Map Quest
ON A FRIGID MARCH morning, Eric Holder strode into a brick union hall on the west side of Milwaukee, across from a credit union and an auto body shop. The Merrill Park neighborhood was once the center of the city’s Irish political machine, filled with stately Victorian houses—including the childhood home of Spencer Tracy—but it was now mostly African American and economically depressed.
Holder had dressed down from his usual suit and tie: He wore a black fleece jacket, white button-down, and dark blue jeans. He was warmly greeted by Angela Lang, the 29-year-old executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a local group that works to increase voter turnout in Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods from an office in the union hall’s basement, which was filled with campaign flyers and maps. It was the 68-year-old former attorney general’s third visit to Milwaukee in a year, and Lang addressed him as “our No. 1 cousin.”
The reason for Holder’s visits was Wisconsin’s assault on voting rights. The Wisconsin GOP had passed a voter ID law, designed to depress Democratic participation, that took effect before the 2016 election. As a result, turnout in Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods dropped by more than 20 percent.
Not long after the election, Holder launched the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), a political action committee that aims to unrig the system that has entrenched Republican control of the country’s most important swing states. He’d received the backing of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, who in December 2018 folded his own political operation, Organizing for Action, into Holder’s to give the fight against gerrymandering more clout. Now, while other top Democrats are focused on the White House, Holder has set his sights on neighborhoods like Merrill Park and on races like the one he was there to talk about, a state Supreme Court contest that had received virtually no attention outside Wisconsin.
“This state is in some ways ground zero for gerrymandering,” Holder told two dozen BLOC canvassers who
