylvania with 52 percent of the vote. Democratic House candidates won 51 percent of the vote. But Democratic House candidates won only 28 percent of the state's seats. In North Carolina, Democratic House candidates won 50.6 percent of the vote, but Republicans seized 9 of the 13 congressional seats. By 2014, they would have 10. The list goes on. Beyond the partisan distortion, this mutilation has had the secondary but no less cancerous effect of making congressional districts deeply homogeneous. The Republican-favored landscape has given rise to the phenomenon of disruptive primary challenges from within the Grand Old Party. With no reward for work conducted across the aisle, Congress has turned from a place of compromise to one of extremism, as representatives fight to protect their right flanks. Daley argues that this is the reason our legislative branch refuses to act on issues including gun control, climate change and college debt - issues with broad national support, but ones that offer little reward for Republican representatives seeking to hold their own in a hostile, conservative environment back home. The book is disheartening and enraging in equal measure - and also occasionally dull, as when the numerous stories of electoral manipulation seem to repeat themselves. But where should the reader channel his or her anger? Certainly the Republican Party's audacity is worthy of indignation, but its strategic expenditures and long-term focus are impressive, enviable even - especially in comparison with the bumbling Democrats, who seem to have been blindsided by the G.O.P.'s takeover. One Ohio-based election scholar says: "I'm not being partisan here. I'm just making an observation that the Democrats have been dumb about aE this for a long time." Daley would seem to agree and suggests that the left remains ill equipped to counterattack - and ill disposed toward what would be better yet: to remove the drawing of congressional lines entirely from political hands and be done with the whole sordid mess. Instead, these distorted, Rorschachian districts are likely to continue to plague our democracy until the next census in 2020, and possibly for some time thereafter. While the work is extraordinary timely and undeniably important, Daley's argument is perhaps a bit too zealous. No doubt this sinister practice has effectively destroyed congressional cooperation, but one has to wonder, especially this election year, whether America's partisan divide really is simply the result of nefarious mapmaking. The rise of an angry, inchoate political force - one that has not only bucked party orthodoxy but maintained widespread grass-roots support - would seem to lend credence to the idea that progress on big-ticket issues relating to the environment and economy is not stalled just because of this miserable redistricting process, but indeed because of a growing and seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the haves and have-nots, urbanites and ruralists, insiders and outsiders. Then again, come Nov. 8, someone will be tasked with trying to put the country back together, and perhaps these warped districts are exactly the place to start. ALEX WAGNER is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

The 2010 election cycle was far more consequential than either of the previous two presidential races. The Republican Party, whose candidates took over 26 state legislatures and 29 state governorships that year, gained not only the power to pass laws and write budgets as they saw fit but also nabbed the real prize-the ability to redraw their states' legislative district lines. This power, ostensibly to assure proportional representation in an evolving population, has been so thoroughly taken over by partisanship and high-tech gerrymandering that, according to Daley (editor in chief, Salon), legislators have ever greater sovereignty to pick their own voters. Daley takes a hard look at the most recent district reshuffling and places it into historical context. He examines the realignment process in several states, primarily ones with a nearly evenly divided electorate that tipped just to the right in the 2010 midterm elections, and finds the myriad ways state legislators (or supposedly nonpartisan boards) used inside baseball and advanced mapping software to carve out districts favoring Republican legislators. VERDICT Liberal readers will find much to chew on in this book, an early warning to prepare for the next round of redistricting. [See Prepub Alert, 1/4/16.]-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An alarming study of the GOP's redrawing of the American political map across the country. According to Salon editor-in-chief Daley, while Democrats were celebrating President Barack Obama's victory in 2008, they took their eyes off the important state legislatures, especially in key swing states. Subsequently, the defeated Republicans were already hatching nefarious plans to turn the "disaster into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census." According to law, every state redraws its district lines every 10 years, after the census. Both parties use gerrymanderingnamed after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who redrew a state Senate map in 1812 so skewed it looked like a salamanderto their advantage, but with wildly more sophisticated mapping abilities, gerrymandering has become a "more lethal weapon." Republican strategists initiated the Republican State Leadership Committee in order to raise millions of dollars for the Redistricting Majority Project, REDMAP, which would indicate where the money should be spent in order to bolster Republican candidates in Democratic-controlled state legislatures from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Michigan to Wisconsin, flip control of the chamber, lock in redistricting, and thus control Congress for the next decade. This political "dirty deed done dirt cheap" is called "ratfucking," as designated by Edmund Wilson in the 1920s and used by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Indeed, this is just what happened after the midterm election of 2010, as the GOP captured 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 680 new seats in the state legislatures. Daley takes on each significant state race in turn and notes that despite the country's pulling more center-left on many issues, the far right is going to be calling the shots until 2020. The author looks at the masterminds behind the strategy and the mapmaking technology as well as the roles of restrictive voting rights laws, "dark money," and voter turnout. A chilling intimation of the growing entrenchment of partisan politics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.