Express
Inside the GOP Playbook

Allen Raymond with Ian Spiegelman, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative (Simon & Schuster, 2008)
How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, chronicles Allen Raymond’s decade-long career with the GOP, a path that leads him from the mires of local New Jersey politics to the heights of the 2000 Forbes presidential campaign, and eventually to a stint in federal prison due to his involvement with a phone-jamming operation during the 2002 elections.
Along the way Raymond recounts the smears made to enact a power grab within the RNC, his first encounter with Karl Rove, and the invasion of a Bergen County Republican headquarters by Israeli nationalist radicals. The memoir is, by turns, illuminating—“RNC elections were supposed to be about courtesy among a unified group of friends…we decided we’d slip the documents under everyone’s doors while they were sleeping”—pithy—Rove “disappeared the thing like it was a witness at a mob trial,” and exciting—“militants…were trashing the place and screaming at the top of their lungs.”
Raymond’s anecdotal accounts of each successive campaign feature their own unique cast of characters, each with their own distinct loyalties. He wisely uses an informal, conversational tone throughout; the style allows him to impart the integral set-up information to the reader with an economy of words—and usually some humor as well. For instance, he recalls his meeting with new RNC political director Curt Anderson, as that of “a moderate Northeastern Republican walking into the very den of the assault rifle knuckle-draggers.” Such a description instantly details Anderson’s character as well as his intra-party allegiance. Additionally, this straightforward approach lends a much-needed sincerity to Raymond’s growing disillusionment with his party that dominates the closing sections of the book, a conclusion which could easily have been undone by excessive snark and bitterness.
The tale of Raymond’s meteoric rise and fall fascinates on several levels, not the least of which is its close parallel to the fortunes of the Republican Party over the same time span. But it is his candid enumeration of dirty-tricks electioneering, behind-closed-doors power, and money-funneling at each level of the political game that makes the book a compelling, guilty pleasure of a read—and hopefully not a preview of things to come.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights
By Joseph PeschelJUL-AUG 2021 | Books
Henkin’s latest novel Morningside Heights, delayed from publication for one year because of COVID-19, is a tragedy in which a family copes with one members early-onset Alzheimers disease. Its a gracefully written book, Henkins best so far, that manages to be emotionally moving, without being cloying or so overwhelmingly depressive as to be unreadable.
RIZOMA: Poetry & Performance Workshops at Santiaguito de Almoloya Women’s Prison
By Emma GomisSEPT 2020 | Special Report
In March of 2020 I went with a group of artists, poets, and musicians to the Penal Femenil Santiaguito in Almoloya, Mexico—a prison center for prevention and social reinsertion.
Crown Heights, 2020
By Amber JosephMAY 2021 | Fiction
In Crown Heights, 2020 a Black woman who has been living in quarantine with her white partner recognizes a shift in their dynamic once the racial justice protests begin. In sharp incisive fragments, the narrator doesnt hold back as she gives us the history of their relationship and the fetishization that she now realizes is at its heart.
Prison in the Virus Time
By Keith "Malik" WashingtonJUNE 2020 | Field Notes
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, USP Pollock was on regular lockdowns due to pervasive violence. Nothing has changed in this regard; in fact, its getting worse. If I dont get COVID-19, I could easily get caught up in the violence. You can just be minding your own business and get stabbed up here. That is the harsh reality of life in a federal prison.