Pete Gallego Quotes
I think the post-Rick-Perry Texas is a Texas that is more competitive between the Democrats and Republicans. I think the Republicans still have a huge advantage, but I think if we're arguing that competition is good for the system, then I think a stronger two-party system in Texas is inevitable, and I think that it will happen.
Gallego, Pete. Interview. Texas Tribune, 2015.
The main source of Republican votes was Anglo White males. However, the demographics of the nation had been changing for a few decades where the non-Whites are the fastest growing demographic subgroup. The projection was clearly that Anglo Whites would cease to be the majority in the coming years and each year they became slightly smaller. This caused many of the Republican politicians to redouble their efforts to appeal (sometimes pander) to non-Anglo White males in order to gain a majority. However, many of the positions that appealed to White Males—like immigration control and deportation of "illegals"—often offended many of the new growing demographic groups who voted in larger numbers against the Republicans. The money and manpower that was needed to try and produce a slim majority gave fewer and fewer resources to those Republicans who wanted to campaign heavily with the current minorities and to be majorities in order to get an even higher percentage to non-Anglo White Males. So each year Republicans were losing more and more ground with the very groups that were becoming a larger and larger voting bloc. Hence the "Death Spiral".
Ironically, for 100 years after the Civil War, it was the Democrats who tried to keep the Blacks from voting as until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt began to attract Negro votes, Blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican. In 1964 President Johnson, with bipartisan support overcame the Southern Democratic Filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. The Republican leadership, sensing the Southern Democratic Anger at the Democratic Party Leadership, implemented their Southern Strategy and embraced the most racist Southern Democrats if they would switch parties. Most did quickly. Soon, almost all the conservatives had abandoned the Democratic Party. This made the Republican Party more conservative and soon liberal Republicans were extinct and by the end or the 20th century, most of the moderates were gone. With almost all of the worst racists in the nation becoming Republicans and being warmly welcomed by the Republican leadership, almost all Blacks became Democratic voters. Then the racist conservatives went back to their time-tested mechanisms for suppressing the Black vote—only this time it was for the benefit of the Republican party. Soon the non-racist Republicans, realizing that minority voter suppression could be an effective mechanism to offset the greater minority fertility rate, the increased voting rate of the young, and the alienation of many unmarried women to the more conservative Republican ideology, got behind voter fraud prevention—a more acceptable purpose for activities that coincidently could make it more difficult for minorities to register and vote. Those activities were what Judge Debevoise was referring to in this quotation.
Pete Peña Gallego is an American politician who was the U.S. Representative for Texas's 23rd congressional district from 2013 to 2015. Gallego, a member of the Democratic Party, previously served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives from the 74th district beginning in 1991.
