Weigel on Backlash over Republican Voting Laws

Here:

In the short term, the risks of a backlash look intense. In the long term, Republicans can probably live with that. In 2008 and 2012, sure, they pulled low-single-digit numbers with black voters, and they lowballed black turnout. Those elections happened to feature the first black nominee of a major party. In 2004, when the Democrats nominated a white ticket, their campaigners waved the bloody shirt of Bush v. Gore and reminded everyone of how black voters had been purged unfairly from the rolls.

The blood didn’t splatter on the GOP. In Florida the Bush vote among blacks jumped from 7 percent in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. In Ohio, where Secretary of State Ken Blackwell became infamous for botched voter registration forms and long lines, Bush’s share of the black vote nearly doubled from 9 percent to 16 percent. That was the ways of things, pre-Obama: A Republican candidate who’d expanded Medicare and showed up to talk to black pastors could make at least a small play for black voters.

Bush’s party, obviously, is a little different from the GOP of 2013. Today’s black Republicans want the party to show their peers that they don’t want to suppress votes.

 

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