A Fox & Friends segment about redistricting efforts led by former Attorney General Eric Holder falsely characterized his efforts as an attempt to rig elections. Holder is involved with several Democratic groups -- the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the National Redistricting Foundation (NFR), and the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) -- that are seeking to eliminate the impact of partisan gerrymandering on state and federal elections.

During its October 8 broadcast, Fox & Friends invited former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on air to smear Holder and his group’s efforts. Walker is the face of a group called the National Republican Redistricting Trust that has fought to preserve partisan gerrymanders that favor Republicans.

Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth introduced the segment by hyping a Wall Street Journal editorial that called Holder’s initiatives a “redistricting coup” and claiming that the former attorney general is leading efforts to “turn districts blue in time for the elections,” citing a recent legal victory one of Holder’s groups had in North Carolina. Walker then provided a litany of false or misleading information about what has been going on in that state.

First, some background: North Carolina has an ugly history of Republican legislators drawing maps for elections along racial lines to diminish the power of Black voters. In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down two Republican-drawn congressional maps in the state, upholding a lower court decision that found them to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. However, that ruling did not solve all of the unfairness plaguing elections in North Carolina, where electoral maps were still largely drawn to advantage Republicans. Recently released documents indicate that following the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina Republicans continued their racial gerrymandering efforts while lying to the district court overseeing the map-drawing process.

The effects of unfair district maps in North Carolina are obvious: In the 2018 federal elections, Democrats won 50% of the vote statewide but only 23% of the state’s congressional races, taking just three of North Carolina’s 13 U.S. House seats. In the state legislature, Republicans lost the statewide popular vote but still ended up controlling 29 of 50 Senate seats and 66 of 120 House seats.

In response, Holder’s National Redistricting Foundation sued in state court, challenging the state legislative maps as an unlawful partisan gerrymander. In September, NRF won its lawsuit and has followed up by filing a second lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s federal congressional maps along similar lines.

While appearing on Fox & Friends, Walker complained about the NRF lawsuits as part of a “sue until it’s blue mentality,” saying, “So even a state like North Carolina where Republicans are in charge of the Assembly and the Senate, the two houses there, they’ve gone to court.” But the whole point of those lawsuits is that the current makeup of the state legislature represents an ill-gotten advantage for Republicans precisely because they achieved their majorities using unfair district maps. Under Walker’s tortured logic, the fact that Republicans were able to achieve majorities in the state legislature by using obviously unfair maps is reason enough to keep those same partisan maps to decide future elections. (Walker has deployed similar mind-bending logic before when defending unfair election outcomes in his home state of Wisconsin.)