Are you curious as to how your city or county is changing? Take a look at the excellent resources available through the U.S. Census Bureau search tool that allows you to see 2009 estimates of various demographic criteria and compare them to the national average. Here’s the WI state profile & a link to where you can review data at the county and city level.
While WI hasn’t reached a “minority majority” other states have according to USA Today:
“Releasing population estimates for July 1, 2009, the Census said 317 counties, four states and the District of Columbia are now “minority majority,” USA Today reported. The states are California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.”
According to the WSJ (subscription required):
“The Census reported Thursday that nonwhite minorities accounted for 48.6% of the children born in the U.S. between July 2008 and July 2009, gaining ground from 46.8% two years earlier. The trajectory suggests that minority births will soon eclipse births of whites of European ancestry.”
The Wall Street Journal also looked at birth rates for minorities in a number of states and found that these numbers were exceeding 50%, including in increasingly anti-immigrant states like AZ.
Implications of these Demographic Changes
The right wing dominated GOP should be scared right out of their pants given these demographic changes. If your whole platform is based on condemning others that don’t fit your white majority world view then you’re in for some deep trouble not only in the midterms, but in future elections. As the party continues to veer further and further to the right, the “minority majority” will find themselves increasingly distant from a party that attacks them and doesn’t welcome them with their policies or with their rhetoric.
In states like SC, we have withered old white Senators calling their state’s leading gubernatorial candidate a “raghead”, in CA we have state GOP gubernatorial candidate Whitman veering right with anti-immigrant rhetoric to win her party’s nomination. In WI, we have Scott Walker, flip flopping on the SB1070 “papers please” law. In AZ, we have tea bagger, anti-immigrant AZ politicians pursuing radical policies beyond their SB1070 push to drive brown people out of the state with pending legislation to attack “anchor babies” to repeal the 14th amendment according to Yahoo News!
“Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona – and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution – to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens.”
If this is the right’s idea of family values, respect for the individual and some willingness to “have a big tent” then they deserve the drubbing at the polls that they’ll be getting in the years to come.
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