Trump's Drive for Citizenship Question: Increase GOP Numbers Over Minority Voters

Thomas Hofeller: GOP's Top Gerrymandering Guru

(Their go-to guy for redistricting schemes)

You may have heard about this incredible story – more follows below.

BACKGROUND: Trump Inc. drive, lies, BS to get the citizenship question on the 2020 census here from Reuters via MSN.

FACT: The Constitution requires the government to count all residents — whatever their legal status: citizen or not — every 10 years. The information collected becomes the basis for voting maps and distributing some $800 billion in federal funds each year.

This story, one of many stories proves nearly 100% what Trump’s real motivation and drive has been to get the citizenship question on the 2020 census. 

Even though he more or has lost and pretty much has given up recently … but it’s not over yet.

Apparently the real motivation that far too many legal minds agree on that is driving Trump is his goal is to further suppress the minority vote to favor the GOP with new district lines (Gerrymandering at its worse) that would have to be redrawn after 2020. 

The source of Trump’s thinking apparently comes from this NY YORKER magazine analysis (July 12, 2019) – the highlights follow.

Setting the scene:

At around half past nine on the last day of September 2018, Stephanie Hofeller was parked at a Speedway in KY where she lives. She got a strange sense that she should Google her father, Thomas Hofeller, whom she hadn’t seen in more than four years. One of the first results that popped up was an obituary in the NY Times, which had been published six weeks before. “Holy sh*t,” she said to a friend who was in the car with her. “My father’s dead.”

She did some more Googling, to make sure it wasn’t a hoax — given her father’s notoriety, she figured it might be saying later: “I remember feeling a lot of things. It’s hard to decide how you feel when you find out a parent you had that kind of deeply fraught history with is dead. I’d spent so long considering him a dangerous enemy to me and the country.”

Thomas Hofeller died in August 2018 (age 75). He was raised in San Diego and served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. In the early eighties, after completing a doctorate in political science at Claremont Graduate University, he became the RNC’s data-operations manager. In that position, he began to grasp how the redrawing of political maps could usher in tides of Republicans in office. Thus, Congressional redistricting became his specialty.

The NY Times obituary referred to him as “The Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander.” Hofeller was the go-to guy, the best one his associates said, adding: “When you do this for forty years, as Tom did, you’re not just doing it for the moment. You’re trying to prepare for legal challenges, to anticipate what changes could be made, population growth and decline, the winds of the political environment in states and districts. Tom, he understood it all.”

Hofeller preferred to keep the details of his work private and to avoid paper trails as he once told a fellow operative: “E-mails are the tool of the devil.”

Still, he did leave some documentation behind.

About a week and a half after Stephanie learned of her father’s death, she made a trip to her parents’ retirement home, in Raleigh, NC, where her mother, Kathleen, still lived. She was looking for keepsakes.

She later described the visit in a deposition for a lawsuit concerning legislative redistricting in NC. In her father’s bedroom, she found a jewelry box, which had been hers as a child. She also found four external hard drives and eighteen thumb drives that had belonged to her father. One of the drives was labelled “NC Data.”

She took the drives to the hotel where she was staying and began to scan the contents of the devices, which contained some 75,000 files.

She also found early photographs of her two children — buried treasure, she called them — and a music recording that she’d made, as well as letters she’d written. She also found a number of files related to her father’s work.

Stephanie Hofeller’s story continues at the NEW YORKER site.

Related story also here from the Slot.

My historial post on this same topic here, also, FYI.

History which Trump and most GOPers fail to remember

My 2 cents: This is a truly an amazing story which goes to prove that “the truth always prevails and will come out eventually even if it takes days, weeks, months, years, decades, or longer” and that is always a good outcome for many countless reasons I believe.

The story gets interesting from the moment that Stephanie Hofeller contacts Common Cause and works with them and others to release this important historical data about her father’s work. Regardless of your political view, you can see its importance.

This story has to be seen from her point of view about right and wrong and not from any raw narrow-minded partisan political view. This is truly an excellent story that fits right into events today. Keep it handy.

Thanks for stopping by.