Quotes about Minority Voters

John Lewis

In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.

Steven Hahn

[There are] coordinated efforts across the country to intimidate and suppress the votes of racial and ethnic minorities .... Hostile officials regularly deploy the language of “fraud” and “corruption” to justify their efforts much as their counterparts at the end of the 19th century did to fully disenfranchise black voters… Although our present-day tactics are state-issued IDs, state-mandated harassment of immigrants and voter-roll purges, these are not a far cry from the poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements and discretionary power of local registrars that composed the political racism of a century ago. That’s not even counting the hours-long lines many minority voters confronted.

At that time a number of state legislatures all changed their state voting laws to require citizens who try to register to vote to have documentation of various kinds and or obtain special documentation. These were generally possessed by upper class and educated people but not in as large proportions by lower and working class people. To obtain the documents and register if things like original birth certificates were not possessed, the citizen had to lose much of a day’s work and travel some distance. The burden existed on most lower class people and especially the minorities. The courts nullified some of these discriminatory requirements for voter registration, but many were allowed. The rationale was to prevent voter fraud and yet there were almost no cases of voter fraud in the entire country. While the requirements were racially discriminatory, they were also socioeconomically discriminatory. By coincidence, or perhaps not, every state that added these requirements had a Republican controlled state legislature AND a Republican Governor. Despite the effort to suppress Obama and Democratic voters, the effort backfired. Minorities and especially Blacks were so outraged that Jim Crow voting suppression had returned that they made a huge effort to register and get out the vote and Blacks voted in a much larger proportion than historical and well over 90 percent voted for Obama who won the election handily.

Nina Turner

There should be no surprise that forgotten America, no matter their ethnicity, because we see that Mr. Trump was able to get Hispanic voters, African American voters. Oh my God, the majority of, of, of the women voters that he was able to amass, even though he was painted as the other, my party, the Democratic party, did not listen to the voices of the forgotten America.

Mitt Romney

To win the nomination, you speak to people who vote in Republican primaries. And they tend not to be millennials or minorities... When I win the nomination and show up at a black church, they say, 'Where have you been Mr. Romney?'

Sadiq Kahn

I welcome an arms race for minority ethnic voters. This will ensure we all raise our game.

Joy Reid

When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.

John Fund

Given that Mr. Kerry is clearly exaggerating what happened to minority voters in the 2000 election in Florida, maybe we should wait for him to provide evidence of what he is alleging in 2004.

Barry Goldwater

We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 or 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.

Christine Pelosi

When Proposition 8 passed in California, some were quick to blame minority voters, some of whom had voted for both President Obama and Proposition 8; however, these claims were later debunked as being overstated.

Martin Luther King Jr.

More and more, the Negro vote is becoming the decisive power in National politics. The Negro vote is the balance of power in so many important big states that one almost has to have the Negro vote to win a Presidential election.

Jeff Sessions

[Donald] Trump is going to appeal better to African Americans, Hispanics, and others than previous Republican candidates because he's talking about what they want: a fair chance to have a better life economically.

Mitt Romney

The weakness that our campaign and that I had is we weren't effective in taking my message primarily to minority voters.

Karen Hughes

It is somewhat perplexing that fellow Republicans would attack a popular conservative governor of a very conservative state whose overwhelming re-election proved a conservative philosophy can erase the gender gap and attract a record number of minority voters while remaining true to conservative principles.

Barack Obama

The senators know it's important to win statewide to have Hispanics and other immigrant populations supporting them.

Cory Booker

I'm a competitor. And I don't want to say, hey, just because this person is a woman or this person is a minority, that they're not going to get the white male vote.

Dickenson Richards Debevoise

Minority candidates continue to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. As long as that is the case, the Republican National Committee, and other Republican groups, may be tempted to keep minority voters from casting their ballots, especially in light of the razor thin margins of victory by which many elections have been decided in recent years.

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.

George P. Bush

I've reached out to independents and minorities that have traditionally voted Democrat but that are conservative on a lot of questions. We talk to young people, folks that typically aren't voting on a consistent basis. I'm proud of that.

Minority Voters Quotes