I have a post up at Salon this morning discussing this reflexive conservative impulse to explain that they are really winning all the elections. It’s just that they are forced to count the votes of all those people of color:
The news is so depressing for conservatives these days. All the demographic trends are moving against them.With every election showing a large majority of single women, young people and people of color voting for the Democrats, thus solidifying their identification with the party, the less likely it is that Republicans can outrun the shift to a multiracial majority. But they still don’t seem to understand exactly what this means for them.
Take, for example, Michael Medved’s latest in the Wall Street Journal in which he explains that the Democrats’ strategy of wooing women voters by pointing out the GOP’s hostility to reproductive rights and equal pay is nothing but a sham. Sure, Barack Obama won the female vote by a commanding 11 points in the last election but it’s not as if he won a mandate for his message. After all, he lost the white female vote… read on.
It’s amazing how they can so blithely imply that they win if the “real” vote were counted. And it proves why they are so desperate to suppress the vote of African Americans and Latinos. Those “illegitimate” voters are diluting the votes of legitimate citizens. What could be more obvious?
Indeed, all you have to do is look at the GOP rationales offered up in the 2000 recount: they said it explicitly. (James Bopp, the author of that linked article is one of the GOP’s foremost vote suppression experts.)
Once you let those illegitimate votes count, Real Americans are denied their franchise. In fact, counting the votes of African Americans and Latinos is the real vote suppression.