Red, Redder, Reddest, Blue! Changing Demographics Could Make Mississippi, Texas The Republican
Party's Worst Nightmare
JACKSON, Miss. -- One day, all of Mississippi will look like Scott County. A largely farming community located in the heart of this conservative Deep South state, Scott County is home to the highest proportion of Latinos in Mississippi, at around 11 percent, who mainly come to work in corporate poultry factories. Combined with the county's roughly 37 percent African-American population (which mirrors the overall black population in Mississippi), blacks and Latinos make up almost half the population there.
So far, Scott County’s blacks and Latinos -- both Democratic-leaning groups -- haven’t been able to tip the balance of political power; Mitt Romney, who barely campaigned in the state, won 54 percent of the county's vote in 2012.
And Republicans are doing everything in their power to keep it that way, in Mississippi and in other states where they exert significant control, contends Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. Chandler points to new requirements for voters to show government-issued identification at the polls in Mississippi and other southern states as well as implementing strict immigration enforcement laws in Alabama and Arizona, which resulted in a Supreme Court case this year.
Conservative whites are extremely concerned that they’ll eventually be outnumbered by black and brown voters, Chandler, whose organization investigated claims of vote suppression and led voter-registration drives in Scott County in 2012, told International Business Times.
Many Americans, including the leaders of the major political parties, consider the Deep South inconsequential in national elections. Since the 1980s, the region has shifted from almost uniformly Democratic to solidly Republican. Most southern states have Republican governors, legislatures and predominantly Republican congressional delegations with a smattering of racially gerrymandered districts that give blacks one or two seats in key states. As a result, national Republicans rarely visit the South except for perfunctory stops to stump during party primaries and national Democrats rarely bother with wasting the party’s money there.
Yet, political analysts say the South could portend the future of the American political system more than any other region of the country. Republican failures to take back the White House in the last two presidential cycles -- largely due to the participation of blacks and Latinos in battleground states -- have touched off debates within the party about whether it is too white, too conservative, too regionally centered. Largely left out of that debate, yet crucial to it, is that Mississippi -- the deepest of the Deep South states -- is on its way to becoming the first majority African-American state. And when that happens, if observers such as Chandler are right, Mississippi will go from red to reddest to blue, with not so much as a hint of violet in between. And other states with large minority populations -- most of them in the South, most now solidly Republican, most notably conservative powerhouse Texas -- won't be far behind.
http://www.ibtimes.com/red-redder-reddest-blue-changing-demographics-could-make-mississippi-texas-republican-partys-worst