In the wake of the Supreme Court having issued a controversial ruling that critics warn may “demolish” restrictions around racially discriminatory voting policies, progressive writer Ryan Cooper laid out a plan Sunday that he argued could potentially unseat “every last possible Republican out of office.”
Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision established to prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies, including the adoption of racially gerrymandered congressional district maps. Republicans have already launched a national effort to redraw state maps to bolster their representation in Congress.
“Democrats should fight fire with fire,” Cooper wrote in a guest column published Sunday in Zeteo. “It’s time to redistrict every last possible Republican out of office. It’s time to unleash the baconmanders.”
Cooper explained that by “baconmanders,” he was referencing gerrymandered congressional districts with odd shapes that include narrow slices – often done to artificially include or exclude certain voters – that appear like thin strips of bacon. And with his call to “unleash the baconmanders,” Cooper was calling for Democrats to "retaliate" against the GOP with a fierce gerrymandering campaign of their own, and across the nation.
“The argument for doing this is game theory 101. Since 2010, Republicans have conducted an utterly ruthless campaign of gerrymandering, which has succeeded wildly. In the 2012 election, for instance, Democrats got more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans kept a 33-seat majority because of their prior cheating,” Cooper wrote.
“This happened in part because Democrats did not immediately fight back in states they controlled. In the prisoner’s dilemma, if you defect and the other side does not, then defecting is the smart strategy. More generally, in any competition, if you can win by cheating, people will tend to do it. Just look at professional sports.”
In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended primary elections that were already underway, moving quickly to redraw the state’s maps, and likely in a manner far more favorable to Republicans. Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey also called a special session to redraw the state’s maps, and Republican lawmakers across the nation have called on their own states to do so as well.
Cooper called the idea of both Republicans and Democrats gerrymandering states “far from ideal,” but argued that it could potentially force Congress to enact laws mandating fair election policies.
“But the only way that is going to happen is if Democrats win national power, break the illegitimate, traitorous, racist majority on the Supreme Court, and restore fair elections by force,” Cooper wrote. “Republicans will not see reason unless they are strapped into the Ludovico Device and made to see.”