The timing couldn’t be better. Hispanic voting power was on every Democratic presidential contender’s mind as they assembled in Albuquerque on Thursday evening for the first of six debates organized by the Democratic National Committee. It’s no accident that the DNC chose New Mexico to kick off the campaign season. Once a solidly Republican state, it is now a swing state because of its rapidly growing Hispanic population. Its new Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, who served in the Clinton administration as ambassador to the United Nations and as Energy secretary, is on everybody’s short list as a potential vice president–in large part because he is Hispanic.
Hispanics are the fastest-growing voting group in the country. Whichever party wins their allegiance can count on electoral superiority for the foreseeable future.
And as the Dem debaters used Albuquerque as a stage to present their Hispanic-friendly policies to the nation, the city remained a focal point in the Lone Star state’s impasse, too. For more than a month, 11 Texas Democrats have been living in an Albuquerque Marriott at their own expense to deny Texas Republicans a legislative quorum. Three Democratic presidential candidates–Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman–met with the holdouts to show solidarity with their effort to block a redistricting plan that Democrats say would dilute Hispanic voting strength in the state.
Texas Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a pharmacist when she’s not serving in the part-time legislature, took out a loan on her life insurance to keep her family afloat while she’s unable to work. She handled her son’s emergency appendectomy by telephone from the hotel. State Sen. Rodney Ellis left home shortly after the birth of his fourth child, a daughter, six weeks ago. He’s managed to sneak back twice to Houston to see the baby at a safe house. “It reminds me of the Underground Railroad,” he quipped at a press conference Thursday morning in Washington, where three of the rebels kicked off a “Don’t Mess With Texas” ad campaign sponsored by MoveOn.org.
Polling shows that a majority of Texas voters oppose the Republican effort to redesign congressional districts just two years after they were redrawn following the 2000 census. But Texans didn’t understand the legislative maneuvering behind Democrats fleeing the state, first for Oklahoma, then for New Mexico.
Meanwhile, the bills have added up. Fines levied by the legislature on the fugitive lawmakers totaled $57,000 each, prompting Jay Leno to joke, “If they had that much money, they’d be Republicans.”
Jokes aside, the Republican plan would create one or two additional African-American seats in Texas (currently there are two), but it would undermine the electoral prospects of at least four moderate Democrats, including Rep. Chet Edwards, who represents Crawford, Bush’s hometown.
David Beckwith, a spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, created a stir when he showed up at the Democrats’ press conference and took a seat among the reporters. Holding court later, Beckwith dismissed the Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy and protecting the rights of the minority. He argued that all the Democrats are doing is protecting Anglos who represent minority districts. Two of them were at the press conference, he said, pointing to Reps. Martin Frost and Lloyd Doggett.
Conservative strategist Grover Norquist said earlier this year that the GOP can live with urban liberals, “It’s moderates such as Texas Democrat Charlie Stenholm who are its main target … It is exactly the Stenholms of the world who will disappear, the moderate Democrats. They will go so that no Texan need grow up thinking that being a Democrat is acceptable behavior.”
There were 11 renegade Democrats; now there are 10. Sen. John Whitmire, the dean of the legislature with 30 years of elected service, turned up in Houston on Tuesday night. His defection, if that’s what it is, could give the Republicans the two-thirds quorum they need. But Whitmire is ducking in and out of a safe house, driving around in his secretary’s car, and behaving more like a fugitive than somebody who’s just caved. Now that the plight of the Democrats is getting national attention, will the Republicans dare to order Whitmire’s arrest and have him brought into the chamber in shackles?
Republicans adopted a national strategy in the early ’90s of siphoning off black and brown voters from districts where they were represented by moderate white Democrats and putting them together so they could elect one of their own. The process marginally increases minority representation while dramatically boosting conservative Republican representation and destroying the political center. Nine of the 10 Democrats exiled in Albuquerque are Hispanic or African-American. Senator Van de Putte, a Latina, says the moderate white Democrats targeted by the GOP vote 70 percent or better in favor of issues rated important by the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which represents the concerns of Hispanics. The closest Republican scores 22 percent.
Van de Putte finds it “condescending and insulting” that the GOP would present its redistricting plan as a way to increase Hispanic voting power. She believes the real reason driving the Republicans is the looming reality that Texas is on its way to become a majority minority state. “Some people in our state are very uncomfortable with the changing demographics,” she says.
