Thread by @MesMitch

A little-known Republican group is ramping up millions of dollars in funding from major US corporations such as CitiGroup and Chevron to protect the conservative stronghold on the country.😣rightlines.gop

The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which held the key to the GOP’s political takeover a decade ago – launched the Right Lines 2020 campaign last September, taglined: “Socialism starts in the states. Let’s stop it there, too.

It’s hoping to meet a $125m investment goal in an effort to retain 42 state legislature seats that the group says are key to holding power in the House of Representatives in battleground states including Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and New York.

The group recently appointed party strategist Karl Rove and ousted White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to its board.

There’s a decade of power and a decade of dominance that’s truly on the line,” RSLC president Austin Chambers, a 24-year-old Republican operative, told Sean Spicer on his Newsmax show in March.

Ahead of November’s election, Republicans face an intense Democratic challenge to unseat Donald Trump, with dark money pouring in on both sides, and consumers who are significantly more vocal and critical of corporations’ politics, especially in the wake of Citizens United.

But this year’s election also coincides with the decennial census, from which demographic data helps determine the number of seats in the House. The state legislatures elected this fall will be in charge of drawing almost all the maps.

For corporations, funneling their money through the group is a simple way to support lawmakers sympathetic to their bottom line and exert political influence.

The RSLC has gone to extreme lengths to undertake its mission, changing the political landscape in the process. In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, it led an unprecedented strategy, the Redistricting Majority Project, or Redmap, to flip legislatures in competitive states.

Once in charge, Republicans manipulated district maps to their advantage, a tactic known as gerrymandering. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” Rove famously said in 2010.

In 2012, Democrats won 1.4m more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans maintained a 33-seat margin in the House.

A 2019 USC study found that 59 million Americans now live under minority rule, where the party that receives the minority share of the vote in a state election controls the majority of seats in the subsequent state legislature

While both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, Redmap changed the game.

The largest single donor, however, was the conservative dark money group the Judicial Confirmation Network with $1.1m, the same group behind the nomination of conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_…

The RSLC funnels the money towards groups on the ground that support candidates, or towards independent expenditures, including mailers, robocalls and digital and TV spots – which often veer into attack ads.

rslc.gop/news/2016/11/0…

In the recent Wisconsin election, the RSLC spent over $800,000 on TV ads against judge Jill Karofsky attempting to portray her as soft on sex offenders. She unsuccessfully tried to block the ads, and later won the state supreme court seat.

Justice Courtney Goodson also sued the RSLC in 2018 when she ran to defend her seat on the Arkansas state supreme court.

The RSLC paid for a 15-second spot and mailers lambasting contributions she had received from a friend of her attorney husband, who had been a top donor to her first state supreme court campaign before they married.

“Redistricting historically was something that occurred behind the scenes in smoke-filled rooms and the people didn’t pay attention,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center. “Now it’s something that angers people.”

Rigged maps and their corrosive effects on democracy have drawn fierce protests in states like Wisconsin and Michigan over the past decade.

Crowds came out once again last year after the supreme court’s influential ruling drawing a line between political and racial gerrymandering, putting even more pressure on the parties to win control of the redistricting process.

RSLC contributors Citigroup, Chevron, and Dominion Energy are one of a number of companies aligning themselves with the Black Lives Matter protests, though not always directly.

Altria and Dominion Energy have both pledged $5m to fight “racial and social inequality”. But these words can ring hollow.

They can look moderate or woke to the public, even though they don’t spend their money to pursue those issues politically the same way they pursue their narrower [interests]

Everybody understands this is a war that has real consequences and you’ve got one shot at it

https://twitter.com/MesMitch/status/1275149074086461443