October 02, 2003

Race: The Dirty Little Secret Of Republican Strategy

By Sam Francis

[Click here to order Sam Francis' new monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future]

With the presidential election only thirteen months away, the ten little Democrats are not the only ones running. President Bush is also cranking up for the race, and soon we can expect to hear from him and his surrogates how much of the black vote they expect to win next year.

In the last election, Mr. Bush and his campaign planners gabbled incessantly about how much they were doing for blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and despite the massive support such voters gave the Democrats, there's no indication the Republicans have learned anything.

A good deal of Mr. Bush's Africa policy—his intervention in Liberia, his trip to Africa last summer and his huge financial support for AIDS treatments there—is clearly shaped by his desire to win black votes.

Yet as I and political expert Steve Sailer among others have insisted, the future of the Republican Party lies not in trying to win more black and Hispanic votes but in increasing their already majority share of the white vote.

Republican officeholders and strategists don't like to embrace this tactic, at least in public [VDARE.COM note: or in Free Republic – Steve Sailer’s mentioning it got us banned] and they much prefer to boast of how "color blind" they and their party are.

But now the evidence is beginning to suggest that Republicans are not quite as color blind as they'd like everyone to think.

The Washington Post this week ran a story about Republican redistricting plans in Texas, where the party won every elective office in the state last year and controls both chambers of the state legislature. Like most political parties when they get into power, the Republicans want to redraw the electoral districts to undercut their rivals and boost their own chances.

But in this case their plans are not just political. They're also blatantly racial. [Stalking Democrats, GOP Hits Minorities | Tex. Plans Affect Black, Hispanic Voters by Lee Hockstader, Washington Post, September 30, 2003]

The plans Texas Republicans have concocted so far envision redrawing districts that now return liberal white Democrats so that the racial minorities that elect them—mainly black—will be diluted in new districts dominated by white voters.

The Democrats of course are wise to this game and have been quick to scream "racism," but whether it is or not is not quite my point.

The point is that the GOP's redistricting plans prove that the party and its leaders understand full well the political significance of race in American politics—that whites will tend to vote Republican (54 percent did so for Mr. Bush in 2000 and that's less than most victorious Republican candidates have won in the past) and non-whites (blacks and Hispanics) will vote Democrat (90 percent and 67 percent respectively in 2000).

For all the Republican gabble about "reaching out" to blacks and Hispanics, the reality is that the party depends on winning the white vote at least as much as the Democrats depend on the non-white. And the Texas plans prove that the party leaders know it.

Thus, in Texas' 9th District, around Galveston, about 40 percent of the voters who elected Democrat Rep. Nick Lampson in 1996 are non-white. The Republican plan would carve up the district and dump some 85,000 blacks and Hispanics into the "overwhelmingly Republican" district that elects House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Another 100,000 would be shipped into a heavily Republican bastion in the Houston suburbs.

There is no talk in Texas of "reaching out" to the non-white voters who will find themselves redistributed into Republican fortresses. If they vote Republican, swell, but the purpose is not to win them over so much as to jackhammer the bloc votes that keep the Democrats in office.

Is that fair? Well, you know what they say about love and war, and the Post itself acknowledges that the practice (called "cracking") is a "tried and true method of redistricting for partisan advantage" and that "Democrats themselves did it to Republicans in the past."

But the point is still not whether it's fair, right or wrong, but what it tells us about what Republicans really know.

What it tells us is that the Stupid Party may not be quite as stupid as it looks and acts after all.

For all their pandering to blacks and Hispanics, all their jabbering in Spanish during campaigns, and all their refusal to resist affirmative action and immigration, they know very well on which side of the racial bread the political butter lies.

And it also tells us something else as well: Even though they know that their party depends on the white votes they are trying to cluster into new districts, the Republicans continue to moo about "reaching out" to non-whites and pander to them just as much as ever.

In other words, they take the white vote for granted, because they also know that white voters now have nowhere else to go.

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