One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The demographic composition of the parties almost dictates it. The Pew Research Center notes that in 2016, while 86 percent of Republican voters were white, those who were African American had stayed at 2 percent since 1992. Meanwhile, Democratic voters were much more diverse: 57 percent were white, 21 percent were black, 12 percent were Hispanic, 3 percent were Asian, and 5 percent described themselves as mixed race or their race as “other.”45 The racial demographics of the parties, therefore, carry over into the ways that the district lines are constructed. In Georgia, when two Republican incumbents barely won reelection in 2016 because their platforms did not resonate with the growing African American population in the Atlanta suburbs, the GOP-controlled legislature simply redrew their districts, moving the black neighborhoods over to a Democrat and extracting her white constituents to Republican districts.