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    ¿Por qué los hombres latinos votan por los republicanos?

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    Fotos de  la turba en el Capitolio

    Elecciones en Georgia

    6 falsedades sobre la elección

    Ataque a la democracia

    La diversidad del voto latino

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    Fauci warns against lifting Covid measures but Republican states push on

    The top infectious disease expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned it is too early to end Covid-19 restrictions, despite Texas and Mississippi having lifted mask mandates and business capacity limits this week.States are easing restrictions after a drop in cases, though that decline is starting to plateau at a high rate of 60,000 to 70,000 infections per day.“We’re going in the right direction but we just need to hang on a bit longer,” Fauci said on Sunday, to CBS’s Face the Nation.Public health experts have warned that the US could undermine progress with vaccines and allow for thousands of preventable deaths by lifting restrictions at the first sign of improvements. More than 524,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US and January was its deadliest month of the pandemic so far.Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said turning restrictions “on and off” risked another surge.“This is not going to be indefinite, we need to gradually pull back as we get people vaccinated,” he said.Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised Biden’s transition team, warned the US was still “in the eye of the hurricane”.Osterholm told NBC’s Meet the Press the situation appeared to be improving, but said he was concerned the B117 variant, which is 50% more infectious than other variants in the US, could create a new surge.“We do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus by not letting up on any of the public health measures we’ve taken and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.On CNN’s State of the Union, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, said he lifted restrictions in his state because of declining rates of hospitalizations.“Our objective in Mississippi has never been to rid ourselves of the virus … our goal is to make sure we protect the integrity of our healthcare system,” the Republican said.Mississippi has seen an average of 461 cases per day, down 17% from the average two weeks ago, according to the New York Times. There were 1,240 deaths from Covid-19 in the state in January, the highest of any month since the pandemic began. About 16% of residents have received a first vaccine dose.“The numbers in Mississippi don’t justify government intervention,” said Reeves, who encouraged residents to keep wearing masks in crowded settings.Other governors have celebrated their state’s mask mandates and said they will remain in place until there is a substantial improvement in infection rates.Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week his state’s mask order was followed by a “significant drop in cases”.“We’ve seen it throughout this last year, these mask really, really work,” DeWine said.He said his state would drop health orders once it had 50 cases or fewer per 100,000 people for two weeks. Though rates were still high in Ohio, he said, the state’s vaccination distribution was getting better each day.“But as we’re doing that, we can’t give up the defense,” DeWine said.The dean of Brown University’s school of public health, Ashish Jha, said decisions such as those by Reeves and Texas governor Greg Abbott to lift restrictions could slow the process of getting life back to normal and put residents at risk of infection and death.“Given how close we are to the finish line, anybody who gets infected today and dies in three or four weeks is somebody who would have gotten vaccinated a month from now,” Jha told ABC. “This is why it’s urgent to just keep going for a little bit longer.” More

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    What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Vexing Question for Democrats: What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?Several voters said values like individual responsibility and providing for one’s family, and a desire for lower taxes and financial stability, led them to reject a party embraced by their parents.Jose Aguilar said he related to Republican messages about personal responsibility. “There’s really no secret to success,” he said. “It’s really that if you apply yourself, then things will work out.”Credit…Go Nakamura for The New York TimesMarch 5, 2021Erik Ortiz, a 41-year-old hip-hop music producer in Florida, grew up poor in the South Bronx, and spent much of his time as a young adult trying to establish himself financially. Now he considers himself rich. And he believes shaking off the politics of his youth had something to do with it.“Everybody was a liberal Democrat — in my neighborhood, in the Bronx, in the local government,” said Mr. Ortiz, whose family is Black and from Puerto Rico. “The welfare state was bad for our people — the state became the father in the Black and brown household and that was a bad, bad mistake.” Mr. Ortiz became a Republican, drawn to messages of individual responsibility and lower taxes. To him, generations of poor people have stayed loyal to a Democratic Party that has failed to transform their lives.“Why would I want to be stuck in that mentality?” he said.While Democrats won the vast majority of Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential race, the results also showed Republicans making inroads with this demographic, the largest nonwhite voting group — and particularly among Latino men. According to exit polls, 36 percent of Latino men voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020, up from 32 percent in 2016. These voters also helped Republicans win several House seats in racially diverse districts that Democrats thought were winnable, particularly in Texas and Florida. Both parties see winning more Hispanic votes as critical in future elections.Yet a question still lingers from the most recent one, especially for Democrats who have long believed they had a major edge: What is driving the political views of Latino men?For decades, Democratic candidates worked with the assumption that if Latinos voted in higher numbers, the party was more likely to win. But interviews with dozens of Hispanic men from across the country who voted Republican last year showed deep frustration with such presumptions, and rejected the idea that Latino men would instinctively support liberal candidates. These men challenged the notion that they were part of a minority ethnic group or demographic reliant on Democrats; many of them grew up in areas where Hispanics are the majority and are represented in government. And they said many Democrats did not understand how much Latino men identified with being a provider — earning enough money to support their families is central to the way they view both themselves and the political world.Like any voter, these men are also driven by their opinions on a variety of issues: Many mention their anti-abortion views, support for gun rights and strict immigration policies. They have watched their friends and relatives go to western Texas to work the oil fields, and worry that new environmental regulations will wipe out the industry there. Still, most say their favorable view of Republicans stems from economic concerns, a desire for low taxes and few regulations. They say they want to support the party they believe will allow them to work and become wealthy.Public polling has long showed political divides within the Latino electorate — Cuban-Americans have favored Republicans far more than have Mexican-Americans, for example. During the 2020 election, precincts with large numbers of Colombian and Venezuelan immigrants swung considerably toward Mr. Trump. Surveys conducted last year by Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, showed a striking gender gap, with Latino men far more inclined than Latina women to support Republicans.And researchers believe that Mexican-American men under the age of 50 are perhaps the demographic that should most concern Democrats, because they are more likely to drift toward conservative candidates. According to a precinct-level analysis by OpenLabs, a liberal research group, Hispanic support for Democrats dropped by as much as 9 percent in last year’s election, and far more in parts of Florida and South Texas.Winning over Latino men is in some ways a decades-old challenge for Democrats — a nagging reminder that the party has never had a forceful grip on this demographic. Still, some strategists on the left are increasingly alarmed that the party is not doing enough to reach men whose top priorities are based on economics, rather than racial justice or equality. And they warn that Hispanic men are likely to provide crucial swing votes in future races for control of Congress in the midterm elections, as well as who governs from the White House.“Democrats have lots of real reasons they should be worried,” said Joshua Ulibarri, a Democratic strategist who has researched Hispanic men for years. “We haven’t figured out a way to speak to them, to say that we have something for them, that we understand them. They look at us and say: We believe we work harder, we want the opportunity to build something of our own, and why should we punish people who do well?”According to exit polls, 36 percent of Latino men voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, up from 32 percent in 2016.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesJose Aguilar grew up in McAllen, Texas, in the 1960s, raised by parents who had limited means for buying food and clothing. They were hard workers, and instilled in him that “if you apply yourself, you will get what you deserve.” His family welcomed relatives from Mexico who stayed for a short time and then returned across the border; some managed to immigrate legally and become citizens, and he believes that’s how anyone else should do so.Still, Mr. Aguilar did benefit from an affirmative action-style program that recruited Hispanic students from South Texas to enter an engineering program.“They were trying to fill quotas to hire Hispanic people in their company,” he said. “The first I ever got on was on a paid ticket to interview for a job, so I did. I saw that as a good opportunity for me to take advantage of, this was my chance, to take that opportunity and run.”Mr. Aguilar, who now lives near Houston, said he saw Mr. Trump as a model of prosperity in the United States.“I’m an American, I can take advantage of whatever opportunities just as Anglo people did,” he added. “There’s really no secret to success — it’s really that if you apply yourself, then things will work out.”Sergio Arellano of Phoenix, Ariz., said he had a story he liked to tell about the moment he registered as a Republican. When he was an 18-year-old Army infantryman on home leave, he went to a July 4 event and spotted the voter registration table. He asked the woman sitting there: What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats?Democrats, he recalled her saying, are for the poor. Republicans are for the rich.“Well that made it easy — I didn’t want to be poor, I wanted to be rich, so I chose Republican,” Mr. Arellano said. “Obviously she figured I would identify with the poor. There’s an assumption that you’re starting out in this country, you don’t have any money, you will identify with the poor. But what I wanted was to make my own money.”Last fall, Mr. Arellano campaigned for Mr. Trump in Arizona, and this year, he narrowly lost his bid for chairman of the state Republican Party. Still, he does not fit the Trumpian conservative mold, often urging politicians to soften their political rhetoric against immigrants.“Trump is not the party, the party is what we make it — a pro-business, pro-family values,” he said. “People who understand we want to make it as something here.”All of this sounds familiar to Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who is deeply critical of the party under Mr. Trump, and who has worked for decades to push the party to do more to attract Hispanic voters.“Paying rent is more important than fighting social injustice in their minds,” Mr. Madrid said. “The Democratic Party has always been proud to be a working-class party, but they do not have a working-class message. The central question is going to be, Who can convince these voters their concerns are being heard?”Supporters of Mr. Trump in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami in November. They were celebrating his winning Florida’s electoral votes. Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesRicardo Portillo has contempt for most politicians, but has been inclined to vote for Republicans for most of his life. The owner of a jewelry store in McAllen, Texas, for the past 20 years, Mr. Portillo prides himself on his business acumen. And from his point of view, both he and his customers did well under a Trump administration. Though he describes most politicians as “terrible” — Republicans, he said, “at least let me keep more of my money, and are for the government doing less and allowing me for doing more for myself.”In the last year, Mr. Portillo, 45, has seen business dip as fewer Mexican citizens are crossing the border to shop at his store. Before the coronavirus pandemic, business was brisk with customers from both sides of the border.A sense of economic security is a shift for Mr. Portillo, who grew up often struggling.“We were brought up the old-school way, that men are men, they have to provide, that there’s no excuses and there’s no crying. If you don’t make it, it’s because you’re a pendejo,” he said, using a Spanish term for idiot. “Maybe that’s not nice, but it breeds strong men, mentally strong men.”The question now, he said, is “what am I going to be able to do for myself and for my family? We don’t feel entitled to much, but we’re entitled to the fruit of our labor.”As a child in New Mexico, Valentin Cortez, 46, was raised by two parents who voted as Democrats, but were personally conservative. Mr. Cortez was around “a lot of cowboys and a lot of farmers” who were also Hispanic, but he never felt as though he was part of a minority and said he never personally experienced any racism.Like so many other men interviewed, he views politics as hopelessly divisive now: “You can’t have an opinion without being attacked.”Though a handful of friends have blocked him on social media when he expressed conservative views, he said, he does not feel silenced in his own life.Mr. Cortez occasionally resents being seen as a minority — he grew up around other Hispanics in New Mexico and believes he has the same kinds of opportunities as his white counterparts. The bigger problem, as he sees it, is the lack of willingness to disagree: “I’ve got friends, they think that I hate my own culture. I have been shut down personally, but I am comfortable with who I am.”Valentin Cortez grew up around other Hispanics in New Mexico and believes he has the same kinds of opportunities as his white counterparts.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesLike other men interviewed, Mr. Cortez, a registered independent, said he voted for Mr. Trump in large part because he believed he had done better financially under his administration and worried that a government run by President Biden would raise taxes and support policies that would favor the elite.Some of the frustrations voiced by Hispanic Republican men are stoked by misinformation, including conspiracy theories claiming that the “deep state” took over during the Trump administration and a belief that Black Lives Matter protests caused widespread violence.In interviews, many cite their support for law enforcement and the military as reasons they favor the Republican Party.For Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign last year, the warning signs about losing Latino men were there for months. In focus groups conducted in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, Hispanic men spoke of deep disillusionment with politics broadly, saying that most political officials offer nothing more than empty promises, spurring apathy among many would-be voters.“We’re not speaking to the rage and the inequality that they feel,” he said. “They just wanted their lives to get better, they just wanted somebody to explain to them how their lives would get better under a President Biden.”To Mr. Rocha, the skepticism of Democrats is a sign of political maturity in some ways.“We’re coming-of-age, we’re getting older, and now it’s no longer just survival, now you need prosperity,” he said. “But when you start to feel like you just can’t get ahead, you’re going to have the same kind of rage we’ve long seen with white working-class voters.”For some Latino men who favor Republicans, they simply want the government to stay out of their way and not impede their chances of success.“You can’t legislate equality, you can’t legislate work ethic and you can’t legislate being a good person,” Mr. Ortiz said. “I am not perfect and nobody is perfect, but for me it starts with individual responsibility.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Texas governor lifts mask mandate and declares: 'It's time to open 100%'

    With less than 7% of Texans fully vaccinated and another Covid-19 surge potentially imminent, Texas is flinging open businesses to full capacity while simultaneously ending its highly politicized mask mandate, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, announced on Tuesday.“It is now time to open Texas 100%,” a maskless Abbott declared to cheers at a crowded restaurant in the city of Lubbock.When Abbott’s policy changes go into effect next week, Texas will be the most populous state in the country that does not require residents to wear masks. Restaurants and other businesses can choose to maintain their own mask policies, but without government backing to do so.“We had a chance maybe by the end of the summer of getting a handle on this pandemic. This governor is just going to throw all of that out and put us back to the stone ages,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic party. “This is crazy.”Other states and cities have likewise started rolling back precautions. In Mississippi – another Republican stronghold – Governor Tate Reeves also announced on Tuesday that the state was lifting rules for businesses and doing away with county mask mandates.In other states and cities, including Michigan, Louisiana, and the city of San Francisco, California, officials are also lifting some restrictions, albeit not with the sweeping approach of Mississippi or Texas.Abbott’s announcement – which comes after about 43,000 Texans have died from the virus, and while many Texans are still ineligible for the vaccine – sparked immediate and vehement backlash, from Democratic mayors to workers’ advocates infuriated that Texans of color will once again be the hardest hit.“I think this is a slap in the face of working people, especially frontline workers, who have been risking their lives,” said Emily Timm, the co-executive director of Workers Defense Action Fund.Local leaders in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin – Texas’s biggest cities – called on Abbott “not to create any ambiguity or uncertainty about the importance of wearing a mask by changing the rules at this time”, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, said in a statement.“We as a state should be guided by science and data, which says we should keep the mask mandate. Too much is at stake to compromise the positive outcomes we have seen with over-confidence,” Adler said.The policy changes also follow a devastating winter storm that pummeled Texas mere weeks ago, in a crisis made worse because of the state’s bungled emergency management.Some critics say Abbott is using this moment to distract from that catastrophic failure, while also playing politics with lives to curry favor with a far-right Republican base that turned against him after he implemented coronavirus restrictions last summer.“He’s made a decision based upon politics,” Hinojosa said.As most meaningful coronavirus-related restrictions disappear from Texas, the state is simultaneously staring down what could easily be a series of super-spreader events over spring break.South Texas beach towns in Corpus Christi and the already hard-hit Rio Grande Valley have long been popular destinations among party-going college students from around the country, and as tourists pack into bars and restaurants, none of them will have to wear masks or socially distance.“You think we had a horrible spike on Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, and during the holidays?” Hinojosa said. “The spike that this state will experience in coronavirus cases will be extremely high – and will cause many, many more deaths than any responsible governor should have allowed.” More

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    Texas freeze casts renewable energy as next battle line in US culture wars

    Sign up for the Guardian’s Green Light newsletterThe frigid winter storm and power failure that left millions of people in Texas shivering in darkness has been used to stoke what is becoming a growing front in America’s culture wars – renewable energy.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which oversees the Texas grid, has been clear that outages of solar and wind energy were only a minor factor in blackouts which, at their peak, left 4 million Texans without electricity, with many resorting to burning furniture or using outdoor barbecues to desperately warm themselves amid the shocking blast of Arctic-like conditions.Crucially, the supply of natural gas, which supplies about half of Texas’s electricity, seized up due to frozen pipes and a lack of standby reserves. The grid failed after about a third of Ercot’s total capacity – supplied by coal, nuclear and gas – went offline as demand for heating dramatically surged.Regardless, the Republican leadership in Texas, abetted by rightwing media outlets and a proliferation of false claims on social media, has sought to pin the crisis on wind turbines and solar panels freezing when the Lone Star state needed them most.“The Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, told Fox News last week, in reference to a plan to rapidly transition the US to renewable energy that currently only exists on paper. “Our wind and our solar got shut down … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”Abbott subsequently walked backed these comments but others have been less hesitant to use the crisis to attack renewables. Sid Miller, Texas’s agriculture commissioner, stated that “we should never build another wind turbine in Texas” on Facebook, while Tucker Carlson, the prominent rightwing Fox News host, said “windmills” were “silly fashion accessories” prone to failure.Fox News blamed renewables for the blackouts 128 times in just a 48-hour period last week, according to Media Matters. The distortions were amplified by social media, with a picture of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine widely shared on Twitter and Facebook, even though the photo was taken in Sweden in 2014.A YouTube live stream by the conservative commentator Steven Crowder blaming the blackouts on “the failures of green energy” has been viewed about a million times, while the Texas Public Policy Foundation used paid Facebook adverts to urge people to “thank” fossil fuels for keeping them warm while assailing “failed” wind energy.The scorn heaped on renewables has echoes of the blackouts suffered by California during devastating wildfires last year, which caused several prominent Texas Republicans such as Dan Crenshaw, a member of Congress, and Senator Ted Cruz, who last week fled his stricken home state for sunny Cancún, to mock California’s shift to cleaner energy.The expansion of wind and solar, a key policy goal of Joe Biden, is now developing into yet another cultural battle line, despite strong public support for renewables. Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University, said the use of “targeted disinformation” and conspiracy theories is obscuring the more pressing issue of how states like Texas cope with the challenges of extreme weather linked to the climate crisis.“There are plenty of other comparable extreme events that are going to compromise the integrity of the energy system,” Keenan said. “These events are going to increasingly resonate in the monthly power bill. The question is do ratepayers want to keep paying to clean up a mess or do they want to invest in building resilience that will save them a lot more in the future?”Keenan said that much like how the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks by escalating its national security activity, the country now needs a similar level of response to the climate crisis by first taking basic steps, like weatherizing infrastructure and keeping reserve power in store, that Texas’s free-market grid system neglected to do.America has now “reached a turning point where the costs of disasters far exceed the amortized costs of upfront investments in resilience”, Keenan said. “Part of the impetus here is an acknowledgment that the status quo is unsustainable and we need to adapt our infrastructure and our way of life.”Transforming Americans’ power supply to renewable energy while bolstering resilience in the face of an unfolding climate crisis is a daunting challenge. Wind and solar energy need to increase their current capacity by up to five times by 2050 in order to reach net-zero carbon emissions, a Princeton report found last year, requiring nearly a 10th of the contiguous US to be covered in turbines and panels and thousands of miles of new power lines and substations in a revamped grid.All of this will need to happen as wildfires, flooding and storms are set to worsen due to global heating, with scientists finding last year that extreme rainfall in Texas alone will become up to 50% more frequent by 2036 than it was in the second half of the 20th century. Storm surges along parts of the Texas coast are set to double by 2050. If infrastructure is not prepared for this “the lights will probably go out again”, said Joshua Rhodes, a power grid researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.But Texas, much like several other states, appears wilfully unprepared for this reality. “We never hear the words ‘climate change’ spoken at Ercot because of the politics. It’s a taboo subject,” Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin, told the Houston Chronicle. “We’re using the past as a predictor of the future and we can’t do that. We’ve fundamentally shifted the planet’s systems, and it’s only just started.”The fallout from this political crusade against renewables will be felt heaviest among poorer communities and people of color who are already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, heaped on top of a pandemic.“The last few days have been overwhelming,” said Nalleli Hidalgo, a Houston-based activist at the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, which has been attempting to help thousands of people lacking water, food and power.“Climate change will continue to hit coastal states like Texas the hardest, we need to invest in renewable energies and sustainable infrastructures, and create weatherized systems to prevent this from happening again.” More

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    ‘Don’t be assholes’: Ted Cruz criticizes press reports over his Cancún trip

    The main lesson from the scandal over his flight to Cancún while Texas froze, Senator Ted Cruz said on Tuesday, is that people should not be “assholes”, and should treat each other with respect.The Texas Republican, who ran for the presidential nomination in 2016, is known for his caustic and brutal attacks on Democrats and willingness to buck even the appearance of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate in order to achieve his own goals, even by causing a government shutdown.He was speaking, without discernible irony, today on Ruthless, a podcast which offers “next-generation conservative talk”.The subject at hand was Cruz’s decision to take his family to warmer climes while his state shivered, and the decision thereafter of an unknown friend to leak the senator’s wife’s text messages to the press.Cruz landed in political hot water while at least 30 Texans died in the cold. Temperatures have now risen but water supplies are still affected by power outages which hit millions because the state energy grid was not prepared for the freeze. Many Texans also face exorbitant bills as power companies seek to profit from the disaster.Cruz has condemned such corporate behaviour, but on the podcast he defended Texan energy independence, insisting it was a good thing “the feds don’t get to regulate us so well” and saying it kept energy prices down.He did not go as far as other Texas Republicans to blame the Green New Deal, a package of progressive policy priorities which are not yet law. But while noting that Texas “produces a lot more wind than California does”, Cruz insisted “the wind turbines froze, that was a big problem, the snow and ice on the solar panels dramatically reduced the ability of solar panels to generate electricity”.Most experts say renewable energy sources were not a major factor in the Texas blackouts.“There were also problems with both coal and natural gas production,” Cruz conceded, “and so those drops significantly as well and it was kind of a perfect storm of all of those together”.Cruz’s most passionate complaint was about how the press treated him and his family in an affair in which he first blamed his young daughters for wanting to go to Cancún, then flew home solo and admitted his mistake.“Here’s a suggestion,” he said. “Just don’t be assholes. Just, you know, treat each other as human beings, have to some degree some modicum of respect.”[embedded content]He said his wife Heidi was “pretty pissed” that her messages were leaked, and had been “sort of walking through” the issue with neighbours, attempting to work out who might be responsible.Cruz said he had “lots of friends who are Democrats” and “in fact one of our friends who are Democrats said yesterday, ‘I can’t believe this. I’m defending the right.’”He also complained about coverage of his dog, Snowflake, a poodle pictured seemingly alone at his Houston home while the family was in Mexico. Cruz said Snowflake had been “home with a dog sitter and actually the heat and power was back on”.Cruz reserved special ire for pictures of his wife on the beach in Mexico that were published by the US press.“The New York Post ran all these pictures of Heidi and her bikini,” he said. “I will tell you that she is pissed.” More

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    Democrats lost Texas because of Covid and Republican voter drive, report finds

    Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterGet-out-the-vote efforts hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and an 11th-hour voter registration surge for well-funded Republicans thwarted ambitions of a blue wave in Texas during the 2020 election, according to a new postmortem that state Democrats shared with the Guardian.“The majority of Texans, if they were in the ballot box, would vote for Democrats. The problem is that Republicans have a higher likelihood of turning out,” said Hudson Cavanagh, the Texas Democratic party’s data science director who authored the post-election report.Texas generated outsized buzz last year, as a spike in early voting made much of the nation wonder whether its 38 electoral college votes were finally up for grabs. Yet former president Donald Trump still triumphed by more than a five-point margin – a much closer presidential contest than any other in recent years, but one that reinforced Republicans as the state’s dominant party.Now, Democrats are blaming last fall’s defeat mostly on programmatic difficulties, which allowed Republicans to best them in get-out-the-vote operations. “Texas is still the next frontier,” said Abhi Rahman, the communications director for Texas Democrats.Despite record turnout in 2020, Texas ranked 44th out of 50 states in terms of ballots counted as a proportion of the total voting-eligible population, according to the United States Elections Project. High Asian voter participation marked “a major shift”, but still, “the electorate was whiter than projected”, Cavanagh noted in his analysis.Latinos – who are considered a key demographic to move Texas to the left – also eclipsed turnout projections. But Latino Republicans voted at a higher rate than Latino Democrats, and that differential turnout created a largely false impression that Democrats were losing ground with one of their most crucial blocs, too often lumped together as a monolith.One exception was the Rio Grande Valley, a typically Democratic stronghold where Latinos did in fact gravitate more toward Trump at the top of the ticket.While “Latino voters continue to strongly support Democrats,” the party needs “to empower Latino voices at the ballot box”, Cavanagh wrote in his report.On top of Texas’s reputation as a voter suppression state – based on voter ID requirements, a difficult registration process, restrictions on mail ballots and other barriers – Covid-19 added yet another obstacle for Texas voters in 2020. Polling locations closed because of infected workers, while long lines of constituents who weren’t required to wear masks threatened exposure to the virus.“It took a lot of bravery for a lot of these Democrats who understood the risk that, you know, they were putting themselves in to go vote,” Cavanagh told the Guardian. “I’m incredibly proud of the folks that did, frankly.”Amid the public health crisis, Texas Democrats decided against knocking on doors for face-to-face voter engagement, because “even one life lost is too many”, Cavanagh said. Republicans, on the other hand, connected with eligible voters in-person, a clear advantage in one of the few states where residents still cannot register to vote online.In the last months leading up to the election, a gargantuan push by Republicans to register new voters wiped out the gradual advantage Democrats had been honing for years, especially given that almost all of those new Republican registrations turned into net votes.“Their willingness to put people at risk to win the election, you know, made it really hard for us to keep up,” Cavanagh said.As Democrats turned to virtual registration drives and phone banking, they spent too much time speaking with reliable party members who would have voted regardless. Likewise, a dearth of contact information for young and rural Texans – as well as people of color – and the inability to canvas made it difficult to connect with voters who were less likely to turn out.Estimates indicate that there are still more than 2 million solidly Democratic unregistered voters in the state, and Cavanagh said the party needs to focus on registering them, then actually building relationships so they make it to the polls.“We know that that’s how Democrats win across this country,” he said. “We look people in the eyes, we tell them our values, we tell them what we believe in, and that’s how we get people to turn out.” More