The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is the centralized hub for executing a comprehensive redistricting strategy that shifts the redistricting power, creating fair districts where Democrats can compete.
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Barack Obama and Eric Holder are the faces of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is waging a mostly partisan fight against partisan gerrymandering.
The campaign operation backed by Barack Obama and Eric Holder is expanding its sights.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was created by the former president and his attorney general to elect more Democratic legislators who could help the party in the coming nationwide remapping of congressional districts. Now it's growing its ambitions to include some judicial elections.
The first target is a pair of Supreme Court contests in Ohio. That's because winning both this fall would tip the partisan balance of the court, and those justices are likely to end up deciding the lines for the 15 House districts that the seventh largest state is likely to have in the coming decade, one fewer than today.
A foundation affiliated with Eric Holder is trying to get North Carolina's congressional map redrawn.
North Carolina's congressional map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander under the state constitution just like the state legislative maps struck down earlier this month, a lawsuit filed Friday argues.
The National Redistricting Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of a political committee run by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, asked the state courts to order a redrawing of the 13 House districts in time for next year's election because the current map is "the most extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander in American history."
The lawsuit relies almost entirely on the precedent set just this month by a panel of three judges in Charlotte, who declared the maps for the General Assembly drawn by the GOP violated the state constitution's clauses protecting the rights of Democrats to free elections, equal protection and freedom of speech and assembly.
This story has been revised after additional reporting.
Steadily if still softly, anxiety about the health of American democracy has become at least a secondary theme in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Proposals for restoring the public's faith in elections, and a sense of fairness in our governing system, have now earned a place on most of the candidates' platforms. And more and more of them have been including calls for democracy reform in their stump speeches.
To be sure, the topic has not come close to the top tier of issues driving the opening stages of the campaign. In the first round of candidate debates last month, for example, the contenders collectively spent less time talking about democracy's ills than eight other issues: health care, President Trump's record, immigration, social policy, economic inequality, gun control, foreign policy and the environment.
Both President Trump and former Attorney General Eric Holder have said they want to fix parts of the system, but really they are working to help their own parties, writes Opdycke.
Opdycke is president of Open Primaries, which advocates for nonpartisan primaries open to all voters.
End Citizens United, a political action committee, is urging Democratic presidential contenders to champion anti-corruption to defeat President Trump. Tom Steyer's entry into the race may help bolster this argument. His launch video stresses the importance of addressing voter frustration with big party and big money control: "Really what we are trying to do is make democracy work by pushing power down to the people."
"It's key to winning back independents, the kind of independents that Democrats have lost over the last couple cycles," Adam Bozzi, vice president for communications at End Citizens United, told Politico. "It's a jump ball: Voters don't know who to trust, whether it's Trump or a Democrat, on this issue."
There are reasons that voters — most especially independents — don't know who to trust to "drain the swamp."
The biggest lack of trust is that politicians, including those who speak out on reform, are consistently silent on the corruption within their own parties.
