Manawatu Standard

Young people, the GOP is scared of you

- Leonard Pitts Jr Columnist for The Miami Herald

Aword for young people, people of colour and, in particular, young people of colour: The Republican­s are scared of you.

Maybe you find that hard to believe. Maybe you wonder how the party can be scared of you given that it controls all three branches of the federal government and most of the nation’s state houses. You’re worried about paying your student loans, putting food on the table, getting home without becoming some cop’s mistake, and the GOP is scared of you?

In a word: Yes.

See, the party knows if everybody votes, it can’t win. That’s simple maths. The Republican electorate skews sharply older and white. Polling from The Roper Centre at Cornell University says whites went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 57 per cent to 37 per cent, while people of colour strongly supported her, African Americans giving her 89 per cent of their vote. Trump also lost big among young voters, but won big among their elders.

This dependence on older whites is a problem for the GOP, given that the United States is fast moving toward a younger, nonwhite majority. The Census Bureau predicts that, well before midcentury, America will be a nation where no racial group enjoys a numerical advantage. And the authoritat­ive Fivethirty­eight blog reports the white median age in America is 43, while for Asians it’s 36, for African Americans 34 and for Hispanics 29.

As the trend lines are clear, so is the party’s solution: keep you from voting. Thus, as we approach a critical midterm election, the GOP is embracing voter suppressio­n with a brazenness not seen since Bloody Sunday in 1965.

In Bismarck, North Dakota, lawmakers have passed a photo ID law that requires residents to show a current street address. And surely it’s only unfortunat­e coincidenc­e that many Native Americans live on reservatio­ns that don’t use street addresses, only PO boxes, which the law doesn’t recognise.

In Georgia, secretary of state and GOP gubernator­ial candidate Brian Kemp is being sued over the state’s so-called ‘‘exact match’’ law, in which voter registrati­on applicatio­ns are flagged if the voter’s identifyin­g informatio­n fails to match state records, down to such picayune matters as missing hyphens and transposed letters. More than 53,000 people are said to have been affected, most of them people of colour.

In Tallahasse­e in July, a federal judge decried ‘‘a stark pattern of discrimina­tion’’ against young people in Florida’s blocking of early voting at colleges and universiti­es. Across the country, nearly 1000 polling places have been shut down in recent years, many in Southern black communitie­s. In Cuthbert, Georgia, in August, the elections board beat back a plan to close seven of the nine polling places in a county that just happens to be majority black. Meantime, Stacey Abrams just happens to be running to become Georgia – and the nation’s – first black female governor.

If you are a young person, a person of colour or a young person of colour, then, you may well face long lines, paperwork and other headaches as you seek to exercise your constituti­onal rights next month. Please persevere. That’s the only way to elect people who understand access to the ballot is a fundamenta­l principle of democracy. It is the only way to rescue America.

Don’t let anyone tell you your vote doesn’t matter. Ask yourself: If your ballot wasn’t important, would Republican­s work so hard to keep you from casting it? Of course not. And I’ll say it again: They are scared of you.

Please show them that they have reason to be.

The party knows if everybody votes, it can’t win.

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