Short Memories: Eric Holder On Redistricting
They say the redistricting battle was started when Trump told Red States to redraw their districting maps. That is a bold face gas lighting lie. In 2017 Eric Holder, Obama's former AG, actually told states to draw districts BASED ON RACE. Trump simply suggested fight fire with fire. Yes, I know Holder wasn't in office in 2017. He said this on one of those speaking tours Democrats do when Republicans hold the Whitehouse. They can't handle losing an election.
Stick with POLICY and stop worrying about RACE and we won't have these waist of time discussions.
#Politics #Redistricting #Obama #EricHolder
Short Memories: Eric Holder’s Race-Based Redistricting Scheme Started the Fire
For years, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party have pushed a narrative that the ongoing nationwide redistricting battles began when President Donald Trump urged red states to redraw their congressional maps. This claim is not merely misleading—it is a brazen, gaslighting lie. The truth, which the left desperately wants voters to forget, is that the modern redistricting arms race was ignited in 2017 by none other than former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who openly called for states to draw legislative districts based on race. Trump’s subsequent suggestion that Republicans “fight fire with fire” was a reactive, defensive posture, not the opening salvo. If Americans want to end these endless, divisive redistricting wars, the answer is simple: stick to policy, stop obsessing over race, and return to a colorblind application of the law.
The Holder-Obama Redistricting Machine Launches in 2017
Within weeks of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, even before his inauguration, the political left began organizing a coordinated campaign to fundamentally alter the electoral landscape. At the center of this effort was Eric Holder, who, in January 2017, formally launched the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) with the explicit goal of influencing how congressional districts would be redrawn after the 2020 Census. Holder’s organization was not a neutral good-government initiative; it was a political weapon designed to break Republican control of legislative maps and boost Democratic representation.
Holder was candid about the partisan nature of his mission. Speaking at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, he declared gerrymandering to be “the biggest rigged system in America” and framed the redistricting fight as essential to rescuing the Democratic Party from Republican-dominated governance. President Barack Obama, Holder’s longtime friend and former boss, immediately threw his post-presidential weight behind the NDRC, signaling the seriousness of the effort. The NDRC went on to raise over $11 million in its first year and set a target of $30 million for 2018, with plans to target Republicans in twelve states.
What is most damning, however, is what Holder and his allies identified as the key to flipping districts: race.
Drawing Districts Based on Race: The Core of Holder’s Strategy
While Holder publicly framed his campaign as a fight against “partisan gerrymandering,” the legal and political strategy he pursued consistently demanded that race be the predominant factor in drawing district lines. In 2017, Holder’s organization aggressively challenged Republican-drawn maps in multiple states on the grounds of “racial gerrymandering,” arguing that minority voters must be grouped together into so-called “majority-minority” districts to ensure their voices were heard.
When the Supreme Court struck down two North Carolina congressional districts as racial gerrymanders in May 2017, Holder celebrated the ruling as a “watershed moment in the fight to end racial gerrymandering”. In Georgia, Holder slammed Republican efforts to redraw legislative boundaries as a “power grab” and accused the GOP of moving black voters out of swing districts. His organization sued the state of Georgia in October 2017, alleging that the legislative districts were drawn “in order to decrease African-American voters’ impact at the polls”. Across the South, Holder threatened legal action wherever he believed Republican maps did not sufficiently prioritize race in their design.
The core premise of Holder’s legal crusade was that racial identity should determine political representation. This approach assumes, as conservative jurists have long warned, that voters of the same race think and vote as a monolithic bloc—a patronizing assumption that reduces individuals to their skin color. As Justice Clarence Thomas and other conservatives have repeatedly argued, the Constitution is fundamentally colorblind, and treating citizens as members of racial groups rather than as individuals violates the very principles of equal protection under the law.
The Left’s Racial Gerrymandering Playbook Exposed
What Holder and his allies call “fair maps” is, in practice, racial gerrymandering dressed up in the language of social justice. The strategy is straightforward: concentrate minority voters who historically vote overwhelmingly for Democrats into as many districts as possible to maximize Democratic electoral prospects. Under the guise of protecting minority representation, the NDRC and its allies sought to carve out racially segregated voting districts that would reliably produce Democratic winners. This is not fair representation; it is racial sorting that undermines the principle that voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.
The conservative legal movement has consistently rejected this race-obsessed approach to redistricting. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2026 that Louisiana’s attempt to create a second majority-black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, it reaffirmed the colorblind principles that should govern all districting decisions. The Court’s conservative majority held that the Voting Rights Act does not compel states to create race-based districts, and that treating black voters as interchangeable political units is antithetical to constitutional equality. This is the exact opposite of what Holder and his organization have fought for since 2017.
Trump’s “Fight Fire With Fire” Response
It is against this backdrop of Holder’s multi-year, race-based redistricting crusade that President Trump’s recent comments must be understood. When Trump urged red states to redraw their maps to pick up additional conservative-leaning House seats, he was not initiating a new conflict he was responding to a war that Democrats had already declared. The “fight fire with fire” framing, echoed even by some Democrats in response to Republican gains, was a recognition that if one side insists on maximizing partisan advantage through aggressive map-drawing, the other side cannot unilaterally disarm.
The media’s attempt to portray Trump as the instigator of the current redistricting turmoil is a textbook example of short memories and selective outrage. The timeline is indisputable: Holder launched his national effort in January 2017, sued states, raised tens of millions of dollars, and openly advocated for race-conscious districting years before Trump said a word about the issue. By the time Trump weighed in, the left had already built a massive institutional apparatus dedicated to gerrymandering on the basis of race and partisanship.
Critics may argue that both parties engage in gerrymandering, and that Trump’s push for more Republican-friendly maps is no different. But the crucial distinction is one of principle and timing. Democrats, led by Holder and Obama, were the first to organize a nationwide campaign to reshape districts for political gain after losing the White House in 2016. They were the ones who made race the central criterion for district composition. And they are the ones who have spent the better part of a decade filing lawsuits to impose their vision on states that rejected Democratic candidates at the ballot box. Trump’s belated call for Republicans to push back is a reaction, not an innovation.
The Policy-Over-Race Solution
The path out of this endless redistricting trench warfare is not found in escalating the race-based arms race but in abandoning it altogether. As the anonymous post rightly states: “Stick with POLICY and stop worrying about RACE and we won’t have these waist of time discussions.”
Americans of all backgrounds are exhausted by the constant racialization of every political issue. The conservative vision for redistricting and for governance in general is one that treats citizens as individuals, not as members of racial tribes. Districts should be drawn based on traditional, neutral principles such as geographic compactness, community integrity, and political subdivision boundaries, not on racial headcounts engineered to produce predetermined electoral outcomes.
The Supreme Court’s colorblind rulings provide a legal framework for this approach, but what is needed most is a cultural and political shift away from the left’s obsession with racial categorization. When Eric Holder and his allies say they want “fair maps,” what they mean is maps that guarantee Democratic wins by racially gerrymandering minority voters into safe districts. That is not fairness; it is a soft form of racial separatism.
True voting rights are secured by enforcing the law equally for every citizen, not by creating racial preferences that assume nonwhite voters cannot succeed without government-engineered electoral advantages. Black Americans, Latino Americans, and all citizens are not defined by their skin color. Their voices deserve to be heard through fair, race-neutral processes that respect individual dignity rather than group identity.
Conclusion
The claim that Donald Trump started the redistricting wars is a lie built on willful amnesia. Eric Holder, backed by Barack Obama, launched the first salvo in 2017 with a multi-million-dollar organization dedicated to drawing districts on the basis of race. Trump’s suggestion that Republicans respond in kind was a predictable consequence of the left’s refusal to play by colorblind rules.
If we truly want to end the partisan and racial gerrymandering that distorts our democracy, the solution is not to escalate the firefighting metaphor but to extinguish the racial arson entirely. Stop drawing districts by race. Stop treating voters as monolithic voting blocs defined by skin color. Focus on policy that uplifts all Americans, and the redistricting wars will fizzle into the irrelevance they deserve. Anything less is a waste of time—and a betrayal of the constitutional promise of equal justice under law.