Roll Back Civil Rights: Deluded Republicans Claim America is #39;Color-Blind #39; Enough
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Roll Back Civil Rights: Deluded Republicans Claim America is 'Color-Blind' Enough - Video
It's no secret that Republicans have a demographic problem when it comes to national elections.
In 2012, roughly nine in every ten people who voted for Mitt Romney were white -- even as the white vote continued its steady decline as a percentage of the overall electorate. He got crushed among Hispanics and African American voters.
Writing at Commentary magazine on Monday, former Bush Administration official Pete Wehner concludes:
Its an undeniable empirical truth that the GOP coalition is shrinking, and its shrinking in the aftermath of two fairly decisive defeats, with the latter coming against a president whose policies were judged by many Americans to have been failures. Which means the Republican task isnt simply to nominate a candidate who can fire up the base; it is to find principled conservative leaders who can win over voters who are not now voting for the GOP at the presidential level.
The problem Wehner -- and many other senior strategists and some elected officials within the GOP -- identify is not only incredibly serious as it relates to the party's ability to win national election but is also almost certain to get worse unless something big changes. As in, the 2016 presidential election will be a tough one for Republicans to win given the demographic changes in the country but it won't be nearly as difficult for them as the 2024 or 2028 elections could be.
A new study from the Carsey Institute, a non-partisan public policy thinktank housed at the University of New Hampshire, makes that fact abundantly clear. Using data from the 2012 Census, the report showcases just how fast the minority population is growing among young people -- those under aged 20 -- even as growth in that same age group among whites is basically stagnant. They write: "In 1990, 32 percent of the population younger than age 20 was minority, increasing to 39 percent in 2000. By July of 2012, 47 percent of the 82.5 million people under age 20 in America were from minority populations."
What that massive growth among young minorities means is that those under 20 are now significantly more diverse than the rest of the population. Minority youths make up 47 percent of the overall population under 20 while minorities comprise jusst 33 percent of 20-and-over population.
Image courtesy of the Carsey Institute
The math isn't complicated. Winning 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and six percent of the African American vote -- as Romney did in 2012 -- makes it hard to win a majority of the overall vote when those groups represent 10 percent and 13 percent of the electorate, respectively. If Hispanics grow to 20 percent of the electorate by 2024 or 2028 and the Republican presidential nominee performs roughly equivalent to Romney's 2012 showing, it will be impossible -- or damn close to impossible -- for that GOP nominee to win a national majority.
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Republicans have a major demographic problem. And its only going to get worse.
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Giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention money for gun violence research is a request to fund propaganda, a Georgia congressman says.
Giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention money for gun violence research is a request to fund propaganda, a Georgia congressman says.
by Lois Beckett ProPublica, April 21, 2014, 2:50 p.m.
We're probing the policy and politics of guns in America.
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After the Sandy Hook school shooting, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) was one of a few congressional Republicans who expressed a willingness to reconsider the need for gun control laws.
"Put guns on the table, also put video games on the table, put mental health on the table," he said less than a week after the Newtown shootings. He told a local TV station that he wanted to see more research done to understand mass shootings. "Let's let the data lead rather than our political opinions."
For nearly 20 years, Congress has pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to steer clear of firearms violence research. As chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that traditionally sets CDC funding, Kingston has been in a position to change that. Soon after Sandy Hook, Kingston said he had spoken to the head of the agency. "I think we can find some common ground," Kingston said.
More than a year later, as Kingston competes in a crowded Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat, the congressman is no longer talking about common ground.
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Republicans Say No to CDC Gun Violence Research
Developments across the country in recent days signal a building momentum within the Republican Party to end the GOP's long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage, with activists arguing that doing so will allow GOP candidates to focus more on popular economic themes in this year's elections and help expand the party's appeal ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Greg McNeilly, 42, left of Grand Rapids, married his longtime partner Doug Meeks, 37, of Lansing, outside the Ingham County courtroom of Judge William Collette, Saturday, March 22, 2014. McNeilly is a prominent Michigan Republican Party strategist. (AP Photo/The Detroit News, Chad Livengood)
The change is being spurred far away from Washington by state party officials and local GOP operatives who believe that it no longer makes political sense to block attempts to expand marriage rights to gay men and lesbians.
Illinois Republicans last weekend ousted party officials who disagreed with a former state party chairman's support for same-sex marriage. Nevada Republicans just days ago removed language from the party platform regarding whether gay men and lesbians should marry. A new fundraising committee supporting pro-gay marriage GOP congressional candidates announced last week that it raised more than $2 million in the first quarter from wealthy Republican donors who support gay rights. Even Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an outspoken social conservative critic of gay rights, said in a recent BuzzFeed interview that I think we need to concede that theres been a real shift of public opinion on marriage."
Fred Sainz, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, agreed that a tectonic shift is taking place in the Republican Party on marriage equality. He cited several polls showing shifting support and the growing number of lawmakers in favor of dropping opposition even as top leaders remain opposed. For the Republican hierarchy it's a very straightforward question, Sainz said. How can they attract the next generation of voters and not support an issue young people have made their minds up on?
Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released in March. But Republicans and conservatives are about the only demographic or political group still opposed to same-sex marriage. Fifty-four percent of Republicans oppose legal gay marriage, while 40 percent approve it, according to the poll. That compares with 70 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents who support it.
But a recent Pew Research poll suggested a stark generational divide among Republicans on the subject. More than six in 10 Republicans and "Republican leaners" under age 30 favor same-sex marriage, while just 35 percent oppose it. By contrast, just 27 percent of Republicans ages 50 and older favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, the Pew poll found.
Those findings encourage Tyler Deaton, a 28-year old GOP activist in Concord, N.H. Hes leading Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry, a national network that hopes to raise $1 million by the summer of 2016 and convince the Republican National Committee to drop anti-gay language from the national GOP party platform during the presidential nominating convention.
I think were going to be successful, I think that this is the right time, that if the party wants to grow, then for the party to reach new voters, this is a necessary change, Deaton said. I think well have a new platform in 2016 that is much more inclusive to gay people.
Nationally, none of the Republican governors or lawmakers mentioned as possible presidential candidates publicly supports same-sex marriage. Ten Republican senators voted with Democrats last year to ban workplace discrimination against gay and transgender workers, but House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other top Republicans leaders oppose the Senate bill and same-sex marriage.
Leaders of the Republican minority in the General Assembly last week proposed some sensible alternatives to parts of Governor Malloy's state budget.
The Republicans' accounting would be more honest, eliminating some "gimmicks" by which the governor and the legislature's Democratic majority pretend that government has more money than it does and set the state up for another billion-dollar deficit after the election.
The Republicans would divert the imaginary state budget surplus into debt repayment and cancel the tax rebates the governor wants to send to voters just weeks before they decide on his re-election. The Republicans also would cancel the governor's other bribe, an income tax exemption for retired teachers, an ordinarily Democratic constituency lately much annoyed by the governor's erratic flirtation with what calls itself education reform.
The Republicans would block the keno game thoughtlessly authorized by the governor and Democratic legislators last year and soon regretted as more gambling exploiting the poor. The Republicans would cut funding for the state university and community college systems, which social promotion has turned into glorified high schools with bloated salaries. And the Republicans would cancel state government's earned income tax credit for the working poor.
While the latter proposal has prompted the most criticism from Democrats, income redistribution is more the business of the federal government than state government even as state government long has failed with its basics, like appropriating adequately for special education, the mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill. Since they always find money for raises for the public employees whose unions dominate their party but never can find enough money for the neediest, the bleating of the keno Democrats is tiresome.
But in the end why should most people care about the Republicans' proposed budget adjustments? Their tax relief would be trivial, restoring a couple of sales tax exemptions. And according to the state budget office, the Republican budget's total spending would be only a tenth of a percent less than what the governor has proposed. Thus the Republicans effectively ratify his record tax increases.
So is this really some "vision" for Connecticut, a departure from the declining path the state is pursuing? Does it address the collapse of standards in education and the worsening of poverty by policies purporting to alleviate it? Does it give hope of transforming the state's economy?
So far the candidates for the Republican nomination for governor have not been any more impressive. Most of them criticize the Malloy administration's economic development grants as corporate welfare, but nearly every Republican in the state House of Representatives last week voted for the administration's biggest corporate welfare package yet, $400 million for United Technologies Corp.
Two Republican gubernatorial aspirants, Senate Minority Leader John McKinney of Fairfield and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, are moving away from their association with gun control so as to ingratiate themselves with the party's gun enthusiasts.
The leading candidate, 2010 nominee Tom Foley, seems mainly to be trying to protect his lead by avoiding debates.