May 29, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Is Texas Turning Blue? Hispanics Bring Higher Birth Rates And Lower Death Rates Than Whites, More Of Whom Are Dying Than Being Born
By Robert Romano
Republicans have carried the state of Texas in every presidential election since 1980, painting the state red as Ronald Reagan won consecutive landslides in 1980 and in 1984.
Democrats last carried the state in 1976 with Jimmy Carter’s 51.1 percent of the vote to Gerald Ford’s 47.97 percent. Before that, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey carried the state in 1960, 1964 and 1968 with 50.5 percent, 63.3 percent and 41.1 percent of the vote (1968 was a three-way race), respectively.
After Carter, it’s been a sea of GOP victories: 55.3 percent to 41.4 percent in 1980. 63.6 percent to 36.1 percent in 1984. 55.6 percent to 43.35 percent in 1988. 40.6 percent to 37.08 percent in 1992. 48.8 percent to 43.8 percent in 1996. 59.3 percent to 37.98 percent in 2000. 61.09 percent to 38.2 percent in 2004. 55.45 percent to 43.7 percent in 2008. 57.2 percent to 41.4 percent in 2012.
But starting in 2016, the size of Republican wins with Donald Trump on ticket began to shrink: 52.2 percent to 43.2 percent in 2016. And 52.06 percent to 46.5 percent in 2020.
Joe Biden’s 46.5 percent showing in 2020 was the best by Democrats since 1976, and Trumps 52 percent showings in 2016 and 2020 were the worst since Ford lost the state in 1976. Is Texas turning blue?
Texas' diminishing Republican majorities have three principal causes: lower birth rates and higher death rates among whites (aging population), higher birth rates and lower death rates among Hispanics (younger population), and immigration (foreign and domestic).
In 2000, Texas' white, non-Hispanic population was 10.9 million and the Hispanic population was 6.6 million, according to U.S. Census data.
In 2010, whites were 11.4 million and Hispanics were 9.5 million.
And in 2022, whites were 11.7 million and Hispanics were 12.1 million.
In short, in over twenty years, the white population in Texas, which tends to vote Republican, has grown a mere 800,000 while the Hispanic population, which tends to vote Democratic, has grown by 5.5 million. And so Republican margins of victory are shrinking.
In fact, more whites are dying in Texas every year than are being born, according to Centers for Disease Control data. In 2018, 125,549 whites were born and 128,238 died. In 2019, 124,678 were born and 127,773 died. In 2020, 120,329 were born and 146,573 died. In 2021, 123,452 were born and 158,270 died. And in 2022, 121,868 were born and 147,573 died.
Whereas, with Hispanics, far many more are being born than dying. In 2018, 179,142 were born and just 43,736 died. In 2019, 179,689 were born and 44,937 died. In 2020, 175,940 were born and 65,587 died. In 2021, 177,386 were born and 68,833 died. And in 2022, 190,889 were born and 57,212 died.
So, while the overall Hispanic population is increasing via births and deaths alone by about 120,000 a year in Texas, the white population via births and deaths is not growing at all and in the past three years has been decreasing.
If white Texans had more than two children per woman for most of those years, say 3 or more babies per woman instead of the current 1.5 seen, the population would have increased by an additional 5 million, almost offsetting the 5.5 million additional Hispanics and keeping the state safely Republican.
Instead, white Texans have barely offset their own population, again, at this point more are dying than being born. For those who were hoping restricting abortions in the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022 might turn the tide, if the 2023 provisional birth rate data is any indication as national and state birth rates are reaching modern history lows, the situation will only accelerate moving forward.
In fact, any recent increase in the white Texan population at this point has been purely from imports from other states like California. For Republicans, they had better hope those coming from California lean Republican the way the ones from New York were for Florida. Maybe start building more retirement communities.
In the meantime, children statistically tend to adopt the politics of their parents on balance, and generational electoral majorities are principally built by family size.
Anyone who favors the two-party system in the U.S. and rightly fears a one-party system that Republicans losing Texas would entail — it is difficult to build Electoral College offsets for this event. With today’s Census numbers, without Texas, Republicans would have to win Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to get above 270 Electoral College votes. Losing any one of those would give Democrats a lock on the presidency.
Meaning, Republicans should be paying far more attention to the fertility issue, if for no other reason than self-preservation. Immigration is obviously important too but it's worth noting once naturalized the question again comes down to live births, and the current laws still favor familial chain migration.
The only available temporary offset is current economics and demographics favor a Republican leaning, aged exodus from blue states (Republicans tend to live in suburbs and many sell their homes and move south when they retire), which might be the only reason Texas isn't blue already. But that's only a stopgap.
Once the Baby Boomers die (sadly in about 16-20 years most of them will have passed away), birth rates will have been the factor most determinative of the future electoral landscape. To prevent the U.S. from becoming a one-party banana republic, it looks like it's time for Republicans to get busy.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Video: NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Hire Illegals As Lifeguards Because They’re ‘Excellent Swimmers’
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyjfjE8ice8
Biden Tries to Make Trump Trial Into Campaign Rally
By Rick Manning
The jury for former President Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial will receive instructions from a Democrat judge whose daughter uses this trial to make money fundraising for left-wing clients about the trial.
Fixed much?
But just in case any of the jurors don’t get the message, the Biden-Harris campaign held an event outside the courthouse to emphasize how important a guilty verdict is even though even CNN analysts have been dismayed that no case was actually made.
The star of the campaign rally was that bastion of rationality - Robert DeNiro.
In a glimpse of the Biden campaign theme, DeNiro, speaking for the campaign made the following claims that Trump “wants to sow total chaos” and “destroy not only the city” and “eventually he could destroy the whole world.”
The Biden campaign spokesman continued, “I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you. If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted. And elections. Forget about it. That’s over. That’s done. If he gets in. I can tell you right now. He will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave.”
Of course the Biden campaign claimed that they were not interested in the trial but came to the New York City courthouse because that’s where the media is.
That DeNiro appearance showed the world that the Biden campaign is desperate for a guilty verdict so they can campaign off of it, regardless of the facts.
And in case anyone is catching up, this case is not about whether or not Donald Trump had an affair with porn ‘actress’ Stormy Daniels in spite of the salacious testimony the judge allowed to be offered. The case is about whether a payment made to Daniels’ attorney should have been treated as a campaign expenditure. That’s it.
The judge didn’t allow the former head of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to testify about the nature of the case or even the consequences of misidentifying an expenditure – it is a misdemeanor with the typical remedy being a requirement to amend the campaign report and pay a minimal fine.
In 2016, the FEC fined the Hillary Clinton campaign $8,000. CNN reported the fine as follows, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier, masking it as “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting” instead of opposition research.”
The Democratic National Committee was also fined $105,000 for the same offense.
Might have been instructive for the jury to know both what the typical treatment is for misreporting a federal campaign expenditure and the fact the FEC never fined Donald Trump or his campaign for the expenditure the Manhattan District Attorney is prosecuting.
But, the compromised judge denied the jury the ability to actually know anything about the federal misdemeanor that Donald Trump is being accused of committing, and that not only did the FEC not charge the former president, but the local U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York federal office chose to not prosecute.
Now, back to the facts of the case. Here is what we learned through four weeks of trial. Trump’s lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen (an admitted perjurer), submitted expenses to the Trump organization. The Trump Organization classified those expenses as ‘Legal Expenses’ because as a prosecution witness who is the Controller of the Trump Organization testified, ‘it was submitted by the attorney.”
The same witness testified that he was never contacted by former President Trump about this expense classification, which is the basis of the prosecutions case.
Michael Cohen’s former attorney later got on the witness stand and testified that Cohen repeatedly told him that he didn’t have anything on Trump even though it would have helped him avoid jailtime in another federal case. Cohen contended to his attorney that he came up with the idea to both make the payment in response to Daniel’s attorneys extortion demand and how to classify it in order to protect Melania Trump from embarrassment.
And in case you missed it, Cohen pinpointed a specific 90 second call that he claimed the he and Mr. Trump laid out the scheme to hide the payment, only for it to be revealed in court that Cohen actually spoke with a security official in the Trump organization about a problem he was having with a fourteen year old girl who was harassing him online during that phone call, not Donald Trump.
What’s more it was revealed that Cohen stole $30,000 from the Trump Organization when he requested and received a $50,000 reimbursement for a separate extortion payoff expense when he only disbursed $20,000 to the extortionist.
So Trump is on trial because his former attorney now claims that Trump ordered the whole payment misclassification to avoid the issue coming up prior to the 2016 election – a charge that federal prosecutors decline to make.
The prosecution provided no evidence that Trump even had knowledge of the payment, let alone how it was recorded on the corporate ledger. And the key witness both lied on the stand about the phone call which was the lynchpin of his testimony and stole $30,000 from Trump’s company in the process.
But it is New York City and it is doubtful that a single juror even considered voting for the former President in 2016 or 2020. And now, the Biden-Harris campaign is seeking to intimidate that jury into a guilty verdict if the facts get in the way. Election interference anyone?
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://townhall.com/columnists/rickmanning/2024/05/29/biden-tries-to-make-trump-trial-into-campaign-rally-n2639661