House Republicans’ Incentive Problem
To understand the immigration conundrum that the GOP faces in the House, it’s important to understand just how rare it is for a Republican House member to represent a Latino district. There are 108 majority-minority districts in the United States. Republicans represent just nine of them. Redistricting in 2012 helped create a structural advantage for the Republicans in the House, but, as my colleague David Wasserman observed, in the process of “quarantining Democrats, Republicans effectively purged millions of minority voters from their own districts” creating an average Republican House district that is 75 percent white and an average Democratic House district that is 51 percent white. “In other words,” Wasserman wrote, “while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.”
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This analysis is fascinating as it illustrates the GOP’s basic political problem - it can now only win many elections where it has some advantage in the electorate:
House Districts - Gerrymandering due to the 2010 elections and Census
States - Voter suppression
Nationally - Off year elections
Until 2020 all GOP election strategies will have to be based on one of these 3 points.