While Donald Trump dashes south to meet with Mexico’s unpopular president — a man with even worse favorability numbers than the GOP nominee
.. “The demographic trends make obvious that you can no longer win a presidential election in the new American electorate of 2016 with just white voters. You have to get a significant proportion of nonwhite voters — especially Hispanics
.. Trump’s favorability rating in Mexico, according to a recent poll from the El Financiero paper, is 2 percent.
.. “Perhaps the strategic play is not for more nonwhites,” he said, “but moderate Republicans who have yet to get on the Trump train because they don’t want to support someone perceived as being racist.”
Critics Say North Carolina Is Curbing Black Vote. Again.
“It is equal to voter suppression in its worst way,” said Courtney Patterson, the sole Democrat on the Lenoir County elections board.
He was referring to a proposal by the board’s two Republicans to allow 106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election — less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.
.. In a county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the election plan limits voting to a single weekend day, and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and do not own cars, make long trips to cast a ballot.
Republicans, who wrote and passed the 2013 law and control all 100 county election boards, deny the rules reflect anything inappropriate.
.. “Does anybody think that Democrats did not select early voting sites and set hours to advantage their voters over Republicans?” Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of North Carolina’s Republican Party, wrote this week, referring to the days when the statehouse was in Democratic hands. “We are just attempting to rebalance the scales.”
.. given North Carolina’s history of racial discrimination in voting, Republicans could not roll back voting rules that benefited African-Americans without compelling reasons.
.. a disproportionate number of African-Americans voted early — especially during the first week of balloting that the law abolished — and that voting after Sunday church services had become an African-American tradition. Reducing the early voting period not only struck directly at black voting habits
States of Cruelty
Beyond this is the question of whether states are trying to make health reform succeed. California — where Democrats are firmly in control, thanks to the GOP’s alienation of minority voters — shows how it’s supposed to work: The state established its own health exchange, carefully promoting and regulating competition, and engaged in outreach to inform the public and encourage enrollment. The result has been dramatic success in holding down costs and reducing the number of uninsured.
Needless to say, nothing like this has happened in red states. And while the number of uninsured has declined even in these states, thanks to the federal exchanges, the gap between red and blue states has widened.
.. A large part of the answer, surely, is the usual one: It’s about race. Medicaid expansion disproportionately benefits nonwhite Americans; so does spending on public health more generally. And opposition to these programs is concentrated in states where voters in local elections don’t like the idea of helping neighbors who don’t look like them.
.. The point is that America would become a better place if more of us started paying attention to politics beyond the presidential race.
How Trump Betrayed Ann Coulter on Immigration
The political commentator may be more committed to the Republican nominee’s platform than he is.
In In Trump We Trust, Coulter calls Trump a “tasteless, publicity-seeking, coarse billionaire” and argues that, “the one thing voters weren’t wild about was his personality.”
Coulter’s ideological interpretation of Trump’s appeal is plausible. It explains, for instance, why support for Trump correlates more strongly to racial resentment than economic misfortune.
.. The secret of Trump’s success, she argues, has been ideological. He recognized that “Americans,” by which she mostly means Republicans, “are homesick.” They don’t just oppose immigration because they believe it depresses wages and strains government services. They’re homesick for a whiter America, an America that was once truly free because “it’s not in the Anglo-Saxon character either to take orders or to give them.” (Never mind about slavery.) Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing more immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has been, according to Coulter in In Trump We Trust, overrun by “illiterate peasants … who can be instructed to learn certain symbols and bloc-vote for the Democrats.”
.. Suddenly, Trump is flirting with an immigration policy that resembles that of every other Republican who ran for president. Which makes Coulter look like a dupe.
.. Unlike most of the folks who appear on television supporting Trump, she has an independent brand. And it’s built on white nationalism. Trump may win votes by moderating his stance on immigration. But that’s not how Coulter sells books.
.. Coulter also needs an explanation for Trump’s likely defeat, an explanation that will preserve her ability to claim that America’s silent majority believes the things she does. By emphasizing Trump’s immigration flip-flop, Coulter could argue that this issue cost him the white votes he needed to win.