Trump's anti-democratic census shapes primary
As voters head for the polls or ballot dropoff boxes in the June 7 California primary election, those with even moderate memories may recall the moves by ex-president Donald Trump that are shaping the vote.
It's not merely that Californians will be voting in one less Congressional primary than previously, but that fewer will likely vote this year here and in other states than in the last several similar elections.
That was Trump's wish, enabled with enthusiasm by his secretary of Commerce, billionaire businessman Wilbur Ross, who did all he could while supervising the 2020 Census to reduce the vote and make it whiter.
That's what Trump has actually meant all along by his vaunted slogan “Make America Great Again.”
For one thing, demographic scholars are just now arriving at the conclusion that the 2020 Census, conducted under the Trump aegis, was the least accurate in many decades.
The aim all along was to undercount minorities, especially Latinos and Blacks, in order to give more clout to white voters who are more likely to vote for Republicans like Trump and Ross. It was also meant to allocate fewer government dollars than before to states where those minorities tend to concentrate, thus causing their populations to decline for years to come.
The strategy appears largely to have succeeded, despite the fact that courts threw out its most egregious tactic — a question on citizenship status designed to intimidate immigrants who are legally eligible to vote.
For, as Robert Shapiro, senior fellow at the Mcdonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., concluded in a recent report, “Large-scale errors in the Census cost New York, Texas, Florida, Arizona, California and New Jersey one (congressional) seat each, and resulted in an extra representative for Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin and Indiana.”
Population increases in the states which lost seats, all places that attract huge numbers of new immigrants, were downplayed by a variety of methods, increasing emphasis on numerical gains in whiter states.
This was accomplished, according to Shapiro and other scholars, by hobbling the Census — with help from COVID-19. The pandemic provided cover for the Trump-ross tactic of underfunding the Census in states where they wanted counts lowered, allowing them to send out fewer Census takers for shorter periods than usual.
This was a ploy to depress minority participation, and it worked, Shapiro and others concluded. The methods included persistent funding shortfalls in areas where large numbers did not fill out and return Census forms on their own, but would have been counted if Census takers called on them. Underfunding led to understaffing and a truncated schedule at least a month shorter than usual, with the pandemic used as cover.
As a result, California's official population increase between 2010 and 2020 was understated by enough to cost the state one seat in Congress and one electoral college vote in each of the next two presidential elections. The Georgetown study found that at the same time Blacks and Hispanics were undercounted, whites and Asian-americans were often double-counted as Census takers were more comfortable in more affluent areas, visiting a higher than usual percentage of homes where occupants had already sent in their forms.
Compared with 2010, the Georgetown team wrote, undercounts of Blacks jumped from 2.03 percent to 3.3% and for Hispanics from 1.54% to 4.99%. In short, about one in 20 Latinos was not counted, more than three times the 2020 margin of error.
This all skews congressional representation now and for the next 10 years to come, before a new Census sets new district lines for the 2030s. At the same time, overcounts of non-hispanic whites and Asians went up.
The political effects of all this are not completely one-sided, as some Republican-leaning states like Texas and Florida also saw their counts distorted.
But uncomfortable as the reality may be for many Californians, living in a state where Trump's approval ratings have rarely topped 40%, they are voting in a system largely shaped by him and his billionaire appointee, Ross.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.
Sunday afternoon I received a call from my friend Felicia in Buffalo, N.Y. She and I had met almost eight years ago. Over those years I had been invited to travel from Oakland to Buffalo multiple times to lead workshops on racism.
I could tell that Felicia — who, like me, is Black — was deeply pained by the news about Saturday's mass shooting. An 18-year-old White gunman, who had written a manifesto claiming that Whites were being “replaced” by Blacks and other people of color, had shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket. He had chosen Buffalo's East Side due to its high concentration of African Americans and traveled over 200 miles to get there.
I have been a facilitator specializing in race and equity for more than 20 years. When I was first invited to lead workshops in Buffalo I thought, why do they
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The annual Taste of History Gala at De Anza College, which was held in early May this year, is always an opportunity to introduce attendees to the bounty of our local wine region. Did you know that the campus bookstore used to be a winery? The California History Center is located in the Petit Trianon, the former home of Charles Baldwin, who planted vines and built a winery on 70 acres in the flourishing wine region of Cupertino. He hired famed San Francisco architect Willis Polk to design the home in 1895.
After several changes in well-to-do ownership, including the heir to the Pullman Coach fortune, the property was sold in 1959 by industrialist E.F. Euphrat, president of Pacific Can Company at the time, to the Foothill College District for the De Anza college campus. He specifically requested that the Petit Trianon and massive stone winery be preserved.
After many years of neglect and eventual restoration, the neoclassic-style house became the California History Center, which contains the Stocklmeir Library, a fantastic resource open to the public for a small fee (free to California History Center members), containing research papers, taped oral histories, clippings and photograph archives covering regional and state history and issues.
More than 400 audiotapes shed light on the valley's agricultural and viticultural heritage, including interviews with some of the valley's last cannery workers and farmers. There is nothing more fascinating than history, especially when viewed through the lens of wine, which captures the essence of each year.
Fittingly, the winery became the college bookstore, a wonderful interpretation of “In vino, veritas. Or as Jack Kerouac put it in “The Dharma Bums”: “There's wisdom in wine, goddamn it!'”
Among those pouring at the gala were House Family, Kings Mountain Vineyards, Loma Prieta, Ridge and Waxwing Cellars. Loma Prieta Winery was pouring the controversial grape called Pinotage, the most widely planted red in South Africa. Created in the 1930s to accommodate South Africa's hotter weather, it's a cross between pinot noir and cinsault. The thicker skin of the latter grape adds an extra layer of sunburn protection, along with a fleshiness and tannic profile rarely seen in pinot noir.
Loma Prieta Winery, located on the Summit above Los Gatos, has been championing Pinotage for years, ever since nowdeceased founder Paul Kemp fell in love with it. The 2017 Estate Pinotage is tasting absolutely amazing at present, with its bountiful sweet red fruit, soft tannins and expansive mouthfeel. It has just the right acid to keep it interesting. Their 2014 Karma Vineyard Pinotage from Lodi reflects its bottle age and the riper growing clime.
Loma Prieta, under new ownership since late 2020, is the only winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains to grow Pinotage in the AVA, and at 2,600 feet, their vineyard makes it the highest known planting in the US. Winemaker Andrew Brenkwitz, who made wine at Byington for 20 years, is now at Loma Prieta Winery. Reached via the Summit Road exit off Highway 17, the tasting room is open every weekend and Fridays, June-august, noon-5 p.m. https://lomaprietawinery.com
Speaking of history, check out local KCAT radio personality Bill Regan, who has a podcast called “Wine with Bill.” He recently interviewed two local winegrowers, Greg Perrucci of Perrucci Family Vineyard in Los Gatos and Jeffrey Patterson of Mount Eden You can find the interviews on Youtube.