When Texas Republican lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional districts at the behest of President Trump this summer, neither they, nor the president, left any question about what motivated them.
They were changing the maps to benefit their party, a practice known as gerrymandering.
“The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance,” state Rep. Todd Hunter, the sponsor of the new voting map, declared from the House floor before it was signed into law.
It was a statement that surprised some with its explicit partisanship.
But this public embrace of political redistricting, a widely unpopular tactic, serves a purpose. It is intended to guard the new maps against legal challenge.
With the new Republican-friendly Texas maps setting off a possible national redistricting arms race, gerrymandering done loud and proud is also something voters will likely see more often.
How did we get here? Stephanie Hofeller has an idea.
Hofeller was the daughter and, for a time, the protege of Tom Hofeller, the father of modern Republican gerrymandering.
She says what we’re seeing in Texas, and across the country, is partly the outcome of a political strategy her father championed decades ago.
Packing and cracking
Tom Hofeller rose to prominence in the Republican Party in the early 1980s.
“He was a cartographer first,” Stephanie said. “Maps were his passion.”
Originally from California, she remembers the family joining “the Reagan wagon train,” to Washington D.C., in the early '80s, when her dad got a job with the Republican National Committee.
He first worked as the head of information technology, but his big contribution was leading the Republican redistricting program.
Redistricting is when local, state or national voting districts are redrawn to account for population shifts. The purpose is to make sure each district has around the same number of people.
But the process is also how politicians gerrymander to create voting districts that will be easy to win.
The way it’s done is pretty simple.
You either break up your opponent's political base, so that they can’t have a majority in any district. That’s called cracking.
Or you concentrate that voting base into one single political district. That ensures that one district stays under a party's control, but removes that party’s influence from neighboring districts. That's called packing.
This is a reason many voting districts look so strange: They are drawn for the benefit of the politicians who draw them, not the voting public.
When it came to gerrymandering, Tom Hofeller was an innovator. His daughter said he understood how to use computer technology to make maps that looked “upstanding.”
His maps had “no funny shapes,” Stephanie said. “Yet they were still drawn to take advantage of the political clout.”
This veneer of objectivity was important. While it is legal in most states to draw maps to advance a party’s power, it is illegal to draw them to take political power from minority groups.
When maps are created to dilute the power of, for example, Black or Hispanic communities, they can get thrown out under the Voting Rights Act.
This is how “the Voting Rights Act long operated as an indirect constraint on gerrymandering,” University of Houston Law Professor David Froomkin told KUT in an email. “By requiring states to provide a minimal level of representation to minority communities.”
But it can be hard to prove in court that maps were drawn to disenfranchise minority voters.
“What is partisan politics and what is racism?” Stephanie Hofeller said. “That's kind of a hard one.”
Both Hofeller and Froomkin say new technology, like the kind championed by Tom Hofeller, has made that question even harder for courts to answer.
Thanks to computer technology, “it is now easy to predict the political performance of a district with high confidence and to assess the likely consequences of small changes, such as moving a single city block from one district to another,” Froomkin said.
‘It’s the state legislatures, stupid!’
Another thing Tom Hofeller understood before many others was how intentionally a party could use the redistricting process at the state level to reshape politics at the national level.
“The idea being to put a bunch of money from the national party into these tiny little state legislature elections,” Stephanie said.
That investment would benefit the national party, because once a it had won control of a state house, it could gerrymander political maps to the advantage of its own congressional candidates.
This idea, to make state legislatures the engine of a national political realignment, eventually became a well-known GOP strategy called “REDMAP” or Redistricting Majority Project.
“It didn't start out being called anything as cool as ‘Operation Red Map,’” Stephanie said. “I remember it when it was my father's PowerPoint presentation: ‘It's in the state legislatures, comma, stupid.'
“It was incredibly intentional,” she said. And it worked.
Wins and losses
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the GOP made big gains in state legislatures across the country, in part due to investments in small state house races.
As planned, those state victories allowed the party to create more politically friendly maps that helped it gain more power in the U.S. Congress.
But, while he helped win elections, Tom Hofeller lost the support of his daughter.
Stephanie said he had hoped to train her as his protege.
“When he first told me about his idea that what we needed to do was take over state legislatures, I was like, ‘You know that's going to destroy the Republic, right?’” she said.
“If you create a situation where the nominee [of the party in power] is gonna win regardless of how many people don't vote for them, you're gonna attract a tyrant to all of these positions, including president,” she remembered saying.
For her, gerrymandering was just one example of how the U.S. political system seemed designed to rob the people of true representation.
It was a system she would end up rejecting entirely, and she now calls herself an anarchist.
“My father used to correct me [saying] ‘You're not an anarchist, you're a libertarian!” she said. “I'm like, no dad, I'm not rich enough to be a libertarian.”
The Republicans’ successful redistricting efforts did not go without legal pushback as well.
After big GOP gains under the Tea Party movement in 2010, congressional maps that Tom Hofeller drew for North Carolina became the subject of a series of court battles.
Opponents successfully argued the maps violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting African American representation in parts of the state.
After that ruling, Hofeller was brought back in 2016 to redraw North Carolina districts again.
This time, state lawmakers, under Hofeller's guidance, wanted to be crystal clear about their partisan motives to defend themselves against accusations of racially motivated redistricting.
“To the extent we are going to use political data on this map, it is to gain partisan advantage on the map,” North Carolina Republican state Rep. David Lewis said.
It was a somewhat risky strategy. At that time, lawmakers suspected that the federal courts might also crack down on partisan, not just race-based gerrymandering.
Creating a new set of legal-challenge proof maps for North Carolina was a job Hofeller would not finish. He died of cancer in August 2018.
Stephanie, who by then was estranged from her father for reasons unrelated to politics, found out weeks later.
The Hofeller files
After her father's death, Stephanie Hofeller handed a trove of his work files over to the group Common Cause, which had sued state GOP lawmakers over the issue of partisan gerrymandering.
Since then, Hofeller’s maps, and his files, have been included in major lawsuits that have reshaped the rules around redistricting. But rarely, critics say, for the better.
The case Common Cause v. Rucho resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that it had no power to rein in partisan gerrymandering.
“Prior to Rucho, states thought there was some federal law limit on gerrymandering,” Froomkin said. “After Rucho, there is not.”
This is why lawmakers in Texas and elsewhere now appear eager to advertise their partisan motives.
“There is no federal law constraint on partisan gerrymandering, while there is a federal law constraint on gerrymanders that are racially motivated,” Froomkin said.
The new Texas maps are currently being challenged on the grounds that they do just that. The lawsuits, filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens, along with other civil rights groups, argue the new maps are discriminatory.
But, Froomkin points out, those minority voting protections are now also under threat in the courts.
In the case Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court could decide to do away with provisions of the Voting Rights Act, protecting minority voting power in redistricting.
‘A self-perpetuating thing’
Regardless of what the court decides in that case, Stephanie Hofeller says the redistricting frenzy that has accelerated since her father’s time is not likely going anywhere.
She points to another case that involved his maps and the documents she made public. In that case, Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court concluded it was up to state judges and politicians whether they wanted to regulate partisan redistricting.
Hofeller points out that those are the very same politicians who most benefit from gerrymandering.
“It's a self-perpetuating thing,” she said. When politicians gain power, “they draw more and more gerrymandered maps” to further extend their power.
“It’s not hard for people to understand how that could be exponential,” she said.
