Texas GOP platforms are often ridiculous, but the new installment touts a model that would effectively prevent Democrats from winning statewide elections.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/new-platform-republican-party-texas-matters-rcna154262
The latest installment is no exception. The Texas Tribune reported over the holiday weekend on state GOP delegates voting on a platform with all sorts of notable ideas, ranging to demanding Bible classes in public schools to seeking UFO information to calling for U.S. military bases to be named after Confederate leaders who took up arms against the United States.
But The Texas Tribune also highlighted one of the state Republican Party’s newer priorities.
Perhaps the most consequential plank [in the platform] calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college. Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office.
It’s been a few decades since a Democratic candidate won statewide office in Texas, and with that in mind, it’s tempting to think Republican officials would be satisfied with the state’s electoral system as it currently exists......
And that's where this newly proposed county-based requirement would kick in, shifting power away from voters in order to ensure Republican rule. As historian Kevin Kruse explained:
If Texas Republicans embrace this return to a county-unit type of system, they’ll actually have created something even more unequal than the scheme concocted by segregationists of a century ago. Harris County, the home of Houston, has a population of 4.7 million, while Loving County has a total population of 64. Harris County has a sizable black population, while Loving is (as far as I can tell) entirely white. But one vote in Loving would mean more than 70,000 votes in Harris.
Kruse added, “It’s staggeringly unequal, and silencing an ‘urban’ vote that is of course now not just coded as more liberal but racially diverse too. And that, of course, is the point.”
This is, in other words, the latest example of Republicans looking at democracy as something that needs to be rigged, rather than a system that needs to be preserved.
Texas is becoming more urban and democratic. This plan is designed to disenfranchise democratic voters in large urban areas such as Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Ft. Worth. This plan shows how scared the Texas GOP is of the demographic trends that show that Texas is turning blue
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