Since I keep dissolving into incoherent screeching every time @the-real-zhora-salome or anyone else starts saying that the Democrats on the federal level need to “do something,” I think I need to back up and provide some history and context, because what happened in 2024 and is happening now was twenty years in the making.
The TL;dr is two things: Karl Rove and his Permanent Republican Majority.
Rove was the major strategist for George W. Bush and the Republican Party as a whole and he had a big idea to basically gerrymander the entire United States to ensure that the Republican Party would have a majority on the federal level for decades — basically, permanently.
This was a several-pronged program:
- Voter ID laws were deliberately designed to prevent Democrats from voting, especially older Black Democrats
- Gerrymandering of congressional districts in states that Republicans controlled to make sure the House delegation from those states would always be majority Republican. This was especially important for Texas and Florida, which are states with large populations and large numbers of seats in the House.
- Gain a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to vacate the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance laws with decisions like FEC v Citizens United (which, you may not be suprised to hear, was founded specifically as an anti-Hillary Clinton group originally called Citizens United Not Timid. Yeah. 🙄)
When Barack Obama won over John McCain in 2008, a lot of pundits declared Rove’s career dead, but the plan had only barely started rolling. The 2012 election was a squeaker where Rove famously had a very public meltdown on CNN when it started to become clear that his plan to elect Romney had failed and Obama had pulled out a victory … but everything Rove had set up was still in place.
And here we are. 2016 was the 2000 election all over again: just like George W. Bush, Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College when the Republicans successfully gerrymandered the country. 2020 was the 2008 election: After Trump thoroughly fucked up, Republicans stayed home and Democrats turned out for Biden.
And in 2024, all of the land mines that Rove and Trump and McConnell and Graham and Alito and Roberts and the rest of the Republicans had spent 20 years laying finally blew up. And now we’re fucked. Even some of the Republicans who happily lay the mines are starting to realize that they fucked themselves over, too.
This 2012 article from Vanity Fair was one of the few not to count Rove out and to see that his plan was still chugging along under the surface just waiting to blow up.
By the end of the second Bush presidency, Karl Rove was enmeshed in scandal. Four years later, he has engineered a billion-dollar takeover o
