This from "The Nation", by Ari Berman. Please follow link to original
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http://www.thenation.com/blog/171146/how-gops-war-voting-backfired?rel=emailNation#
Since the 2010 election, Republicans passed
new voting restrictions
in more than a dozen states aimed at reducing the turnout of Barack
Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant”—young voters, African-Americans and
Hispanics.
“This is not rocket science,” Bill Clinton said last year. “They are
trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate
than the 2008 electorate.” By pushing voter suppression laws,
Republicans wanted the 2012 electorate to be older, whiter and more
conservative than the young and diverse 2008 electorate.
But the GOP’s suppression strategy failed. Ten major restrictive voting laws were
blocked in court and turnout among young, black and Hispanic voters
increased as a share of the electorate relative to 2008.
Take a look at
Ohio,
where Ohio Republicans limited early voting hours as a way to decrease
the African-American vote, which made up a majority of early voters in
cities like Cleveland and Dayton. Early voting did fall relative to 2008
as a result of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s
cutbacks in early voting
days and hours, but the overall share of the black electorate increased
from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. More than anything else,
that explains why Barack Obama once again carried the state.
I spent the weekend before the election in black churches in
Cleveland, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the GOP’s push to
curtail the rights of black voters made them even more motivated to cast
a ballot. “When they went after big mama’s voting rights, they made all
of us mad,” said Reverend Tony Minor, Ohio coordinator of the African
American Ministers Leadership Council. According to
CBS News: "More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008."
The same thing happened with the Latino vote, which increased as a
share of the electorate (from 9 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2012)
and broke even stronger for Obama than in 2008 (from 67-31 in 2008 to
71-27 in 2012, according to
CNN exit polling).
The share of the Latino vote increased in swing states like Nevada (up 4
percent), Florida (up 3 percent) and Colorado (up 1 percent). Increased
turnout and increased support for Obama among Latinos exceeded the
margin of victory for the president in these three swing states.
We’re still waiting on the data to confirm this theory, but a
backlash against voter suppression laws could help explain why minority
voter turnout increased in 2012. “That’s an extremely reasonable theory
to be operating from,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of
Latino Decisions,
a Latino-focused polling and research firm. “There were huge organizing
efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there
would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.”
Groups like the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Association
of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Asian-American Legal
Defense Fund worked overtime to make sure their constituencies knew
their voting rights.
As
Andrew Cohen of
The Atlantic wrote:
If there is one thing this election has proven, if there
is one thing I have come to know, it is that Americans don’t like it
when their right to vote is threatened. The very people whose votes the
Republicans sought to suppress came out to vote. In places like Akron
and Orlando and Denver and Milwaukee, they came. They waited in long
lines and endured the indignities of poll workers. Yet they were not
cowed. Today is their day. A day when they can look at one another and
appreciate that they are truly a part of the history of civil rights in
this country.
There are, of course, major caveats to this theory. If voter ID laws
had been on the books in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, turnout
might’ve shifted in the Republicans’ favor, as the political science
literature suggests. (
Nate Silver
predicted that Pennsylvania’s voter ID law would’ve provided a net 1.2
percent shift to Republican candidates.) We don’t know how many voters
were disenfranchised by voter ID laws in states like Kansas and
Tennessee or didn’t vote in Florida because of long lines or a felony
conviction or were forced to cast a provisional ballot in Ohio that will
not be counted. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act could be invalidated
by the Supreme Court, which would be a devastating setback for voting
rights, and new voting restrictions that were temporarily blocked in
state courts could be ultimately upheld.
But, for now, the momentum is shifting away from the GOP when it
comes to voting rights. For the first time, in Minnesota, voters
defeated a
photo ID ballot initiative.
The measure started with a double-digit lead, but opponents of voter
ID were able to convince a purple-state electorate that such laws are
unnecessary and discriminatory. This could be a harbinger of things to
come in other swing states.
In a recent piece in
The Nation, I wrote that voter suppression efforts have become the
“new normal”
in the GOP. Unless or until Republicans get serious about courting an
increasingly diverse and younger electorate, they’ll continue to pass
laws to undermine the political power of this growing constituency.
But they’ll do so at their own peril. Racial minorities made up 28
percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008, and voted
80 percent for Obama. “Romney matched the best performance among white
voters ever for a Republican challenger—and yet he lost decisively in
the Electoral College,” wrote
Ron Brownstein of
National Journal.
Minorities also accounted for 45 percent of Obama’s total vote. That
means that in the not-so-distant-future, a Democrat will be able to win
the presidency without needing a majority of white votes in his or her
own coalition. In a country with growing diversity, if one party is
committed to expanding the right to vote and the other party is
committed to restricting the right to vote, it’s not hard to figure out
which one will ultimately be more successful.
“Hopefully
I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal
budget because they’re simply the facts,” he said. “Hopefully she’ll
agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions.”
