Former George W. Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that white Republicans were “scared to death” that their voters are diminishing according to the most recent census data, so they are passing legislation to suppress the votes of “people of color.”
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “This is so flagrant. Tragically this has been so successful, the Republican effort to rig who does the counting and put in place measures to suppress the vote and make it harder to vote. What is your degree of confidence that any federal voting rights legislation will receive the adequate urgency that stories like this make clear it deserves, Matthew?”
Dowd said, “Let’s put this in historical context, Nicolle. The United States of America has never had universal suffrage. The closest it came to universal suffrage in our country was in the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That’s the closest it’s come. We didn’t have it in the beginning when only property-owning white protestant males could vote, and then it extended to non-property owner males, and then 140 years later, it expanded to women. Then we finally gave the right to vote to African-Americans in the 1860s. Then it took another hundred years, and other minority groups, Latinos and Asian-Americans, have suffered along the way. So it was in the aftermath of 1965 where we came closest to what we all thought our ideal was.”
He continued, “What’s amazing to me is we’ve now rolled back that. We’ve rolled back that and are now making it even worse than it was before 1965 in this. I would point to one reason why this is. It’s all political because the GOP understands the changing face of America. It’s been going on for 20 years, and they know the only way they can continue to hold power and not be accountable for the awful things they’re doing is by restricting the right to vote or by making it harder for people to vote or by nullifying elections in this country.”
Dowd added, “The last census underlines this completely. For the first time in American history, the number of Whites in America fell. For the first time since 1790, the number of whites in America fell. We’re fast approaching a time where America is going to be a majority people of color country within the next 20 years. That’s what the Republicans are scared to death of, and that’s why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
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