Join us Friday, August 21 at 12:00 PM ET for a live conversation with David Daley, journalist, political analyst, and author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.
After Obama’s 2008 win, a small circle of Republican operatives built a plan to hold power without winning more votes. His book traces how these Republican operatives looked at Obama’s victory, targeted a few dozen state legislative districts across the country, and turned them into the levers that would decide national power for a decade.
The plan worked. The maps they drew after the 2010 census locked in majorities that stopped matching how people actually voted, and we are still living inside the results.
In this interview, we’ll be connecting what Daley documented to what’s happening right now: the dark money that flooded in after Citizens United, the tools that let operatives carve up neighborhoods block by block, and the fresh wave of map-rigging that took off this April, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Daley doesn’t stop at the diagnosis, and neither will we. He has spent years reporting on reforms that could actually pull us back toward fair representation: multi-member districts that break the single-map stranglehold, and legal standards sharp enough that courts can finally name a rigged map when they see one and defend the principle of one person, one vote.
This is the third pick in the Fair Fight Action Book Club, following Ari Berman’s Minority Rule and Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote. You don’t need to have read it to follow along.
Come for an inside look at the machinery that decides your representation while presenting as a dull technical process, and leave understanding why rigged maps are one of the load-bearing walls of minority rule.
In solidarity,
Fair Fight Action Team
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