California took a third of these new citizens. As non-Latino white registration fell by one hundred thousand in California in the 1990s, one million Latinos registered.56 Now 16 percent of the California electorate, Hispanics gave Gore the state with hundreds of thousands of votes to spare. “Both parties show up at swearing-in ceremonies to try to register voters,” says Democratic consultant William Carrick. “There is a Democratic table and a Republican table. Ours has a lot of business. Theirs is like the Maytag repairman.”57 With fifty-five electoral votes, California, home state of Nixon
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