What if a party could lose the national vote by more than a million and still hold on to Congress?
On our Fair Fight Action Summer Reading List, David Daley’s Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy lays out exactly how that happened. In this live conversation, he walks through how a small group of Republican operatives turned a few dozen state legislative races into a decade of control over national power, without winning a single extra vote to do it. The book came out years ago, but the maps it describes are the maps we are still voting on.
This was the third and final stop on our first-ever Summer Reading List series, where we go live with authors to dig into the history behind today’s attacks on voting rights and elections.
A Heist Disguised as Housekeeping
Daley starts with a plan that looked like paperwork. After Obama’s 2008 win, a handful of operatives studied the map and made a bet: forget the marquee races, and go win the state legislatures that draw the district lines. Citizens United opened the money spigot, the 2010 midterms delivered the chambers, and the census handed the winners a fresh set of maps to draw. By the time most people noticed, the lines were already set for ten years.
The key to it was how boring it looked. No one framed it as a power grab. It was redistricting, a routine that happens every decade, rewired to lock in majorities before the next election was even on the calendar.
When More Votes Isn’t Enough
Here is what those maps bought. In 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more House votes nationwide, Obama carried Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and Republicans still kept the House 234 to 201. The maps had stopped tracking how people actually voted.
Daley’s point is that this was not a fluke or a bad cycle. It was the design working as intended, and we are still living inside it.
The Voting Rights Act, Turned Against Itself
One of the sharpest threads in the conversation is how a law built to protect Black voters got turned into a weapon against them. In the 1990s, strategists took the Voting Rights Act’s majority-minority requirements and packed Black voters into a handful of districts drawn at 70 to 90 percent, boosting minority representation on paper while bleaching every surrounding district conservative.
That fight is back and moving fast. This past April, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and states are already redrawing to match. Fair Fight’s own research estimates that up to 19 congressional seats are in play heading into 2026 and 2028.
The Courts Step Back
Daley gets into the role of the judiciary, because the courts keep deciding how far this can go. In Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the conservative majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” the federal courts will not touch, kicking any check back to state courts, state legislatures, or independent commissions.
Since then, decisions chipping away at the Voting Rights Act have let states challenge and dismantle majority-minority districts. It has already reshaped seats in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, with Mississippi redistricting plans already underway and Georgia likely next.
Where We Go From Here
His book paints a pretty bleak picture of entrenched political polarization, but Daley doesn’t believe that’s the end of the story. He points to reforms that change the math instead of fighting map by map.
Larger multi-member districts paired with proportional representation would take away the cracking and packing that gerrymandering runs on. Ranked-choice voting would let people vote for who they actually want. And bigger federal reform, in Congress and at the Supreme Court, would stop a single hostile majority from tearing down voting protections every few years. The maps were built by people making choices. They can be rebuilt the same way.
If you missed the live conversation with David Daley, check out the video in this post. It is one of the clearest explanations of gerrymandering you will find: what it is, why it matters, how it changed over time, and what we can still do about it.
In solidarity,
Fair Fight Action Team
