Texas: Future Blue State?

[Max]

Linkster

Texas Becomes a Majority-Minority State By ALICIA A. CALDWELL, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 3 minutes ago



EL PASO, Texas - Texas has become the fourth state to have a non-white majority population, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday, a trend driven by a surging number of Hispanics moving to the state.

According to the population estimates based on the 2000 Census, about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities. In the 2000 Census, minorities made up about 47 percent of the population in the second-largest state.

Texas joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii as states with majority-minority populations — with Hispanics the largest group in every state but Hawaii, where it is Asian-Americans.

Five other states — Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona — aren't far behind, with about 40 percent minorities.

Public policy analysts said these states and the country as a whole need to bring minority education and professional achievement to the levels of whites. Otherwise, these areas risk becoming poorer and less competitive.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said lawmakers need to start with immigration reform, while striving to bring minorities' education and salary levels in line with Anglos.

"Immigration is good for the United States ... it's important for us to keep our doors open, but we need to keep an eye on the people coming in," Frey said. "While initially it will be a state problem, eventually it will be a national issue, and education is the best way to deal with it."

Complications from the cultural shift aren't likely to be exclusive to states that already have majority-minority populations, Frey said.

Nevada, for instance, has seen a massive influx of minorities in the last 15 years, reducing the percentage of Anglos since the 1990s from nearly 80 percent to about 60 percent. Such a rapid shift is likely to cause growing pains that include trying to balance the needs of a bigger and younger minority community with an aging Anglo community, Frey said.

"That's the kind of state that is going to have to deal with quick transition," Frey said.

Though some areas may never see this shift, the country as a whole is expected to continue the trend first noticed more than a decade ago.

The nation should be more than half minorities by 2050, said Steve Murdock, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"If you look in the 1990s, in every one of the 50 states, non-Anglo Hispanic populations grew faster than Anglo populations," Murdock said. "It's a very pervasive pattern."

This makes me wonder if the state will eventually become a blue state. Any thoughts?

[NapoleonGH]

that really depends on whether the hispanics continue to tend to vote blue

[Ma Deuce]

When exactly did this blue state/red state thing come to represent Democrat and Republican states respectivly? I thought that historically, blue was used to represent states that voted for the incumbant, and red was used to represent states that voted against?

[Joe]

Not necessarily...the minority population is obviously predominantly hispanic, and the Democrats don't really dominate the hispanic vote the way they dominate the black vote.

[Chmee]

I never thought Dubya's ceaseless pandering to El Presidente Vicente was a coincidence ...

[Jalinth]

Not necessarily...the minority population is obviously predominantly hispanic, and the Democrats don't really dominate the hispanic vote the way they dominate the black vote.

Even in the non-Cuban population, Hispanics don't vote en-block anywhere near the same extent as the black population. In addition, what percentage will be citizens and therefore can vote, and what percentage will vote? Both will significantly dilute the "majority" you are talking about.

Given the Bush family's real push towards Hispanics (Jeb is a good example), I wouldn't assume they will stay Democratic. Although how the predominately Roman Catholic Hispanics will get along with the evangelicals is a good question - while the RC Church and other churches agree on certain issues (abortion), other issues they are diametrically opposed to each other.

[fgalkin]

about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities

I guess that makes them a majority now, no?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Beowulf]

about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities

I guess that makes them a majority now, no?

Nope. Means everyone's a minority now. No group makes up more than 50% of the population.

[drachefly]

You get one plurality and the rest are minorities.

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't know if it makes that much a difference in Texas politics. Hispanics tend to run the gambit of the political spectrum and there are a whole lot of Hispanics who are massively socially conservative due to taking Catholicism very seriously.

[Mr. T]

I don't know if it makes that much a difference in Texas politics. Hispanics tend to run the gambit of the political spectrum and there are a whole lot of Hispanics who are massively socially conservative due to taking Catholicism very seriously.

I agree, the GOP is continuing to make gains on the Hispanic population, and Hispanics as a voting bloc do not vote nearly as uniformly Democratic as blacks anyway.

[wolveraptor]

I reeaally don't want Spanish to become a national language. Bilingualism sucks ass, especially when you weren't educated in Spanish-English as a kid. Dios fucking mio.

[WyrdNyrd]

Bilingualism sucks ass, especially when you weren't educated in Spanish-English as a kid. Dios fucking mio.

Oh, stop whining! You think learning just one more language is bad, I have to learn nine!

I grew up bilingual (English and Afrikaans) because those were the official languages of my country at the time. Now, we have eleven official languages.

OK, I'm kidding, it's not so bad. While technically we have eleven official languages, English is more equal than the others.

BTW, you already know English, which is a bitch-bastard-mongrel of a language. Fuck, once you can master that, anything else is easy!

[Gil Hamilton]

I reeaally don't want Spanish to become a national language. Bilingualism sucks ass, especially when you weren't educated in Spanish-English as a kid. Dios fucking mio.

You know in most countries in the world, they learn several languages growing up, right? In fact, America is one of the few places that most of the population doesn't.

[Lone_Prodigy]

BTW, you already know English, which is a bitch-bastard-mongrel of a language. Fuck, once you can master that, anything else is easy!

Seriously. I cannot comprehend how difficult it would be to learn English for the first time as an adult...

"WTF? 'Take a piss'? Are you going to drink it or something? This is so fucking confusing!"

[Elfdart]

One of the reasons Tom DeLay, Rick Perry and the rest of the GOP were so hell bent to gerrymander districts in Texas was to try to stave off any Black/Hispanic takeover of state politics. That's why southern states do their damndest to keep the darkies off the voter rolls: there are enough of them to make things inconvenient for the massa.

[tharkûn]

You know in most countries in the world, they learn several languages growing up, right? In fact, America is one of the few places that most of the population doesn't.

The problem isn't learning to speak two languages (though the odd habit of not teaching additional languages until the mid teen years does make it more difficult than in smart bilingual populations), the problem is running the government in two languages. The government now has to produce twice the paper trail (or spend huge numbers of manhours translating paper trails on demand), ensure that every government office has actual fluent Spanish speakers (which will lead to problems in the first generation), deal with the inevitable backlash from the people who like only English. That of course pales in comparison to the heyday the lawyers are going to have hammering on the differences in legal texts between the languages. It is bad enough when you have legal arguements over the definition of the word "is", can you imagine the legal crap coming out of slight conceptual differences between "es" and "is"?

Government should have one definitive language in which everything is published and only one lexicon should be availible for lawyers to haggle over. I have no problem with making school cirriculum bilingual so kids grow up fluent in the major tongues of their nation, but nothing more is needed to contribute to bureaucratic inefficiency and lawyer mongering.

[Gil Hamilton]

The problem isn't learning to speak two languages (though the odd habit of not teaching additional languages until the mid teen years does make it more difficult than in smart bilingual populations), the problem is running the government in two languages. The government now has to produce twice the paper trail (or spend huge numbers of manhours translating paper trails on demand), ensure that every government office has actual fluent Spanish speakers (which will lead to problems in the first generation), deal with the inevitable backlash from the people who like only English. That of course pales in comparison to the heyday the lawyers are going to have hammering on the differences in legal texts between the languages. It is bad enough when you have legal arguements over the definition of the word "is", can you imagine the legal crap coming out of slight conceptual differences between "es" and "is"?

Government should have one definitive language in which everything is published and only one lexicon should be availible for lawyers to haggle over. I have no problem with making school cirriculum bilingual so kids grow up fluent in the major tongues of their nation, but nothing more is needed to contribute to bureaucratic inefficiency and lawyer mongering.

I don't believe my post or the one I was responding to said anything about running the government like an Ikea Shelf Assembly Instruction Sheet, did it?

[Death from the Sea]

One of the reasons Tom DeLay, Rick Perry and the rest of the GOP were so hell bent to gerrymander districts in Texas was to try to stave off any Black/Hispanic takeover of state politics. That's why southern states do their damndest to keep the darkies off the voter rolls: there are enough of them to make things inconvenient for the massa.

next time try not to copy it word for word out of the Democrats "1001 Republican Conspiracies That You Should Know About" book, it's called plagerism ya know.

[The Dark]

When exactly did this blue state/red state thing come to represent Democrat and Republican states respectivly? I thought that historically, blue was used to represent states that voted for the incumbant, and red was used to represent states that voted against?

I would assume from the colors used to mark states that vote one way or the other. I'm not that old, but as far back as I can remember (Dukakis-Bush I election), they've always marked Republicans in red and Democrats in blue.

[Elfdart]

next time try not to copy it word for word out of the Democrats "1001 Republican Conspiracies That You Should Know About" book, it's called plagerism ya know.

Republican goons don't try to harass and intimidate non-white voters, like the old Dixiecrats (most of whom are now Republicans, by the way) used to? Over 90,000 voters were illegally removed from the rolls in Florida before the 2000 election. The vast majority were black.

So blow it out your ass, motherfucker!

[Jew]

When exactly did this blue state/red state thing come to represent Democrat and Republican states respectivly? I thought that historically, blue was used to represent states that voted for the incumbant, and red was used to represent states that voted against?

I would assume from the colors used to mark states that vote one way or the other. I'm not that old, but as far back as I can remember (Dukakis-Bush I election), they've always marked Republicans in red and Democrats in blue.

Red = Republican, Blue = Democrat was started in the days immediately following the 2000 election. Before that--and even on Election Night 2000--the assignment of colors hadn't entered the national consciousness and was sort of random.

A little thinking will show that this Red/Blue terminology must be very recent. Red has traditionally been the color of Communism, and it's only been since the collapse of the Soviet Union (or maybe a few years prior) that the Cold War really truly ended. Before that time it wouldn't have been poltically feasible to permanently label the Republicans as the red party.

But for more evidence I offer this Washington Post article.

Before Bush's disputed victory over Al Gore four years ago, there was no consensus on the color of liberalism or conservatism. Indeed the scheme was often reversed, reflecting traditional European associations (red being not just the color of communism but of Great Britain's Labor Party, too).

In 1976, NBC identified states won by Gerald Ford in blue and Jimmy Carter's states in red. On election night in 1980, ABC News showed Ronald Reagan's march to the White House as a series of blue lights on a map, with Carter's states in red. Time magazine assigned red to the Democrats and blue to the Republicans in its election graphics in every election from 1988 to 2000. The Washington Post's election graphics for the 2000 election were Republican-blue, Democrat-red.

The first reference to "red states" and "blue states," according to a database search of newspapers, magazines and TV news transcripts since 1980, occurred on NBC's "Today" show about a week before the 2000 election. Matt Lauer and Tim Russert discussed the projected alignment of the states, using a map and a color scheme that had first shown up a few days earlier on NBC's sister cable network, MSNBC. "So how does [Bush] get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will?" Russert asked at one point.

In an interview yesterday, Russert disclaimed credit for coining the red-state, blue-state distinction. "I'm sure I wasn't the first to come up with it," he said. "But I will take credit for the white board," Russert's signature, hands-on electoral vote tracker.

As the 2000 election became a 36-day recount debacle, the commentariat magically reached consensus on the proper colors. Newspapers began discussing the race in the larger, abstract context of red vs. blue. The deal may have been sealed when Letterman suggested a week after the vote that a compromise would "make George W. Bush president of the red states and Al Gore head of the blue ones."

So there you have it. Red state/blue state was invented in 2000.

[Lord Pounder]

next time try not to copy it word for word out of the Democrats "1001 Republican Conspiracies That You Should Know About" book, it's called plagerism ya know.

Republican goons don't try to harass and intimidate non-white voters, like the old Dixiecrats (most of whom are now Republicans, by the way) used to? Over 90,000 voters were illegally removed from the rolls in Florida before the 2000 election. The vast majority were black.

So blow it out your ass, motherfucker!

Proof?

[tharkûn]

I don't believe my post or the one I was responding to said anything about running the government like an Ikea Shelf Assembly Instruction Sheet, did it?

Those are the requirements for "official language" as are commonly practiced in the western world. Both the EU and Canada do have to do loads of crap like that to be officially multilingual.

Republican goons don't try to harass and intimidate non-white voters, like the old Dixiecrats (most of whom are now Republicans, by the way) used to?

No. The old Dixiecrats left bruises, broken bones, and dead bodies as a tribute to their work. Today's "harassment and intimidation" are things as stupid as someone saying "Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wensday" or merely show up in the statistics. Intimidation and harassment might still be there, but it ain't the bare knuckle version of the Dixiecrats.

Over 90,000 voters were illegally removed from the rolls in Florida before the 2000 election. The vast majority were black.

So what? Were they removed for being black, or because of some other factor that correlates well with race? A correlates with B is not proof of causation.

[Elfdart]

Try here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/n ... 956129.stm#

and here:

http://archive.salon.com/politics/featu ... ex_np.html

Keep in mind, that's just Florida. The rest of the Old Confederacy pulls the same shit.