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Msg ID:
2699857 |
It Was a Terrifying Census for White Nationalists +3/-0
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Author:TheCrow
8/17/2021 1:06:13 PM
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QAnon and their proposed "Storm" are perfectly predictable if you looks at america's history of prejudice, segregation.
As is the extreme right's insistence on 'secure' elections. Their strength is based on a very well conditioned, organized group of voters who believe the pre-Voter's Rights laws were only a first step in controlling the outcome of elections.
As the lose control at the ballot box, they must restrict access to the vote to ensure what they believe are the correct outcomes in elections. The redistricting as result of the 2020 census will be a vivid illustration.
Aug. 15, 2021
For some of us, the census data released on Thursday was fascinating. For others, it was, I would presume, downright frightening.
Much of what we have seen in recent years — the rise of Donald Trump, xenophobia and racist efforts to enshrine or at least extend white power by packing the courts and suppressing minority votes — has been rooted in a fear of political, cultural and economic displacement.
The white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off.
They tried to clamp down on immigration, both unlawful and lawful. They waged a propaganda war against abortion, and they lobbied for “traditional family values” in the hopes of persuading more white women to have more babies. They orchestrated a system of mass incarceration that siphoned millions of young, marriage-age men, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, out of the free population.
They refused to pass gun control laws as gun violence disproportionately ravaged Black communities.
Republican governors, mostly in Southern states, even refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. As the Kaiser Family Foundation points out, “Medicaid is the largest source of insurance coverage for people with H.I.V., estimated to cover 42 percent” of the adult population with H.I.V., “compared to just 13 percent of the adult population overall.” It adds that Medicaid beneficiaries with H.I.V. are more likely to be male, Black and dually eligible for Medicare. So H.I.V. continues to rage in the South, even though we now have treatments that prevent the transmission of the virus.
On every level, in every way, these forces, whether wittingly or not, worked to prevent the nonwhite population from growing. And yet it did.
As The New York Times reported:
Hispanics accounted for about half the country’s growth over the past decade, up by about 23 percent. The Asian population grew faster than expected — up by about 36 percent, a rise that made up nearly a fifth of the country’s total. Nearly one in four Americans now identifies as either Hispanic or Asian. The Black population grew by 6 percent, an increase that represented about a tenth of the country’s growth. Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose the fastest, jumping to 13.5 million from 6 million.
Meanwhile, the white population, in absolute numbers, declined for the first time in the history of the country.
This data is dreadful for white supremacists. As Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Chicago, told me by phone, “These people experience this kind of shift as an apocalyptic threat.”
Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield. The only option left to white supremacists at this point is to find ways to help white people maintain their grip on power even as they become a minority in the population, and the best way to do that is to deny as many minorities as possible access to that power.
We are now seeing a shocking, blatant attempt at voter suppression across the country. I believe that this is just the start of something, not the end — that efforts to disenfranchise minority voters will grow only more brazen as the white power movement becomes more desperate.
We are likely to see this trend in full swing as the redistricting process gets underway. As Nate Cohn wrote in The Times, the fact that much of the population growth over the past 10 years occurred in the Sun Belt, where the G.O.P. controls redistricting, gives Republicans, who are overwhelmingly white, “yet another chance to preserve their political power in the face of unfavorable demographic trends.”
It’s particularly important to note that the changes in the nonwhite population will be not uniform but concentrated in particular states. Black people are continuing a reverse migration to the South and threatening to alter the political landscape there. Hispanics account for more and more of the voting-age population in key swing states across the Southwest.
As the nonwhite population grows in these states, so does their political power. In response, many of these are the states now trying to suppress nonwhite votes. This is why the Democratic-controlled Senate’s inability and unwillingness to alter the filibuster to pass voter protection is so maddening. Republicans’ voter suppression is an all-out attempt to shore up white power and diminish nonwhite power, and the Senate has been letting them do it.
The passage of power is not a polite and gentle affair like passing the salt at a dinner table. People with power fight — sometimes to the end — to maintain it. There’s going to be a shift, but not without strife.
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Msg ID:
2699860 |
America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts +3/-0
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Author:TheCrow
8/17/2021 1:15:02 PM
Reply to: 2699857
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Is gerrymandering a purely Republican practice? NO, but it is how a historically national minority party maintains it's power. If the left is mostly urban- 82.66% and the urban areas are Democratic strongholds, then the districts must be carefully drawn to maintain that political minority's power. Thus those in power as resylt of previous redistricting seek to maintain and expand their power.
This election year we can expect to hear a lot about Congressional district gerrymandering, which is when political parties redraw district boundaries to give themselves an electoral advantage.
Gerrymandering is at least partly to blame for the lopsided Republican representation in the House. According to an analysis I did last year, the Democrats are under-represented by about 18 seats in the House, relative to their vote share in the 2012 election. The way Republicans pulled that off was to draw some really, really funky-looking Congressional districts.
Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. Considering this dynamic, John Sides of The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog has argued convincingly that gerrymandering is not what's behind the rising polarization in Congress.
The process of redrawing district lines to give an advantage to one party over another is called "gerrymandering." Here's how it works. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
The compactness of a district -- a measure of how irregular its shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter -- can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to score poorly on this measure.
Using district boundary files from the Census, I calculated compactness scores for each of the districts of the 113th Congress and mapped them so you can see where the least compact -- and likely most-gerrymandered --districts are. Click through for an interactive map, along with detailed methodological notes for the brave.
There's a lot to say about these districts, about who drew them, the factors that went into their creation and the electoral consequences. Here's a straightforward run-down of where the most- and least-gerrymandered districts are.
1. Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
This speaks to the notion that the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a safe seat but to put your opponents in safe seats by cramming all of their supporters into a small number of districts. This lets you spread your own supporters over a larger number of districts. And the way to do this is to draw outlandishly-shaped districts that bring far-flung geographic areas together. North Carolina's 12th district, which holds the title of the nation's most-gerrymandered, is a textbook example of this: It snakes from north of Greensboro, to Winston-Salem, and then all the way down to Charlotte, spanning most of the state in the process.
2. Three of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts are in North Carolina.
North Carolina Republicans really outdid themselves in 2012. In addition to the 12th district, there's the 4th, which covers Raleigh and Burlington and snakes a narrow tentacle all the way south to pick up parts of Fayetteville. And then there's the 1st District, which covers a sprawling arbitrarily shaped region in the northeastern part of the state. All three of these seats were won by Democrats in 2012.
Overall, the North Carolina GOP's efforts paid off handsomely. Based on their statewide vote share you'd expect North Carolina Democrats to hold about seven seats. But they won only four. This is because an outsized share of the state's Democratic voters were shunted off into the three highly-gerrymandered districts above.
3. Indiana and Nevada stand out as states with the least amount of gerrymandering.
In contrast to North Carolina's Republicans, Indiana's did a remarkably good job of drawing sensible district boundaries. The same holds true for Nevada's Democrats, although with only four districts, the district boundaries in Nevada are dictated to a large degree by the state's borders.
4. Maryland and North Carolina are essentially tied for the honor of most-gerrymandered state.
With average gerrymander scores of about 88 out of a possible 100, Maryland and North Carolina are home to some of the ugliest districts in the nation among states with at least three Congressional districts. In fact, North Carolina is home to three out of the top 10 most-gerrymandered districts in the country. Maryland is proof that gerrymandering isn't just a Republican pastime, as the state's Democrats redrew those boundaries in 2012. The standout in that state is the 3rd Congressional district, which is the nation's second-most gerrymandered and home to Democratic congressman John Sarbanes.
5. Republicans drew Congressional boundaries in six of the 10 most-gerrymandered states.
In addition to North Carolina, Republicans drew district boundaries in Louisiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Alabama. Democrats drew districts in West Virginia and Illinois, in addition to Maryland. Boundaries in Kentucky were drawn up by that state's mixed legislature.
Again, the payoff for Republicans is in the makeup of the state's delegations: In those six states, Republicans picked up about 11 more seats than you'd expect from simply looking at the parties' vote shares.
6. Gerrymandering is easier to get away with in more densely-populated areas.
You'll notice that many of the highly irregular districts are clustered around cities and metro areas. When there are more people in a given area, partisans have more leeway in how to draw their districts.
7. This is what the 10 most-gerrymandered districts look like.
For a sense of just how ridiculous gerrymandered districts look, nothing beats a visual. I've listed the 10 most gerrymandered districts below.
NORTH CAROLINA'S 12TH DISTRICT
Gerrymander index score: 97.09
MARYLAND'S 3RD DISTRICT ("The praying mantis")
Gerrymander index score: 96.79
Gerrymander index score: 96.15
PENNSYLVANIA'S 7TH DISTRICT ("Goofy kicking Donald Duck")
Gerrymander index score: 96.05
NORTH CAROLINA'S 1ST DISTRICT
Gerrymander index score: 96.01
Gerrymander index score: 95.60
NORTH CAROLINA'S 4TH DISTRICT
Gerrymander index score: 95.16
Gerrymander index score: 94.96
TEXAS'S 35TH DISTRICT ("The upside-down elephant")
Gerrymander index score: 94.63
Gerrymander index score: 94.41
Want more on gerrymandering? Check out this excellent video produced by PostTV last year.
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Msg ID:
2699863 |
It Was a Terrifying Census for White Nationalists +3/-0
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Author:TheCrow
8/17/2021 1:20:49 PM
Reply to: 2699857
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This is why TrumpeRINO frog boys want to close the Mexican border: 'those people' are diluting America's 'white' culture. Which is a myth- America is and has been a nation of immigrants well before immigration laws, racist in intention, were passed.
One of the biggest findings is the big growth in Latinos who identified as more than one race, while the number of Hispanics who identified as white dropped significantly.
Sixth grade students line up to go into a classroom at Orchard Knob Middle School, in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Thursday. Robin Rudd / Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP
Aug. 12, 2021, 5:24 PM EDT / Updated Aug. 13, 2021, 7:23 AM EDT
By Suzanne Gamboa
Latinos drove the country’s demographic growth, shooting up to 62.1 million, the Census Bureau announced Thursday.
Latinos accounted for 51.1 percent of the country’s growth, rising to 18.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to numbers from the 2020 census. Latinos, or Hispanics, were 50.5 million and 16.3 percent of the national population in 2010. That means the Hispanic population grew by 23 percent from 2010 to 2020.
In contrast, the country’s white population alone is shrinking and aging, while people identifying as white in combination with some other race grew by 316 percent.
Fewer white Latinos, big increase in ‘more than one race’
The census data showed a drastic drop in the number of Latinos or Hispanics who identify as white, from 26.7 million in 2010 to 12.6 million in 2020.
The number of Hispanics or Latinos reporting more than one race more than quintupled, from 3 million to 20.3 million.
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said it is significant that the data showed the Hispanic population at 62.1 million. Many Latino leaders and groups have been putting it at about 60 million for a couple of years, he said by text message.
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement, “Today’s data release from the 2020 Census demonstrates that the Latino community is a huge and increasing part of our nation’s future.”
Latinos have been undercounted in the past — the Census Bureau estimates by 1.5 percent. But last year, the fallout from failed attempts by former President Donald Trump to include a citizenship question in the census survey and to exclude immigrants without legal status from taking part — as well as the coronavirus pandemic — raised concerns about fewer responses and a possible undercount.
“Despite an unprecedented attempt by the disgraced Trump administration to manipulate the decennial Census specifically to reduce the count of Latinos, and despite a likely statistical undercount, the authoritative decennial Census count shows significant growth of the Latino population nationwide, and Latino population growth at a much higher rate than the nation’s non-Latino population,” Saenz said.
Vargas said that more study of the data is needed to determine the extent of an undercount of Latinos but that he was wary of presuming that the number was on point.
“We have been citing the 60 million population figure for Latinos for two years now,” he said. “I would have expected higher than 62.1 million.
“What is important is for us to peel the skin of the onion back on these metro areas that have grown. To what extent was those metro areas’ growth due to Latino population increase?” he said. “That’s where we’d expect some of the new congressional seats to be based.”
The numbers, which are critical for dividing up billions of dollars in federal funding for many programs that communities rely on, also are used by legislatures and commissions and to a degree, by local governments to segment populations into voting districts or such divisions as city council, county commission and school board districts.
The increase in diversity the data show is the source of the nation’s strength, said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, a vice president of UnidosUS, the country’s largest Latino advocacy group. She noted that 8 in 10 Latinos in the U.S. are American citizens.
“But despite our contributions to the country, the realities of our lives aren’t always recognized and worse, in too many cases, we are actively demonized,” she said in a statement.
Also notable in the data release are that Latinos are now the largest population group in California and that in Texas, Hispanics grew to 39.3 percent of the state’s population, nearly equal to non-Hispanic whites’ share of 39.7 percent.
Texas’ state demographer, Lloyd Potter, has said Hispanics are expected to outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the state by the end of the year or early next year.
Suzanne Gamboa
Suzanne Gamboa is a national reporter for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com
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