Case Study 01 — REDMAP and the 2010 Republican Gerrymander Cycle

The strategic insight

In 2009, with Barack Obama eight months into his presidency, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) — a 527 organization founded in 2002 to coordinate Republican efforts in state-level races — launched a project that would shape U.S. House politics for the next decade. The project was called the Redistricting Majority Project, abbreviated REDMAP. Its strategic insight was simple, and in retrospect, nearly obvious. The 2010 Census would be followed by the decennial redistricting cycle. State legislatures elected in November 2010 would draw congressional and state-legislative maps that would govern through 2020. State-legislative races, dollar-for-dollar, were dramatically underpriced relative to the U.S. House seats those state legislators would, in effect, draw lines for.

A flippable state-senate seat in Pennsylvania could be moved with $200,000 in targeted spending. The U.S. House seats whose lines that state senator would help draw cost millions to win directly. The leverage ratio was extraordinary. REDMAP's architects, including former RSLC president Chris Jankowski, decided to exploit it.

The 2010 spending

REDMAP raised and spent approximately $30 million during the 2009–2010 cycle, concentrated in roughly 100 state-legislative races in approximately a dozen states with high redistricting leverage: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, and several others. The targeting was tight — small-dollar races in suburban districts where modest spending could be decisive, races in states where flipping a chamber would deliver unified Republican control of redistricting (governorship + both chambers), races in states whose post-2010 congressional maps would have outsized national impact because of their seat counts.

The 2010 election was a Republican wave year nationally — the Tea Party energy, midterm backlash against Obama and the Affordable Care Act, economic discontent — and REDMAP rode the wave with surgical precision. Republicans gained approximately 700 state-legislative seats in 2010, took control of state-legislative chambers in twenty states, and won unified control (legislature + governorship) of redistricting in states totaling more than 190 U.S. House seats. By the 2011 redistricting cycle, Republicans had the pen in states that, collectively, would draw the boundaries for nearly half the U.S. House.

David Daley's Ratfked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016) is the most-cited journalistic account of REDMAP. Daley interviewed RSLC strategists, accessed internal documents, and traced the program's tactical decisions in several key states. The book is sympathetic to reformers; readers seeking a counter-perspective can read RSLC's own self-published retrospective, REDMAP: The Plan That Worked (2013).

The maps

Through 2011 and into 2012, Republican-controlled state legislatures drew congressional and state-legislative maps that have since been studied as a class by political scientists. The maps shared common design choices — packing Democratic voters into a small number of urban-and-college-town districts; cracking suburban and exurban Democratic concentrations across multiple Republican-leaning districts; in some states, drawing lines that placed Democratic incumbents into the same district to force primaries against each other. The technical sophistication was new: Maptitude software, voter-file analytics, precinct-level partisan-history data, and dedicated mapping consultants (notably Tom Hofeller, longtime RSLC mapping strategist whose internal files, recovered after his death in 2018, became central to Common Cause v. Rucho and to the broader documentation of the program) gave map-drawers a degree of granular control that had not previously been available.

Several state maps stood out as particularly aggressive:

Wisconsin (Act 43). The state-assembly map drawn by Republicans in 2011 was litigated in federal court as Whitford v. Gill, later Gill v. Whitford. A three-judge district court found the map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander; the Supreme Court ultimately reversed on standing grounds in 2018, deferring the substantive partisan-gerrymandering question. The 2018 elections under Act 43 produced the result that became iconic in reformer arguments: Democrats won 53% of the statewide assembly vote and 36% of assembly seats. Subsequent state-court litigation under the Wisconsin Constitution (Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, 2023) struck down the maps after the state supreme court flipped to a 4–3 liberal majority.

Pennsylvania. The 2011 Republican-drawn congressional map produced 13–5 Republican delegations in 2012, 2014, and 2016, in a state where the statewide congressional vote was within a few points of 50–50 each year. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the map under the state constitution's Free and Equal Elections Clause in League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth (2018), substituted a court-drawn map for the 2018 elections, and produced what is widely cited as the model state-court partisan-gerrymandering decision.

North Carolina. The 2011 Republican-drawn congressional map produced 10–3 and 9–4 Republican delegations through the decade. After Common Cause v. Rucho failed in federal court, plaintiffs pursued state-court remedies. The North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the maps in 2022 (Harper v. Hall), then reversed itself in 2023 after the November 2022 election flipped the court's partisan composition. The state's congressional map was redrawn in 2023 to be more aggressively Republican; the 2024 elections produced a 10–4 Republican delegation.

Ohio. The 2011 Republican-drawn congressional map produced 12–4 Republican delegations in years when the statewide vote was closer to 55–45. After Ohio voters approved a 2018 redistricting reform amendment with 75% support, the state's Republican-dominated Redistricting Commission drew maps in 2021–22 that the Ohio Supreme Court struck down four times as violating the new constitutional requirements. The maps were used anyway after a federal court allowed the unconstitutional maps to be used because no constitutional alternative had been finalized in time. Ohio is the case study for how a redistricting reform can fail at implementation when the relevant political actors refuse to comply.

Michigan. The 2011 Republican-drawn congressional map produced 9–5 and 9–6 Republican delegations through the decade. Michigan voters in 2018 adopted a ballot initiative establishing the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, which drew the 2022 maps. The new maps produced more proportional outcomes.

The empirical effect

How much did the 2010-cycle gerrymanders shift U.S. House outcomes? Estimates from independent academic and policy analyses converge on a Republican advantage of approximately 10–15 seats above what neutral maps would have produced, sustained through 2018. Specific studies:

  • Stephanopoulos and Warshaw, "The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering on Political Parties" (2017): efficiency-gap analysis finding nationwide Republican advantage in the 8–12 seat range.
  • Princeton Gerrymandering Project simulations: 2010-cycle maps in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan each fell in the most-pro-Republican 1–2% of computer-generated alternatives meeting the same legal constraints.
  • Brennan Center for Justice analyses: aggregate Republican advantage in the 16–17 seat range under the most aggressive estimates, with the range narrowing after the Pennsylvania and Florida court-ordered redrawings of 2018 and 2015 respectively.

The 2010-cycle maps did not fully control U.S. House outcomes — Democrats won the House in 2018 and again in 2020 — but they tilted the marginal seat distribution in ways that matter for control of the chamber and for the specific identity of marginal members. A House majority of, say, 5 seats is meaningfully different from one of 15 seats; and the gerrymander's effect on individual members' incentives (toward primary-driven extremism in safe seats) shaped the ideological distribution of the House over the decade.

REDMAP's maps generated a decade of litigation. The federal-court cases — Gill v. Whitford, Common Cause v. Rucho, Benisek v. Lamone (a Maryland Democratic case that the Court bundled with Rucho) — culminated in the 2019 Rucho decision foreclosing federal partisan-gerrymandering claims. State-court cases produced more varied results: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's 2018 decision struck down the map; the Florida Supreme Court's 2015 decision (under the state's Fair Districts amendment) had earlier struck down Florida's 2011 congressional map; the North Carolina Supreme Court's 2022 decision struck down North Carolina's maps before reversing itself a year later; the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly struck down maps that were used anyway. Voting Rights Act litigation under Section 2 produced challenges to several states' maps with mixed results (more successful in Cooper v. Harris in 2017 against North Carolina racial-gerrymandering claims; less successful in some other state proceedings).

The composite legal aftermath: the federal courts will not police partisan gerrymandering after Rucho. State courts can, where state constitutions and state-court compositions allow. The 2010-cycle maps were the catalyst for both the federal-court litigation that ended in Rucho and the state-court doctrines that emerged afterward in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

What the 2010 cycle teaches

Three lessons. First, state-legislative races have outsized leverage in redistricting years, and a sufficiently disciplined party with sufficiently coordinated funding can purchase decade-long structural advantages cheaply. REDMAP demonstrated the playbook; Democratic groups including the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC, founded 2017) attempted to replicate the approach in 2018 and 2020 with mixed success. The leverage operates the same way for both parties; the 2010-cycle asymmetry was driven by Republican capture of more state-legislative chambers in a wave year, not by any structural feature inaccessible to Democrats.

Second, map-drawing is now a sophisticated technical practice, and amateur observation of "weird-shaped districts" no longer captures what is happening. Modern gerrymandering produces maps that look reasonably compact while delivering systematic partisan advantage; the old visual-eyeball test (the salamander test) is obsolete, and quantitative measures (efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, simulation comparison) have replaced it.

Third, the 2010-cycle Republican gerrymander was the most aggressive single-cycle partisan gerrymander in modern U.S. history. The aggressive Democratic gerrymanders of the same cycle — Maryland and Illinois — were less extreme by quantitative measures and operated in fewer states. This empirical fact has to coexist with the equally true fact that Democrats also gerrymandered when they had the chance (Maryland 2011, Illinois 2011, New York 2022; see Case Study 02). Both parties gerrymander; the 2010 cycle's asymmetry was driven by the unusual scale of the Republican opportunity in a wave year and the unusual sophistication of REDMAP's targeting. Subsequent cycles, with both parties more strategically engaged and with state courts more active, have produced narrower asymmetries.

The honest summary, fifteen years out: REDMAP was a strategically brilliant and democratically corrosive program. Its successes were genuine, its consequences are still being litigated, and its lessons have been absorbed by both parties for future cycles. Whether the corrosion can be undone — by reform, by court action, by future political shifts — is the question Chapter 38's reform-portfolio assessment takes up.