Republican’s Struggle to Control State Legislatures on the Eve of Redistricting: An Inside Look with Michael Steele

Interviewed former RNC chairperson Michael Steele and wrote article for the Carnegie Mellon University Journal for Politics and Strategy.

A week after the United States inaugurated its first African-American president, the Republican National Committee (RNC) elected Michael Steele as its first African-American chairperson. Inheriting a party whose message had been “wholesale rejected by the public,” Michael Steele transformed a near cataclysmic loss into remarkable gains for the Republican Party within just two years, flipping 11 state legislatures and winning 760 state legislative seats, 8 governorships, and 63 House seats for the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections.

While 2010 was not a presidential election year, it was arguably more significant: it was a census year. Every ten years, following a counting of its citizens, the United States redraws its congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as “redistricting” to account for population shifts. At least, that is the goal. In actuality, redistricting more often serves as a tool for incumbents to secure their positions of power (e.g. via gerrymandering). If you control the lines, you can control who wins the election. Thus, victory is vital in a census year.

The 2020 election may be even more consequential, coming as it does in a census year with Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency at stake. When Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he blew away any hopes that the Republican Party would follow the doctrine outlined in their 2013 “autopsy” report, which prescribed better relations with ethic minority voters (namely Hispanic), younger voters, and female voters in response to the disastrous results of the 2012 election cycle for the Republican Party. In the years since the 2010 census, Republican affiliation among these three groups has dropped slightly.

As we approach November 3, the battle for these demographic groups, redistricting power, and quite possibly the future of the country will be waged with increasing ferocity with state legislative races at its core. In this article, we draw on a variety of sources – including our interview with former RNC chairman Michael Steele in April 2020 – to outline the strategies that the RNC has used to maintain state legislative supremacy in a census year.