Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin thinks he has deduced why Republican-run states are passing new voting laws, but his analysis is amateurish and statistically inaccurate.
Durbin’s grand conclusion was that the GOP was motivated by racism. Not exactly treading new ground, Durbin said on the floor of the Senate, “The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them.”
Sen. Dick Durbin: “The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them, away from Donald Trump, away from their party creed that they preach.” pic.twitter.com/IiPsBKV2of
— The Hill (@thehill) July 19, 2021
This has been the conventional wisdom among Democrats for some time now. It was always a flawed analysis, presuming that voting preferences were hard-wired based on race. As all those old, white, male Republicans died off, the thinking goes, the young, nonwhite population would come to command a greater share of the vote until Democrats would hold power indefinitely.
Durbin could have saved himself some trouble by paying attention last November. Record turnout, long thought by many people on both sides to favor Democrats, resulted in only a close win for President Joe Biden and a narrow House majority for the Democratic Party. It would take Georgia’s election rules requiring runoffs for both Senate seats to prevent the GOP from controlling the Senate.
Simply looking at the data, one can see that Durbin is factually incorrect in his assertion that demographics are “moving away” from the Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump made gains among black and Hispanic voters of both genders compared to his 2016 victory. Counterintuitively enough, the major group that trended away from Trump was white men.
If Durbin were correct, Republicans would not be as strong in Texas and Florida as they are. Durbin’s state of Illinois has a smaller percentage of black residents than Florida does and a much smaller share of Hispanic residents than both states. Texas, in particular, is the face of the Democratic Party’s demographics dream, but Republicans have continued to pick up wins in heavily Hispanic areas of the states.
Whether the new voting laws passed by red states are the result of genuine concern over the security of the election or Trump’s temper tantrum after his loss is irrelevant here. The laws themselves are benign, mostly reverting to the pre-pandemic status quo for elections. If they were motivated by the sinister, racist goals Durbin seems to think they are, then Republicans did a terrible job of it.
The “racism” line is yet another weak argument against voter ID laws and bans on ballot harvesting and 24-hour voting. That Durbin is repeating it now, less than a year after the 2020 election disproved his thesis, would be embarrassing if he actually meant it and wasn’t simply using racism as a political tool.
