Republicans want to change US census to shore up white vote
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It is one of the few solutions to the GOP’s current quandary: the party increasingly relies on white voters, and white voters are a shrinking portion of the population. The dim future of a lily-white Republican Party had been apparent for years. In 2002, political experts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued in The Emerging Democratic Majority that demographic shifts in the US all but guaranteed Democratic dominance in the future, unless Republicans got their act together and started wooing non-white voters.
They were, it turns out, largely wrong. They failed to account for two things: one, that a chunk of Latino voters would have no problem voting for a candidate who ran a xenophobic campaign (Donald Trump captured 28 per cent of the Latino vote in 2016) and, two, that the franchise would remain stable.
It is that second mistake that has proven the most troubling in recent years. Since 2010, when conservative Republicans swept the midterm elections, the party has focused less on persuading voters and more on eliminating them.
That was evident in the scare campaign about voter fraud, which fuelled hundreds of new voter-restriction laws across the country. Though in-person voter fraud is so rare as to be statistically non-existent, laws requiring difficult-to-access forms of ID passed just about everywhere that Republicans controlled the state legislature. Nor were the real goals of these laws secret. In 2012, a Republican politician from Pennsylvania sold voter ID laws with the promise that they would deliver the state to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In 2016, North Carolina Republicans admitted in court documents that they eliminated Sunday voting because it was mostly used in “disproportionately black” counties.
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