Texas
Micah Cohen offers half of an answer to a question that’s been on the back of my mind for a while: why haven’t we seen Texas shading toward a lighter shade of red, given the depth of recent demographic shifts?
Poor turnout has dulled the impact of the state’s Hispanic population at the ballot box. Hispanics may make up 38 percent of the population, but they have never exceeded 20 percent of the electorate in presidential elections, according to exit polls.
“Latino turnout is even lower here than it is in a lot of other places,” Mr. Henson said.
Hispanic turnout is creeping up incrementally, but the non-Hispanic white vote in Texas has become overwhelmingly Republican.
The other half of the question, of course, is why? What accounts for lower political participation rates among Texas Latinos than Latinos elsewhere?
Update, in response to a question I did some math in comments. Upshot: if Texas Latinos participated at roughly the same rate as New Mexico Latinos, McCain’s margin of victory in 2008 would have been in the 3-4 point range.
Isn’t the extent to which white people in the major Texas metro areas (especially Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, I guess) are super-Republican also rather contrary to national trends? Compare, for instance, to rather similar metro areas in North Carolina and to Atlanta, which, as they fill up with northern transplants, have become more Democratic. This doesn’t seem to be happening in DFW or Houston.
There are TONS of northerners in the Dallas and Houston suburbs.
and aren’t Dallas and Houston more Democratic than the rest of the state? Dallas voted for John Kerry with 57% of the vote. Houston’s mayor is an openly gay woman, but it’s area congress people are mostly Republican.
Houston proper is very Democratic; The Woodlands and other exurbs are heavily Republican. Houston is one of the most heavily segregated cities in the country, and the district lines are drawn in such a way as to fragment the city’s Democrats.
Yes, but those are the actual cities as opposed to the masses of suburbs which are CRAZY.
Like the Californians who have been moving to Austin for 20 years, most of them choose Texas because of no income taxes, low taxes in general, and backwards of the political culture; they just couldn’t afford Cali any longer, and maybe also because Cali is more Democratic country.
I dunno…El Paso is probably the most solidly blue section of the entire state. They have their Repuke crazies, too, though.
To be clear, I’m not surprised that white people in Texas have continued to be as Republican as ever. I’m more puzzled by lower than elsewhere Republican turnout.
The influx of wealthy newcomers has also made Austin more conservative….
I would assume that it’s due to Texas’ first in the nation status in minority voter suppression. The federal courts were surprised at how blatant their Voting Rights Act violation were. And in the middle of this, the Old White Peoples’ propaganda arm is working to convince people that the VRA’s Article 5 is out of date and should be discarded.
Texas; there’s no other state like it in the union! Not even Louisiana or Mississippi, though not for lack of effort.
Agreed. It is rather like asking why African American voter turnout was so low in the South in the 1960s. Even in the absence of legal barriers to voting, there is a long history of actively discouraging Hispanics from voting in Texas.
Also, Texas’ funding of education is in a serious decades-long free fall; bad education = less voters and uneducated voters.
Just one of many ways of discouraging “those people” from voting.
Texas Anglos?
If all voter suppression nationwide was stopped, Republicans would have about 30% fewer seats in the congress and would never win the White House again.
To be fair, the nature of a two party system is that, were this to happen, the Republicans would spend 8 to 16 years out of power and then moderate themselves. This goes double for the GOP, because 16 years from now, their Angry Old White People base will have died off even more. If that were combined with, oh, federally-mandated early mail-in voting, voting moved to the Saturday before and made a federal holiday, and aggressive enforcement of the VRA, the GOP would move left so fast you’d hurt your neck trying to watch.
I asked about this generally when I’d been in the Southwest for a while, and the explanation given was that Hispanics were, to a degree, suspicious of both major parties, that some Hispanics saw them both as instruments of the same power structure that had marginalized Hispanics in the past. As well, they tended to feel that the white components of both parties expected them to abandon Hispanic culture, including language, as the price of admission.
But, mostly, it is a function of wariness about authority, particularly among those who come from Mexico or Central America, where authoritarian police and government officials are a way of life. That’s an attitude that’s slow to change, especially in Texas, where the authorities are kind of quick-on-the-draw where minorities are concerned.
I heard that latter from friends who’d grown up in Colombia and El Salvador back when I was in high school, in the early ’80s. It doesn’t surprise me that it would continue to be an issue, particularly with so much more overtly officially sanctioned lawless law enforcement.
(It’s not that everything was great with law enforcement in some by-gone day, but the combination of increasing money in the drug trade and militarization makes a different kind of badness. I found No Country For Old Men very resonant with things I saw in southern California at the time, and heard about from friends from elsewhere.)
As for the first part…well, certainly on the national level the Democrats are better for a bunch of issues likely to matter to Hispanic voters. But so many of the southern Democratic state parties are pretty awful. I can understand apathy in response.
This. The ID requirement for Texas voting feeds right into this wariness of authority figures, and I don’t blame Texas Latinos for thinking “no good can come from showing my ID to a government worker.”
Yeah, but a significant part of TX latinos (esp. Rio Grande valley/Brownsville area) are not immigrants and have lived there basically forever. They have their own reasons for distrusting White Authority but the specific reasons and character of it are a little different from the immigrant population.
This is such a fantastic point. Lots of folks forget that in areas like TX, NM, AZ, CO, NV, CA, etc., the Latino populations have been there longer than the Anglo populations. Latino is not synonymous with immigrant.
No, but the rapid growth of the Latino population in Texas is synonymous with immigration. And it also doesn’t explain the differences between Texas and California or New Mexico. There are great complexities within those communities and maybe some of them are unique to Texas but Texas is not an outlier on this dynamic. However, it is an outlier on Latino voting.
It’s perplexing indeed. I can’t address Cali, Ariz, N.M., but Texas Democrats were in charge of suppressing the Latino vote for 100 years and the Republicans have been in charge of suppressing the Latino vote only relatively recently. Latino institutional memory is intact and naturally makes people wary to forgive, forget, and trust. Also, the overall culture here is so historically and still currently Texas Ranger-suppressive, it’s thick as butter and a lot harder to slice.
I can’t address Cali, Ariz, N.M., but Texas Democrats were in charge of suppressing the Latino vote for 100 years and the Republicans have been in charge of suppressing the Latino vote only relatively recently.
Where by “recently” you mean only the last 40 years or so? Do you really think Latinos are too dense to understand the Southern Strategy and related realignment?
What proportion of Texas’s Hispanics are new immigrants? They tend to have lower turnout rates than long-term residents.
What percentage of Texas Latinos are non-citizen immigrants who do not have the right to vote?
Are we missing the answers by looking at Latino voters? Latino is an aggregate term that applies to a group of people that are not alike in their political behavior.
I’d like to see data for Mexican-Americans and have it broken down by how long they have been in the country, i.e., immigrant, second generation, etc.
I read an article six or seven years ago that claimed that the largest concentration of eligible but unregistered voters were the Mexican-Americans living in the area from East LA to Riverside County. The area along the 60 freeway for locals. There was no real explanation offered for this.
One factor could be that, unlike California, even if you’re a properly registered voter in TX, you have to do some research to determine when and where you are suppose to vote.
The time and place isn’t listed in the newspapers, you don’t get a sample ballot with the address of your local voting precinct, like you do in CA, so this serves as a king of automatic voter suppression that favors the educated white voters(who know how to research where and when to vote) vs. the Latino voters who probably aren’t as politically aware and don’t have the knowledge or time to do the research necessary to be able to vote properly.
So, given the current demographic makeup of Texas, how much would Latino turnout have to increase to flip it from Red to Blue?
A little back of the envelope math: in NM, the Latino population is 45%; the Latino vote share is 40%. That might be high, but I’m not going to check every state, so we’ll use it.
So using 2008, a similar turnout rate in Texas would put a Latino share of the vote at 34%, a 70% increase over reality. If I’m doing the Math correctly, that would make the overall electorate in Texas 51% white, 11% black, 34 % Latino, 4% other.
That would have put the final result based of the “three race vote” at 49.35 McCain, 45.2 Obama. I’m using NYT exit polls, they don’t give me anything for the 4% outside of these groups, who I assume are mostly Asian. I’m assuming they’d probably break for Obama, but not by enough to change the basic equation.
One assumption that probably needs relaxing is the Latinos we’d be bringing into the electorate would be Republican at the same rate as already currently voting Latinos. I’m guessing wealthy Latinos most likely to vote Republican are already voting in pretty high numbers, and we’d be bringing in a poorer and more Democratic electorate. I doubt this would have closed the gap entirely, but the McCain win might have been as small as 3 points or so.
Of course, this electorate would still be a recipe for a 10+ point Republican when it’s a tie nationally.
Don’t underestimate the effect that 20 years of abandonment by the national party had. As much as I love President Clinton, he did enormous da age by ignoring Texas as anything other than a source of cash. If the Dems would spend a little time and money here they could hasten the inevitable by a couple of elections.
Late to the thread but… I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I’ve lived in Housron and now Dallas for the last 20 years. Back in tye early 70′s , CA started a statewide push for child safety seat awareness.followed by legeslation. As I recall the only significant resistance to embracing the obvious came from the Latino population and the experts were baffled as they thought they’d removed all the obvious barriers, economics, language,etc. Finally they approached the Church and the word went out God doesn’t mind a little help with protecting the kids and God wouldn’t see it as a lack of faith. Someone should explore the dynamics at work down here. Maybe someone has, but I’d say it may be the elephant in the room. I would imagine there’s a good deal of dependance on the Church from the larglely poor and least assimilated. Not hard to imagine the clan of the red beanies touting the lillies of the field over fetus murdering Democrats. Pure specularion on my non social scienctist part.but….