A whole lot of Latinos, especially men, inexplicably voted for Donald Trump in the last election. There are a bunch of reasons set forth by various political scientists for this phenomenon which I will go into in another post. I suspect a lot of the reasons are Trump centric. A lot of working class men just love that guy.
But I have to wonder how they feel about this:
People of color made up the vast majority of Texas’ decade-long growth spurt, especially Latinos, a group that accounted for fully half of the state’s growth.
But Republicans control the state’s legislature. And the new political maps they’ve approved in recent days as part of the redistricting process dilute Latinos’ voting power, according to the first lawsuit over the maps.
The suit, filed Monday in federal court in the Western District of Texas, marks what’s likely to be a fierce struggle over political representation in the increasingly diverse state.
People of color made up 95% of Texas’s population growth since 2010. Of the state’s roughly 4 million new residents over the past decade, 1,980,796 were Hispanic, 613,092 were Asian, 557,887 were Black — and just 187,252 were white, the Texas Tribune noted.
That diverse growth is not being represented in newly-drawn political maps, several Latino civil and voting rights groups suing the state say. Rather, Texas Republicans drew up state House, state Senate, state Board of Education and U.S. congressional maps that preserved their power by “packing” certain districts with Latinos but keeping them out of the majority in new districts.
“Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the redistricting plans for the Texas House (Plan H2316), Senate (Plan S2168), SBOE (Plan E2106) and Congress (C2193) violate their civil rights because the plans unlawfully dilute the voting strength of Latinos,” the suit read. “Plaintiffs further seek a declaratory judgment that the challenged redistricting plans intentionally discriminate against them on the basis of race and national origin.”
The complaint was written by lawyers from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF. The suit’s defendants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Deputy Secretary of State Jose A. Esparza, have not responded in court to the complaint, but Republicans lawmakers have said they followed the law with the new districts.
That strikes me as a bit of a slap in the face. But a lot depends on whether they can get the word out to the community what this means.