It’s Disgusting, and It’s Still About Race: Southern Republicans Simply Don’t Want Minorities to Vote
Sometimes conservative politicians, particularly those who hail from the South, accidentally forget to dog-whistle and they say what’s really on their minds. It’s always revealing.
Take the Georgia secretary of state, for instance, who just this week gave a speech about voting “integrity” and told his Republican audience, “the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November.” That was actually a rare slip-up in an otherwise pretty slick speech where he obliquely referred to ACORN and its alleged misdeeds and bragged about how the state is making it really complicated to register online so as to root out (nonexistent) voter fraud, wink, wink. (That last seems like a dubious strategy for a party that is dependent on elderly, rural white voters …)
But after you isolate all the clever obfuscation, you see that he is simply saying that Democrats are registering too many racial minorities and that will inevitably hurt the ball team. This is, of course, an old story that goes back to Reconstruction. In those days the Southern conservatives all gathered in the Democratic Party, but any party with which those particular folks identify gets upset at the prospect of racial minorities voting. Such things as “citizenship tests” and poll taxes are no longer available to them so they have to rely on subtler ways to ensure that this group of citizens are kept from voting their interests.