So over the past couple of months I'ver read a number of books about elections, voting, and politics. These have ranged from staunchly nonpartisan to staunchly and openly feminist (which shouldn't be a partisan issue but is), and have covered a wide range of topics in relation to elections and voting in the United States. As we approach the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, I wanted to share what I got out of the books in one big post. Here they all are, in the order I read them:
The first thing I notice about this list, putting it all together like that, is that only one book is by a woman; the other four authors are all men, and all five of the authors of any gender are, to the best of my research, white. But I'll come back to this later. For now, let's look at the content of the books.
First up are the two all-access recountings of the 2008 and 2012 election cycles: Game Change and Double Down. Heilemann and Halperin put together an impressive array of sources, interviews, memos, and other materials to construct cohesive narratives out of the absolute chaos that were those two election cycles. I've talked a little about my reading of these two books in early Chaturday posts, but that was before a whole lot of things happened in this election — the one that's ending soon but not soon enough — and before I read the other books. So! What do I think of them now?
Well, I'm gonna start with an image that stuck with me long after I put those books down. It's from the beginning of the first book, Game Change, and it's about Hillary Clinton's fitness for President. The book opens with Obama's win in the Iowa caucuses, when he turned an impressive ground game into a resounding victory in the nation's first primary, with huge turnout, coming as a surprise to many observers and participants, including the Clintons. Here is how Heilemann and Halperin present it:
How did this happen? The Clintons asked again and again [...] The turnout figures made no sense to them: some 239,000 caucus-goers had shown up, nearly double the figure from four years earlier. Where did all these people come from? Bill asked. Were they all Iowans? The Obama campaign must have cheated, he said, must have bussed in supporters from Illinois.
Hillary had been worried about that possibility for weeks; now she egged her husband on. Bill's right, she said. We need to investigate the cheating.
"It's a rigged deal," Bill groused.
Hillary was trying to rein in her emotions. The former president was not. Red-faced and simmering, he sat in the living room venting his frustrations. He was furious [...].
But mostly Bill was enraged with the media, which he believed had brutalized his wife while treating Obama with kid gloves. This is bullshit, he said. The guy's a phony. He has no experience, he has no record; he's not nearly ready to be commander in chief.
"He's a United States senator," Hillary snapped. "That's nothing to laugh at."
He's only been in the Senate three years and he's been running the whole time for president, Bill replied. "What has he really done?"
"We have to be real here — people think of that as experience," Hillary said.
Losing always tests a politician's composure and grace. Hillary had never lost before, and she found little of either trait at her disposal. Presented with the carefully wrought, sound-bite-approved text of the concession speech she was soon supposed to deliver before the cameras, she suddenly leafed through the pages, cast them aside, and decided to ad lib. Her phone call to congratulate Obama was abrupt and impersonal. "Great victory, we're three tickets out of Iowa, see you in New Hampshire," she said, and hung up the phone.
The advisers in the room were all longtime intimates of the Clintons and had experienced their squalls of fury many times. But to a person, they found the display they were witnessing now utterly stunning—and especially unnerving coming from Hillary. Watching her bitter and befuddled reaction, her staggering lack of calm or command, one of her senior-most lieutenants thought for the first time, This woman shouldn't be president.
Now, the authors are careful to lay out some typographic conventions before they dive into the narrative: quotation marks indicate precise quotations, and italics indicate real thoughts that people actually had at the time and later shared with the authors. So they chose to include these quotes and paraphrases, this specific thought from one of the staffers.
Throughout this bit of the narrative, it is Bill who displays more temper, but in the end Hillary is the one passed negative judgment on. She "snaps", she "eggs her husband on". And throughout this book, the authors paid a lot of attention to the allegations of racism floated against Hillary Clinton and John McCain and their campaigns and supporters — as they should, as racism was all over the place in that election cycle. They paid rather less attention to the sexism on display against Hillary Clinton, and apparently even less attention to examining their own approach.
I learned a lot about the 2008 election cycle from this book, but I can't wholeheartedly condone its approach. It tried to go for nonpartisan and, in my opinion, overcorrected. It took a light touch with events of the 2008 election cycle that I thought to be pretty iconic, like Obama's "Yes We Can" speech and subsequent video by will.i.am, which I thought was an odd choice. But it also presented a very close, inside look at all the campaigns, winner and loser, which was absolutely fascinating to read about. But I'm not sure it balances out the small touches of disdain for Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. I'd definitely be interested in reading these authors' take on the 2016 race, to see if their views had evolved any.
Their 2012 book, Double Down, was essentially more of the same: an inside look at the campaigns gleaned from interviews, memos, and other sources. This time, though, there was a look inside the White House itself, as part of the campaign was necessarily a referendum on Obama's first term in office. There was a surreal self-referential section in there where Barack Obama learned that one of his private lists had been leaked to two authors (yes, these two authors, as we learn in a note at the end of the book). Obama was devastated by this leak, which the authors recount dispassionately, as if their obtaining of this information was morally neutral. It was very strange.
What I learned about most from the second book was the Republican field before Mitt Romney emerged as the winner. There were a lot of people who started running, or considered running, that I didn't know about. Their stories were in most cases sad, like the story of Rick Perry, who ultimately had to drop out of the race due to health conditions. The authors, of course, did not take this moment to examine ableism in our society, but they did make some effort to portray him with sympathy, which I appreciate. If only they had lent that sympathy to Hillary Clinton, rather than sacrificing a rounded view of her for the sake of narrative.
This is in stark contrast to Big Girls Don't Cry, the oddly-titled book of what the 2008 election meant for US women, and one of the things that book is devoted to is a full, three-dimensional portrait of Hillary Clinton. This book was part election chronicle, part personal journey: the author started out as a John Edwards supporter and part of the narrative is about her dealing with her feelings about Hillary and deciding how to vote after Edwards dropped out. And, as I feel is only appropriate, my account of this book will be part personal journey, too.
I went into this book not liking Hillary Clinton. Oh, I would vote for her in the general election, of course, and tell everyone else I knew to vote for her too, because, come on, Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. But I didn't like her. I'd voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Something about Hillary — the way she was less feminist than I hoped for, than I knew she could be ("women's rights are human rights") — something bothered me about her. I heard the stories about her early days sometimes with reverence and sometimes with disgust, like when I first came across the story about her laughing about getting a rapist off in court. My friends kindly did not tell me I was being a misogynist, but I was sure wondering about that: would Hillary ever be likeable enough, on whatever scale I cared to imagine?
Of course, I was far from the only person feeling this way, stumbling through this journey. Rebecca Traister gives a forthright account of her own doubts, starting first by laying out Hillary Clinton's feminist credentials and universal appeal (the first chapter after the introduction is titled, "Hillary Is Us"). I learned a lot about Hillary's early years here — Bill Clinton's presidency is the first one I knew, having lived in Russia prior to that time, so I missed Hillary's earlier career and the Arkansas governorship — and I hadn't realized how much of a feminist she had been, or what pressure she was under, later, to roll that back. I never knew why, for a long time, she was "Hillary Rodham Clinton", how she had fought to keep her name:
The sacrifice of her maiden name in the interest of her husband's political future always seemed to me to shed valuable light on Hillary and who she would eventually become. Whenever people claimed she was a born shape-shifter, that political chameleonism was written into her genetic code, I would think of that last name and her protracted insistence on keeping it independent. She hadn't wanted to be Hillary Clinton; she wanted to be Hillary Rodham. When faced with the assertion that doing it her way would result in her husband's loss, or at least blame for her husband's loss, she made the change. But it was a compromise, not concession: she became Hillary Rodham Clinton. The question of her name would return, and on the campaign trail in 1992 it forced her to begin to grasp that although she "had worked full-time during [her] marriage to Bill and valued the independence and identity that work provided," she was now "solely 'the wife of,' an odd experience." Clinton described opening a box of stationery she's ordered; embossed across the top was "Hillary Clinton." "Evidently someone on Bill's staff decided that it was more politically expedient to drop 'Rodham,' as if it were no longer part of my identity," she wrote, adding that she quickly ordered new stationery. But by that point, hers was a lost name.
How different would the 2016 presidential election be if she were "Hillary Rodham"? It would have distanced her from accusations of a Clinton political dynasty, but also made her even harder to swallow for a lot of other people. Wouldn't it have been amazing, though?
This is not to say I can intelligently criticize her choice, then or now. As Game Change and Double Down showed me, I live far outside the world in which these decisions are made, and Big Girls Don't Cry went on to show me that I had not fully grasped the sacrifices — or the reluctance of the sacrifices — Hillary Clinton has had to make over her many years in politics. But I can wish this were a world in which she could have stayed Hillary Rodham, unquestioned.
Regardless of the name issue, this book showed me a lot of different sides of Hillary, and spent a lot of time analyzing the dynamics of the 2008 Democratic primary race. While it freely acknowledged the point about the racism Barack Obama faced, it spent more time (as is appropriate to its woman-centered subject) on the sexism faced by the participants of the 2008 race — including the racialized sexism faced by Michelle Obama. I voted in the 2008 Democratic primaries (and sadly, I no longer recall who for, as it was a very close race for me), but I had been insulated at college at the time, able to look up from my studies for the sake of politics only briefly as I was preparing to write my thesis. Of course, had I been taking anything along the lines of a Women's Studies course, I would likely have been much more aware of the 2008 primaries and the climate in which they took place. But as it was, at the time, I was faced with two choices, both of whom seemed progressive to me.
What about now? Hillary is undoubtedly the more progressive candidate, and, well, how do I feel about her now? It's way more positive after reading Big Girls Don't Cry. I found social and political fellowship in those struggling to accept Hillary Clinton's imperfect but highly practical feminism, and the book took me on a journey that I found incredibly relevant to my experiences in the 2016 election. I recommend this book to anyone, but especially those who still struggle to accept Hillary Clinton as a positive figure.
But there's more to the 2016 election cycle than the presidential candidates, and now I want to turn my attention to Ratf**ked, hereafter known as Ratfucked, as the word is freely and frequently used in the book itself but could not published as the title without censorship. For those who don't know:
Ratf**cking: an American slang term for political sabotage first invoked in the 1920s and later popularized by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men.
Later on in the book, the author defines: "In politics, a 'ratfuck' is a dirty deed done dirt cheap." This book holds that the GOP has vastly changed the political landscape of the United States with a huge nation-wide gerrymandering effort in 2011. The effort, called REDMAP — for Redistricting Majority Project — started after the 2008 drubbing the GOP took, as key players in the GOP started looking ahead to the 2010 election, which would be a census year. They realized that Democratic votes and voters would outnumber them, so they hatched a plan that would let them retain power even if they got fewer votes. Chris Jankowski, who got the effort going and was one of its chief architects, convinced various investors to give $30 million to REDMAP, and funnelled those funds into local races in key states. This was an unprecedented amount of money to spend on local races, which are generally run on shoestring budgets. The GOP flooded local races with handouts, flyers, radio ads, and even TV ads, securing victories for Republicans in just about all cases. Many of these GOP materials, I was enraged to learn, obscured facts or outright lied about their Democratic opponents. These victories in turn tipped state legislature control towards Republicans, and they were then free to redraw state and congressional district lines to give the GOP an advantage not just in state legislatures, but the US House of Representatives, until at least 2022.
The importance of redistricting has been discounted by many political writers:
Some academics and political journalists discount the importance of gerrymandering and redistricting, even in the 2012 election. It is not trendy to suggest that redistricting matters; no one gets tenure or retweeted for making the case that the thing that put us all to sleep in high school civics is actually a chief cause of our democratic decay.
The most influential book shaping this discussion remains Bill Bishop's often brilliant and always provocative The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, which redrew the way the smart set thought about redistricting. Bishop argued that we'd sorted ourselves into increasingly homogenous and "ideologically inbred" communities. Our polarized politics and congressional districts were not the fault of gerrymandering, he argued, but the result of a new American propensity to cluster around people who share our opinions on politics and religion [...]. Bishop is right: we have surrounded ourselves with people who agree with us. He was also right about gerrymandering in 2008, when his book was published. But the extent of the REDMAP effort — and the pure political will behind it — was something new to American politics, the map-making technology has improved dramatically, and The Big Sort can no longer be the only aperture through which we see our uncompetitive congressional races. We may well have sorted ourselves into cities, suburbs, or rural America. But 435 sets of lines, drawn by experts, informed by more data than ever before, have sorted us into congressional districts. Those districts, intended by the Founders to be directly responsive to the people's will, have now been insulated from it.
The Big Sort still has an outsize influence on how we think about gerrymandering, and it obscures the national debate over just how effective the GOP strategy has been.
Personally, I found the book's argument very convincing. 2008 saw a wave of Democratic voters and winners, and it felt like the start of an era. But the GOP, threatened by this, took action and short-circuited the victory soon after. The playing field was also changed by the Citizens United decision, which came down in the first few days of 2010. This allowed super PACs and other political organizations to raise and spend essentially unlimited amounts of money, much of it "dark" — money that couldn't be traced back to a donor. This money, through a series of maneuvers by the GOP, bought them control of the House of Representatives. Here is a summary of what REDMAP spent and gained at the state level:
In New York, Republicans spent $1.4 million targeting four state senate races. Democrats held a slim 32-30 edge. Republicans won 2 of those seats and control of the chamber.
In Pennsylvania, where Democrats held a 104-98 advantage, REDMAP focused almost $1 million on three of the toughest races in the state and won them all, flipping the house to the GOP.
REDMAP helped reverse a 53-46 Democratic advantage in Ohio, where Republicans zeroed in on 6 seats with almost $1 million, and won 5, again turning the chamber red.
A commanding 65-42 Democratic advantage in Michigan's House was wiped out with REDMAP's help. Republicans spent another $1 million in alliance with the Michigan Republican Party and the Michigan House Republican Campaign Committee, which paid off with 20 seats and new GOP leadership.
Another $1.2 million in North Carolina returned GOP majorities in the state House and senate. Alabama turned its state House red for the first time in 136 years with $1.5 million from REDMAP. In Wisconsin, $1.1 million helped flip both the senate and the lower assembly, knocked out the powerful senate majority leader, and made governor-elect Scott Walker's move on public employee unions possible.
Those aren't, however, the only numbers that illustrate the dramatic GOP gains. On the state level, this was the biggest rout in modern history. Republicans gained almost 700 seats nationwide — that's more than the 628 Democrats grabbed in the penumbra of Watergate and Republican shame in 1974.
In fact, Republicans ended election day 2010 with majorities in 10 of the 15 states scheduled to gain or lose seats under reapportionment and where the legislature controlled the new lines.
In state after state, Democrats and Independents, especially those with strong histories of across-the-aisle work and successful compromise, were ousted in favour of Republican candidates, often with the help of smear campaigns conducted by the centralized GOP offices in Virginia rather than by locals who understood the local issues.
But winning the state legislatures was only the first step. After that came drawing the maps. Republican map-makers used state of the art software to rig maps such that it was not voters choosing their representatives, but representatives choosing their voters. Democratic strongholds were broken up and dispersed across multiple GOP-leaning districts or, alternatively, Democratic voters were "packed" into a small number of districts that would be guaranteed Democratic wins, giving the GOP the more numerous surrounding districts with comfortable margins. The resulting maps were often absurd:
Pennsylvania's 7th congressional district.
In North Carolina, the district maps were so absurd and racialized that the NAACP sued: "in February of 2016, a three-judge panel in federal court agreed with the NAACP and ruled that two North Carolina districts — the 1st and 12th — had been racially gerrymandered. The judges ordered them redrawn within the next two weeks. 'The record is replete with statements indicating that race was the legislature's paramount concern,' the judges wrote in a stern ruling." However, this was not enough to restore competitive districts to North Carolina. One month before the 2012 election, Justice Paul Newby was far behind Democrat Sam Ervin IV. Then the Republican State Leadership Council (RSLC; the main thrust behind REDMAP) funnelled $1.65 million into the race, paying for a slew of TV ads, and Newby turned the race around and narrowly won, outspending his Democratic rival 10-to-1. As the book puts it, "The North Carolina Supreme Court was then asked to rule twice on the constitutionality of the state and legislative maps, and approved them both times, each on a 4-3 party line vote. Judge Newby was asked to recuse himself by critics who pointed out the role played in his campaign, and in the mapmaking, by the RSLC. He declined to do so. That's right: The courts which hear these cases can be ratfucked, too."
North Carolina also provides an example of why the Big Sort theory fails: before 2011, the heart of North Carolina's 11th district had been the college city of Asheville, where like-minded liberal Democrats had sorted themselves. However, after 2011, GOP mapmakers cracked the city's votes in two, scattering the Democratic votes. Such demolition of communities of interest was rampant in the GOP redistricting of 2011.
In Ohio, meanwhile, despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates, the congressional delegation itself ended up 75 percent Republican. This is the power of gerrymandering. In fact, the gerrymander in Ohio was so bad that it ratfucked the Republicans themselves, giving over control to a minority of extremists.
Even in states where voters passed laws to try to make redistricting fairer, as in Florida, the GOP operated in secret — and illegally — to draw GOP-friendly maps and pretend that they were maps drawn by concerned citizens in the community. The amount of secrecy surrounding the GOP mapmaking processes in these ratfucked states is hard to describe — I recommend reading the book to see the whole mindblowing scope of their audacity and illegality. The Florida ratfuck was absolutely breathtaking, flying directly in the face of two voter-passed constitutional amendments designed to make for fairer districts, which won with 63% of the vote and bipartisan support. But Florida wasn't alone in this level of chicanery and secrecy. Here is how the book describes the Wisconsin ratfuck:
It took three lawsuits from citizens and government watchdog groups, thousands of pages of court transcripts and depositions, hundreds of not carefully-enough-worded emails, several furious decisions from bipartisan panels of judges, two election cycles, and a new political science measurement to uncover the brilliant story behind the 2011 Wisconsin gerrymander.
These underhanded tactics — lying, operating illegally and/or in secret — won the GOP a US House majority despite the GOP getting less of the vote, which has happened for only the second time since World War II. This majority has stonewalled Obama's efforts to save the country and stimulate the economy, and gives us the highly dysfunctional House we have today.
Of course, there are other factors that lead to the dysfunction of the House. Politics in the US have been becoming more polarized, more partisan, with fewer moderates or other people in the middle. But Ratfucked maintains that neither polarization or the Big Sort alone are enough to explain what's been happening. Because the Republicans draw the lines, they make districts where the only challenge to either a Democrat or Republican is in the primaries, where they can be defeated only by someone more extreme. However, even in these highly polarized times, a 2014 Pew Center poll on partisanship — one of the largest and most exhaustive studies on political polarization — found that the majority of Americans still want the parties to work together and meet in the middle, which the Republicans in the House, at least, are adamantly refusing to do.
So what are Democrats doing in the meantime? The GOP announced its REDMAP plan brazenly, in advance, and no one listened. Now, Democrats have pledged to raise $70 million for the next three cycles to pull off the same gambit in reverse. Of course, this only sounds impressive until you hear that the GOP is planning to raise $120 million to maintain its edge.
There are other efforts underway to combat gerrymandering, including a proposed scientific measure to detect ratfucking by Sam Wang, a neuroscientist and gerrymandering junkie. The assumption starts simple: the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. But even that low bar was not cleared in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The book takes a closer look at Pennsylvania:
Wang had his computer run 1,000 simulations for outcomes with a 50.7 Democratic/49.3 Republican vote. The median result? 9.7 GOP seats, 8.3 Democratic seats. The actual result in Pennsylvania? 13-5 to the Republicans. The 13-5 result came up once in 1,000 simulations. The 5 Democrats won with an average of 76 percent of the vote, the 13 Republicans with 59 percent. That outcome, Wang found, would arise by chance far less than 1 percent of the time. "In other words," he wrote, "gerrymandering's contribution to Pennsylvania's partisan outcome was about five times as large as the effect of overall structural advantages." Even simpler: the odds against Pennsylvania voters sending 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats to Congress was nearly 1,000 to one.
Wang's search for a scientific measure is spurred by a Supreme Court ruling. In his comments on the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, Justice Kennedy noted that technology was rapidly changing the field of reapportionment, but technology is also making the impact clearer, and a technological route may give the courts some sort of firm standard on which to rule on the constitutionality of district lines. Wang sees promise in this route.
Of course, Wang's is not the only path. Groups like FairVote are trying to change the current winner-take-all system to fair representation voting, top-two primaries, and right to vote amendments. Such systems would obviate gerrymandering, but they're a long way off from passing.
Meanwhile, Republican are consolidating their hold, not just through gerrymandering, but through other efforts such as increasingly restrictive voting laws. As Daley closes, "Redistricting plus restrictive voter registration laws are a strategy designed to stave off GOP demographic oblivion in a country becoming more diverse each year. A failure to recognize and combat this strategy will lead to electoral apartheid."
This forms the perfect transition to the last book in this set, The Great Suppression, which is about conservative tactics designed to undermine representative democracy. This book makes the argument that conservatives have been behind a multi-pronged effort to weaken democracy in the United States, including voter suppression measures, dark money in politics, blocking local government measures, supporting government structures that privilege less populous and more rural states, and conservative judicial activism. If Ratfucked enraged me, The Great Suppression terrified me. But! I have so much to say about that book that it will get its own post, up soon! So see you then!
I was just talking to my dad today about how it seems like the default setting -- for people on all parts of the ideological spectrum -- seems to be mild-to-severe disdain for Clinton, and how that's making it really hard for me to feel like there's anything I actually and really know about her. The standard of scrutiny that's applied to her is so obviously prejudiced by gender that I feel unmoored in reality. Like I know that people criticize her for things they wouldn't and don't criticize male politicians for, but I never feel like I know WHICH SPECIFIC THINGS. It's the double consciousness mindfuck of being not-a-dude, but played out on a national stage. One among many reasons this election is screwing me up. :p
I keep wanting to read more about politics, but it's so hard to know where to start, and it's one area where I don't have any real knowledge of the bookish landscape. So this post is immensely helpful to me. Thanks so much for taking the time to put it together!
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