AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wallsten, where does redistricting fit into all of this?

PETER WALLSTEN: That's actually an important point that I think -- that we both think has been lost in a lot of the current debate over who is going to win the House, who’s going to win control of the House this year. You know, we don't know who’s going to win control of the House, but we can tell you this: Republicans have a huge advantage when it comes to the way that districts are drawn. And this is an interesting point.

It happened actually in the 1980s, the Democratic Congress passed a rewrite of the Voting Rights Act. And what that did was encourage the creation of more districts that would be drawn to elect more minorities to Congress, which seemed like a good goal at the time to the Democrats who were in charge and certainly to the civil rights groups that were advocating for it. But what Lee Atwater, the kind of the late and legendary Republican operative, strategist, realized then was that since redistricting was done every decade typically, that after the 1990 census when state legislatures in states around all over the country would be doing their map redrawing, Lee Atwater realized that the Republicans could actually create alliances with these civil rights groups and give them more minority seats than the Democrats could give.

And the reason for that is because the Republicans realized that when you take minorities and pack them into districts that would elect, say, a minority member with 60% or 70% or 80% of the vote, that bleaches out the surrounding districts. It creates more white conservative districts. This happened in Florida and across the South. And that helped create this map that is now, we argue, tilted in favor of Republicans, especially when it comes to districts that are maybe a little more closely competitive but lean Republican. The fight for control of the House is not fought out on a level playing field. It is on a playing field that benefits Republicans.

So this year, for a lot of reasons that your viewers and listeners know about, the Republicans are having a hard time. And many think that they might lose control of the House. This is what some analysts call a tsunami effect of problems that could lead Democrats to win. But even Democratic strategists will tell you that they don't know that they’re going to win in this environment, which is a pretty remarkable acknowledgement given everything that's gone on. And even if they do win, it would be only by a narrow margin, and that's because they’re constrained by these maps, and this redistricting plan is important to this day for that reason.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the Republican strategy to reach more deeply into the African American, Latino communities, to immigrant communities?

PETER WALLSTEN: It's also a very important tenet of One Party Country, as we lay out in the book, that really under the leadership of the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb, they tried to redefine the way the Republican Party goes after minority voters. Latinos, George W. Bush won 40% of the Hispanic vote nationally, which is a pretty remarkable number for Republicans. Jeb has won with huge numbers, not just the Cuban Republicans, but non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida who tend to vote Democratic, as well. And they did this with a strategy that some strategists call the “I love you” strategy, where they manage to appeal to a sense of emotion, rather than issues, in the case of Latinos.

In the case of African Americans, we can talk more about programs and issues that they use, but one that we lay out in the book is called the White House faith-based initiative, where the White House actually helped -- created a program to funnel taxpayer dollars to African American churches across the country, kind of bringing influential ministers into the fold, so they would turn around and campaign for Republicans.

You mentioned Hurricane Katrina. There's the immigration debate. There's lots of reasons right now why this outreach to minorities is strained. What we argue, though, is that the point was never to win a majority of these groups. The Karl Rove vision is to peel away slices of the electorate. So, Republicans don't need to win the majority of African Americans to win elections. They don't even need to win 20% of them. They could win 15% of African Americans, and that would give them the chance to really keep Democrats in the minority.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you explain how the whole Sensenbrenner bill, immigration bill that criminalized immigrants, criminalized those that would help them, criminalized priests, nuns, people who helped those who are undocumented in this country, how did that fit into an Republican strategy?

PETER WALLSTEN: Well, I would say that that is probably not part of the Karl Rove strategy, per se, however, in the long-term strategy. In the short term, you have the White House pushing for what some might call a more open immigration policy, and you have conservative Republicans pushing for this more restrictive policy, so all bases are covered for the Republican Party right now, depending on which district you’re running in.

But as far as the long-term strategy that we write about, this is really one of the strains and one of the pressure points of this strategy, that, you know, George W. Bush, the one issue that you can really point to that he seems to understand and feel strongly about is immigration. We went back to Midland, Texas and talked to Hispanics that he knew as a young businessman. I mean, George W. Bush has long been close personal friends with immigrants, Mexican Americans and even Mexicans living in the United States who are in the citizens. It's something that he actually has strong feelings about, and he believes that the immigration policy should not be restrictive. He also is very close with corporate America, as Tom can talk about later, and they obviously have strong feelings about inexpensive labor.

So, but in the big picture, the White House is pushing for this more open policy, because, in part, Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman believe that Hispanic voters are going to be key to any Republican majority, if it's going to be long-term. And George Bush realized this in ’94, when he actually challenged Pete Wilson personally on Proposition 187 in California, where George Bush, at a time that the Republican Party overall was thinking that immigration was going to be a huge issue for them -- Pete Wilson won reelection, he was viewed as a possible challenger to Bill Clinton in ’96 -- George Bush told them Prop 187 was wrong. And that’s in part because they realized the power of the Hispanic vote.

And one more point to that is that a lot of Republican strategists right now believe that if the party nominates a candidate in 2008 who believes in a more restrictive border policy, that this majority plan could actually die.