Wisconsin GOP playbook works to perfection
The author is not a politician and is not personally involved in politics; he's a professional historian. The strategies he describes are what allowed the Republicans to dismantle democracy in Wisconsin.
Is this also happening in your state?
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/wisconsin-gop-playbook-works-to-perfection-b99639605z1--363946401.html?ipad=y
1) Make sure your opponent can never field a full team. In the 2012 Wisconsin Assembly elections, which covered the entire state, Democrats took 52% of the total votes but only 39% of the seats. The gap was less glaring in 2014, but Democrats still captured a greater share of votes (43%) than seats (36%). Elections for the Wisconsin Senate are staggered, but the results are comparable. Why the obvious discrepancy? Because the Legislature gets to redraw district lines after every federal census, and the Republicans seized the opportunity to give themselves a structural advantage after the 2010 count. They boxed Democrats into "supermajority" districts and shifted the remaining lines to give themselves an edge in head-to-head contests. It was gerrymandering at its most blatant. As a result, the Democrats will always start at least a man down. If the GOP fields 11 players, their opponents will have only 10.
2) Keep the other team's fans out of the stadium. Despite the pious Republican rhetoric about the "sanctity of the vote," the fact is that voter fraud in Wisconsin is rare. That hasn't stopped the GOP from enacting "reforms" — including mandatory voter IDs and limitations on polling hours — that have a disproportionate impact on low-income urban voters, i.e., people who tend to vote Democratic. The effect is even more nefarious than it might seem because the fans in the stands don't just make noise: They choose the players on the field.
3) Slash your opponent's payroll. Act 10, which gutted public employee unions, was sold as another "reform" to protect the state's "hardworking taxpayers" from those maligned public servants who teach our children, but one of the law's side effects produced a touchdown for the Republicans. Dues-paying union members tend to vote Democratic, and crippling unions inevitably crippled their ability to support Democratic campaigns. The Republicans doubled down on the strategy with last year's right-to-work law, an attempt to weaken private-sector unions and shrink their campaign coffers in the process.
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6) Fire the referees. If you don't like their rulings, get rid of the officials. In 2012, the Government Accountability Board, a nonpartisan group of retired judges, began to look into collusion between Republican candidates and outside funders, sparking a John Doe probe that went on for more than two years. The GOP cried foul and took the GAB's whistles away, replacing the board with two partisan bodies.
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