# RedMap Project The cheapest, highest-leverage political investment of the modern era. REDMAP — the **Redistricting Majority Project**, run by the **Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC)** — was a roughly $30 million Republican operation in 2010 to flip state legislative chambers in the census year, seize control of the once-a-decade redistricting process, and lock in congressional and statehouse majorities for the decade that followed. It worked. With a budget a fraction of what a single competitive U.S. Senate race costs, REDMAP redrew the political map of the United States for the 2012–2022 cycle and made [[Gerrymandering]] the defining structural advantage of the 2010s Republican Party. ## The Insight REDMAP's strategic logic, credited to RSLC executive director **Chris Jankowski** and incubated in 2009 in the office of RSLC chairman [[Ed Gillespie]] (the former RNC chair), was a textbook exercise in leverage. In most states the legislature draws congressional district lines. The lines drawn in 2011, after the 2010 census, would govern elections through 2020. Therefore, whoever controlled state legislatures in 2010 would control the maps for a decade. And state legislative seats are astonishingly cheap to contest — a few tens of thousands of dollars can decide a race that national donors ignore. Gillespie pitched donors that with about $31.5 million, Republicans could target roughly 107 legislative races across 16 states and "fully control or affect the drawing of 9 new congressional districts." The money — much of it [[Dark Money]] routed through the RSLC and allied groups in the post–*[[Citizens United v. FEC]]* environment — was concentrated on a small number of winnable chambers in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. ## The Result The 2010 wave (amplified by Tea Party energy and the [[2010 Midterm Elections]]) handed Republicans control of roughly 10 of the 15 states that would redraw the most districts. The maps drawn in 2011 produced durable Republican advantages: in several states Republicans won comfortable congressional majorities while losing or narrowly winning the statewide popular vote. The 2012 election was the clearest demonstration — Democrats won more total votes for the U.S. House nationally, yet Republicans retained a comfortable House majority, an outcome widely attributed to REDMAP-engineered maps. The model fed a decade of litigation. North Carolina's maps became a national flashpoint, culminating in *Rucho v. Common Cause* (2019), in which the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable in federal court — effectively ratifying the REDMAP strategy by removing the federal judiciary as a check. Watchdog groups including [[Common Cause]] have spent the years since fighting REDMAP-drawn maps state by state. ## The North Carolina Connection North Carolina is the purest case study of REDMAP's logic intersecting with a local donor machine. The national project supplied the strategy and outside money; [[Art Pope]]'s state-level network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and direct spending supplied the ground game and the policy infrastructure. Together they flipped the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time since Reconstruction, controlled the 2011 redistricting, and entrenched supermajorities that survived even when Democrats won statewide offices. The maps that resulted are among the most litigated in the country and recur throughout the [[Redistricting Timeline 2025-2026]] as the baseline the current mid-decade fights are measured against. ## Analytical Framework REDMAP is the **leverage doctrine** of American electoral strategy made explicit: identify the cheapest decision point that controls the most downstream power, and saturate it. It is the structural sibling of the [[Art Pope]] state-capture model and the donor-as-infrastructure logic of the [[Dark Money]] ecosystem — proof that durable political control is bought not at the top of the ticket but at the overlooked bottom, in the off-year races for the bodies that draw the lines. Democrats spent the following decade trying to build a counterpart, and the 2025–2026 mid-decade redistricting wave is in large part a delayed argument over the map REDMAP drew. ## See Also - [[Gerrymandering]] — The mechanism REDMAP industrialized - [[Art Pope]] — The North Carolina state-capture parallel - [[Ed Gillespie]] — RSLC chair who pitched the project - [[2010 Midterm Elections]] — The wave REDMAP rode and shaped - [[Redistricting Timeline 2025-2026]] — The current fights over the map REDMAP drew - [[Dark Money]] — How the project was funded post–Citizens United - [[American Crossroads]] · [[Crossroads GPS]] — Parallel post-2010 GOP money vehicles