While the Republican Party is busy responding to Donald Trump’s latest remarks, the powerful progressive arm of the Democratic Party is looking so far ahead it has compiled data it is using to predict racial changes to the American electorate state-by-state through the year 2060.
This while Obama administration housing rules imposed nationwide are poised to fundamentally change the demographic makeup of American cities, especially suburbs, by setting new conditions for federal funding. The new rules could drastically alter local and national elections through the distribution of lower-income minorities throughout jurisdictions.
The big leagues of highly influential progressive organizations conducted a massive, largely unreported study that for the first time in more than 20 years projects the racial and ethnic composition for each state through 2060.
Advertisement - story continues below
Currently, there are only four majority-minority states: California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.
However, citing the “ongoing demographic transformation of the country,” the progressive groups found that by 2060, 22 states will become predominantly minority, including seven of the currently largest states and 11 of the top 15, ultimately accounting for about two-thirds of the country’s population of eligible voters.
TRENDING: American ships put in bull's-eye in Mideast
In February, the highly influential Center for American Progress, founded by former Obama White House counselor and current Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute and demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution for the extensive study.
Advertisement - story continues below
The results were published in a 151 page report, reviewed in full by WND, titled “States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974–2060.”
The projections came one year after the U.S. Census Bureau projected minority growth through 2060, finding of the more than 20 million children under 5 years living in the U.S., 50.2 percent were minorities.
The progressive authors’ predictions on the changes of the electorate state-by-state based their calculations on the 2014 Population Survey, the American Community Survey, the Census' 2014 National Population Projections and their own data.
“With the ongoing demographic transformation of the country, our States of Change projections find (states becoming majority minority) will become more and more common,” states the report of the study.
Following in the footsteps of California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas, the next two majority-minority states, Maryland and Nevada, should arrive in the next five years, the data indicates.
Advertisement - story continues below
Four more states will turn majority-minority in the 2020s, the study found: Arizona, Florida, Georgia and New Jersey.
In the 2030s, those states should be joined by Alaska, Louisiana and New York; and in the 2040s, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Virginia will become majority-minority.
Looking forward to the 2050s, Colorado, North Carolina and Washington likely will be added to the list.
“By 2060, that should bring the number of majority-minority states to 22,” the authors find, “including seven of the currently largest states and 11 of the top 15. Together, these 22 states account for about two-thirds of the country’s population.”
Advertisement - story continues below
The study provided lengthy predictions and explanations for each state, replete with graphs.
Children of illegals as future voters
The study predicted the future trends of eligible voters turning majority-minority, factoring in the children of immigrants, apparently including the children of illegal aliens.
The disparity between the racial makeup of the overall population versus those who are eligible voters is expected to narrow in the future, the report said, “as more of the growth in Hispanics and Asians comes from native fertility rather than immigration; children of immigrants are citizens and therefore (eligible voters) once they reach age 18.”
Advertisement - story continues below
“By 2060, we predict that the EV (eligible voters) population will be 46 percent white, 13 percent black, 27 percent Hispanic, and 14 percent Asian/Other.”
The authors expressed hope that more Mexicans will be naturalized as more public and non-profit services become available to help them overcome barriers such as language and administration.
Parties must accommodate
The study arrived at two main conclusions.
Advertisement - story continues below
Firstly, that public policy must “adjust to the needs of a quite different America.”
“Diversity is spreading everywhere: into new generations, into every age group—even seniors—and into every corner of the country—including such unlikely states as Oklahoma, Kansas and Utah,” the study said.
“Policy, both national and state, must become increasingly diversity oriented or be deemed ineffective,” it stated. “There is simply no way around this.”
The second conclusion is that political parties cannot win national elections without competing “for the votes of a new America,” with some demographic trends already causing political ripple effects in the short term, including in the 2016 presidential election.
Remaking suburbs
The progressive study on the electoral changes state-by- state takes on new-found significance because of major changes at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.
The Obama administration issued a historic and final HUD ruling earlier this month titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” which could precipitate major demographic changes nationwide.
The administration wants to integrate more minorities into townships across America, which could drastically impact local elections, as well.
The new rules require communities to have more in-depth plans for reducing the so-called concentration of poverty and “racial segregation.”
It sets as a condition for receiving federal HUD funding the requirement that state and local government recipients further the purposes of the Fair Housing Act. The federal government will provide each funding recipient with a clear list of priorities and tools to further the act.
The Fair Housing Act sets as its goals “improving integrated living patterns and overcoming historic patterns of segregation; reducing racial and ethnic concentrations of poverty; reducing disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets such as education, transit access, and employment, as well as exposure to environmental health hazards and other stressors that harm a person’s quality of life; and responding to disproportionate housing needs by protected class.”
The new HUD stipulations require communities to provide an explanation for any imbalance of diversity patterns while drafting a plan to change the patterns.
Already, 12 states plus the District of Columbia have passed their own laws prohibiting landlords from turning down prospective tenants based on income source, presumably to further the Fair Housing Act.
The Center for American Progress has recommended the Obama administration take things further by compelling private firms to rent to families receiving Section 8 housing subsidies.
“Blanket prohibitions on voucher holders may disproportionally affect African American renters and expose rental companies to challenges,” the CAP paper stated.
The paper, titled “5 Ways America’s Newest Landlords Can Win the Public’s Trust,” recommended that while “working collaboratively with local governments, renting to voucher holders may also help companies stay in compliance with the Fair Housing Act and avoid costly lawsuits.”
Researcher Stanley Kurtz, writing at the National Review Online, focused on the way the new HUD funding rules obligate local grantees to compare themselves to the racial makeup of other nearby localities.
“In other words,” writes Kurtz, “it’s not enough for, say, Philadelphia’s ‘Mainline’ Montgomery County suburbs to analyze their own populations by race, ethnicity, and class to determine whether there are any imbalances in where groups live, or in access to schools, parks, transportation, and jobs.
“Those suburbs are also obligated to compare their own housing situations to the Greater Philadelphia region as a whole. So if some Montgomery County’s suburbs are predominantly upper-middle-class, white, and zoned for single-family housing, while the Philadelphia region as a whole is dotted with concentrations of less-well-off African Americans, Hispanics, or Asians, those suburbs could be obligated to nullify their zoning ordinances and build high-density, low-income housing at their own expense.”
Hoover Institution media fellow Paul Sperry, a former WND reporter, wrote at the New York Post last week that the Obama administration is “prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of ‘racial and economic justice.’”
Sperry reported several U.S. government agencies are “furiously mining data” on Americans’ “health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document ‘inequalities’ between minorities and whites.”
Perry relates the data collection is intended to make “disparate impact” cases against “banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers."
