Just holding the fort might not be enough, but demographic change is coming and the republicans destroyed their brand among the vast majority of them. They've managed to piss off every minority in the country and a majority of women too, their latest victims are the Asian American community. I'm sure Muslim Americans will be in for a rough ride next as Foxnews makes hay with the fact the Colorado shooter was a Muslim. They will need to distract from the rightwing terrorists and those who stormed and sacked the capital, no doubt Donald will chime in.
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Republican voter restrictions are a race against time - CNNPolitics
Why Republican voter restrictions are a race against time
(CNN)With their drive to erect new obstacles to voting, particularly across the Sun Belt, Republicans are stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change.
In many of the states where Republicans are advancing the most severe restrictions -- including Georgia, Arizona and Texas -- shifts in the electorate's composition are eroding decades of virtually uncontested GOP dominance.
In each of those states -- and others such as North Carolina, South Carolina and, in a slightly different way, Florida -- the GOP still holds a statewide advantage primarily because of its strong performance among older, non-college-educated and non-urban White voters. But in almost all those states, the Republican edge is ebbing amid two powerful demographic currents: an improving Democratic performance among white-collar voters in and around the states' rapidly growing major cities, and the aging into the electorate of younger generations defined by kaleidoscopic racial diversity.
That latter shift, in particular, represents an existential long-term danger to Republican control of Sun Belt states where they have held the upper hand for years: Kids of color now compose a clear majority of the under 18 population in Arizona, Texas, Georgia and Florida, and nearly half in the Carolinas, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. In Texas alone,
local experts estimate that about 200,000 citizen Latinos will turn 18 and thus eligible to vote each year through at least 2028.
Many analysts agree that the
restrictions on voting proliferating in such states -- and the prospect that many of them will also impose severe partisan gerrymanders before the 2022 elections -- represent a race-against-time effort by Republicans to entrench their political advantage before it is eroded, or washed away entirely, by that approaching surge of demographic change.
"They see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in," says Frey. "It's the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can."
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