Former President Barack Obama is joining forces with ex-Attorney General Eric Holder in a campaign designed to preserve his legacy and change the way Americans vote.
Obama’s Organizing For Action (OFA) nonprofit, which comes with an affluent donor list and an army of volunteer-activists, will be merging with Holder’s National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) to defend the Affordable Care Act, enforce stricter gun control, and protect voting rights.
Now called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the new group’s primary mission is to crusade against partisan gerrymandering.
Democratic crusade
“The integration of OFA with NDRC, into our redistricting effort, is going to help us have activists all over the country who are fighting for fair maps and more representative democracy,” Holder explained in an interview with The Hill. “The integration of OFA with NDRC is an organizational action, and it’s really just designed to effectuate that which OFA has always stood for, which is to engage citizens at the local level.”
With assistance from a political heavyweight like Obama, NDRC hopes through its first campaign, “All On The Line,” to position Democrats favorably ahead of the 2020 census, the results of which will influence how states redraw their congressional districts and determine electoral college votes.
In most cases, the legislative majority is responsible for the reapportionment and redistricting process, inviting accusations that Republican Party leaders in control of most state assemblies have rearranged congressional boundaries to satisfy their political whims.
Changing the rules
Indeed, Republicans currently control 67 state legislative chambers, compared to just 32 among Democrats. And as promised, the NDRC is increasingly interested in changing the way that state assemblies determine who gets to redraw congressional district lines.
The Obama-Holder coalition hopes to hire new staff and train volunteers to take part in legal battles in different 10 states challenging the way that congressional districts are apportioned. In four states — Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Arizona — Democrats have already succeeded in undermining the legislative majority by establishing bipartisan commissions to regulate redistricting.
“This is not only an affirmative effort on our part; it’s a protective effort,” Holder said, explaining how NDRC would train activist to support and defend the commissions and transplant the model to other states. “It’s only by cheating, that’s the reality, have [Republicans] been able to maintain control of Congress.
“For too long, politicians have been able to pick their voters, instead of allowing voters to choose their representatives,” Holder added in a statement. “Gerrymandering rigs our elections so the party in power can’t lose and it moves our policy debates away from rational solutions to the extremes.”
Politics as usual
After previewing in December the work that his new nonprofit would carry out, Obama referred to redistricting reform as an “opportunity to bend the great arc of history toward justice.” Ironically, Obama’s own “arc of history” would have fizzled out in 2001 if it weren’t for partisan gerrymandering.
After losing to Congressman Bobby Rush in an Illinois House race in 1999, Obama learned that his racial identity alone wouldn’t carry him to victory in a majority African-American district. The University of Chicago academic then took advantage of the Democratic control of the redistricting process in 2001 to redraw his state senate district to his own specifications, redrawing the map to include wealthy, educated supporters from Chicago’s Gold Coast.
The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza said that Obama’s gerrymandering efforts “may have been the most important event in Obama’s early political life” because it gave him the political clout and financial resources to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004. But when asked about political gerrymandering in 2001, Obama had an altogether different opinion of the phenomenon.
“It’s just politics,” he said.
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