Disenfranchisement: Not Just For the Poor and Minority Any More

The Repug War on Democratic Voters is a fucking Hydra: every disenfranchisement trick you stop creates five new tricks. Are demographic trends of increasing minorities turning repugs into an endangered species? Just draw insane districts that combine all the minorities into the fewest possible districts so white repugs can take over the rest.

Ari Berman at The Nation:

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

The consequences of redistricting in North Carolina—one of the most important swing states in the country—could determine who controls Congress and the presidency in 2012. Democrats hold seven of the state’s thirteen Congressional seats, but after redistricting they could control only three—the largest shift for Republicans at the Congressional level in any state this year. Though Obama won eight of the thirteen districts, under the new maps his vote would be contained in only three heavily Democratic districts—all of which would have voted 68 percent or higher for the president in 2008—while the rest of the districts would have favored John McCain by 55 percent or more. “GOP candidates could win just over half of the statewide vote for Congress and end up with 62 percent to 77 percent of the seats,” found John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation.

SNIP

This gives the GOP a major opportunity to build on its gains from 2010. Today GOP Representative Paul Ryan, nobody’s idea of a moderate, represents the median House district in America based on party preference, according to Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report. That district will become two points more Republican after the current redistricting cycle. “The fact of a Republican wave election on the eve of redistricting means that Republican legislators are in far better shape to shore up that wave,” says Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert at Loyola Law School. Though public dissatisfaction with GOP members of Congress is at an all-time high, Republican dominance of the redistricting process could prove an insurmountable impediment to Democratic hopes of retaking the House, where the GOP now has a fifty-one-seat edge. Speaker of the House John Boehner predicts that the GOP’s redistricting advantage will allow the party to retain control of the House, perhaps for the next decade.

SNIP


The use of race in redistricting is just one part of a broader racial strategy used by Southern Republicans to not only make it more difficult for minorities to vote and to limit their electoral influence but to pass draconian anti-immigration laws, end integrated busing, drug-test welfare recipients and curb the ability of death-row inmates to challenge convictions based on racial bias. GOP presidential candidates have gotten in on the act, with Newt Gingrich calling President Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.” The new Southern Strategy, it turns out, isn’t very different from the old one.

The really diabolical aspect of this strategy is that it disenfranchises not just minorities but white Democratic voters, too.

All you disenchanted democrats who sat home instead of voting in 2010: this is YOUR FAULT. Eat poisoned rat dicks, fuck off and die, and don't ever, EVER complain that Democratic office-holders aren't doing enough.