[Ed. note: there is a Wikipedia entry for REDMAP which complements the information below.]
Gillespie (see 'Ed Gillespie' in blog search) called the plan "REDMAP," an acronym for the Redistricting Majority Project. To implement it, he took over the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a nonprofit group that had previously functioned as a catchall bank account for corporations interested in influencing state laws....(p 298)
By the end of 2010, with the help of million-dollar donations from the tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds, as well as huge donations from Walmart, the pharmaceutical industry, the RSLC would have $30 million, three times its Democratic counterpart...In the previous decade, Pope and his family foundation has spent more than $40 million in efforts to puch American politics to the right. In addition to regularly attending the Kochs' secret planning summits, he served on the board of the Kochs' main public advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, as he had on its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy... (p 299)
Indeed, Pope's role in his home state of North Carolina was in many respects a state-sized version of the Kochs' role nationally. ...What Pope (see 'Art Pope' in blog search) brought to the panel that weekend was the chance for donors to help him turn North Carolina into a laboratory for REDMAP....He was a master of arcane election law and had a fortune... ...Art Pope was...the multimillionaire chairman and CEO of Variety Wholesalers. (p 300)
For this, the panel (the RSLC) turned to its fourth member, Jim Ellis (see Jim Ellis in blog search)...[who] was under indictment...for violating campaign-finance regulations.
Ellis has a history of creating fake movements in support of unpopular corporations and causes. [Ed. note: including anti-tobacco regulations in the 1990s, when Ellis handled multi-million dollar campaigns funded by R.J. Reynolds]...If the [Tea Party] outbursts bore a striking resemblance to those of Obama's health-care proposal fifteen years earlier, it may be because the same political operatives were involved in both. (p 301)
In accordance with his REDMAP strategy, Gillespie continued to concentrate on governorships and state legislators. To hide their hands, the operatives steered the funds to a plethora of obscure, smaller groups...Soon, the unschooled eye, a rash of spontaneous attacks on Democrats appeared to be breaking our all across the country. In reality, the effort was so centrally coordinated, as one participant put it, "there wasn't one race in which there were multiple groups airing ads at the same time." (p 306)
....Gillespie's Republican State Leadership Committee began to channel dark money into one local state legislature race after another...North Carolina in particular was living up to its promise as a perfect testing ground for the REDMAP strategy. Art Pope's outsided role there...was also providing an instructive demonstration of how much influence one extraordinarily wealthy activist could have over a single state in the post-Citizens United era. (p 321)