From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010"
Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race now seemed a promising dress rehearsal for even more outside money, which the Court had ennobled as free speech. So as the self-described "investors' came together to plan for the 2010 midterm elections, they were in a buoyant mood.
... Even before the Citizens United decision, Gillespie has been busy. While many other conservatives were despondent during the early months of the Obama administration, when the president's approval ratings were stratospherically high, Gillespie hadcome up with an ingenious plan to exploit the only opening he could see. With Obama dominating Washington, Gillespie looked to the states. He knew that 2011was a year in which many state legislatures would redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts based on anew census, a process that only took place once a decade. So he put together an ambitious strategy aimed at a Republican takeover of governorships and legislatures all across the country. Capturing them would enable Republicans to redraw their states congressional districts in order to favor their candidates.
... Gillespie called the plan "REDMAP", an acronym for Redistricting Majority Project. ...All he needed was enough money to put REDMAP into action. By the end of 2010, with the help off million-dollar donations from the tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds, as well as huge donations from Walmart, the pharmaceutical industry, and rich private donors like those at the Koch summit, the RSLC [Republican State Leadership Committee] would have $30 million, three times its Democratic counterpart.
...On November 2, 2010, the Democrats suffered massive defeats, losing control of the House of Representative. Just two short years after he soars to power amid predictions of a lasting realignment, Obama's party and his hopes of prevailing on any ambitious legislation were crushed.
...The Democrats' setbacks were huge at almost every level, Republicans picked up half a dozen Senate seats at the state level, the Democratic losses were even more staggering. Across the country, Republicans gained 673 legislative seats. They won control of both the legislature and the governor's office in twenty one states; the Democrats had similar one-party rule in only eleven. The map looked red, with small islands of blue.
As a consequence of their gains, Republicans now had four times as many districts to gerrymander as the Democrats. By creating reliably safe seats, they could build a firewall protecting the Republican control of Congress for the next decade.
In the middle of all this, in March 2010, Obama got his one signature victory, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Two cheers for Obama. But Obama and his people were apparently unaware of how the GOP was going about developing the infrastructure for obstructing anything else he might ever want to do:
By July [2010], Democratic strategists began to feel a strange undertow, as if an offshore tsunami were gathering force. One operative put together a chart compiling the ledger of midterm expenditures by ten Republican-aligned independent groups and was appalled to discover that this slice of the total spending alone would likely reach at least $200 million, Americans for Prosperity had pledged to spend $45 million. Karl Rove's group American Crossroads had pledged $32 million. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had committed to spend $75 million. Countless other groups, including an unknown number of dark-money organizations loaded with secret funds were lined up to spend millions and millions more. A Democratic operative who saw the chart, which was passed around like samizdat within the party, admitted that it was "one hell of a wake-up call."
The numbers caught the Obama administration off guard. The former White House aide Anita Dunn admits, "It was clear that Citizens United was going to open the floodgates and it would be bad for the Democrats. But it exploded in 2010. The amount spent in those midterms probably surprised everyone."
As late as May, Axelrod had barely known who the Kochs were. When a reporter asked what he knew about them, he seemed unsure. Later, the Koch public relations team would suggest that press coverage of them was initiated by the White House. In truth Obama's political team was almost clueless. Only after Noble's team, working undercover, began launching attacks on Democrats all across the country did some in the White House start to sense something odd. As Axelrod recalls, "We began to wonder, where is all this money coming from?"
History will judge as to what degree the Obama administration's being blindsided by all this was unavoidable or was political malpractice. I don't have an opinion on that right now. He can't be blamed for Citizens United. But I blame him for playing the insiders' game once elected and thinking he could win it rather than looking for ways to mobilize outsiders' support from the electorate that so enthusiastically supported him during his campaign. He just didn't have the people around him who could even begin to imagine how to do that.
Part of the reason the Democrats got shellacked by the GOP in the 2010 midterms lies in the way that Obama's playing the insiders' game in his first two years dismayed the base, especially young people, who went back to sleep when it became clear that Obama was not offering a real change, that he was just playing the insiders' game. Mayer's book makes clear, though, not just that the Right in this country has a lot of money to work with, but that it has far more talent and resourcefulness in playing the insiders' game. The Democrats have a chance only if they find a way to mobilize the outsiders, the people in the base that Obama's administration showed so much disdain for.
Do I think that a Bernie Sanders-led team will do any better? I don't really know for sure. it could be that it's already too late to do anything. But he at least understands that the insiders' game is a losing one for Democrats and the Left. HRC presents herself as someone who knows how to play the insiders' game, and I just don't see her as having the imagination or moral resources to anything different than to play that losing game. Maybe I underestimate her--I hope I do--but I just see her as too enmeshed in the decadent system to be able to offer an alternative to it. I also fear that we are now in a populist moment, and if the Democrats don't offer the American electorate a genuine populist on the Left, the country will choose the one from the Right. HRC represents at best a murky prolonging of the agony, and at worst a delivery of the country to a classical demagogue who with the support of the mob destroys what's left of our democracy.