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Madison, Wisconsin (AP) — Black and Hispanic voters in Wisconsin’s largest city can’t openly applaud Republican tactics that Republican election commissioners believe have lowered minority voter turnout. , says it publicly acknowledges the conservative strategy that has been in place for years.
“He proudly tells Hispanic and Latino voters, ‘I am your enemy. I am actively using my position of power to undermine your voting rights.'” Group for immigrants.
Election Commissioner Robert Spindell, who served as a fake Republican elector for former President Donald Trump, did not back down. He said he did not support restraint.
Mr. Spindell said he was simply promoting Republican efforts to counter the liberal message in Milwaukee, home of the Democratic Party. The key to Democrats winning statewide is the high voter turnout there.
Spindell, a former Milwaukee elections official, said in an email newsletter that Republicans “can be particularly proud” of the drop in voter turnout in Milwaukee during the 2022 election, calling it “overwhelming.” We’ve seen significant declines in black and Hispanic neighborhoods,” he said.
Spindell, who is white, cited midterm results by district that showed lower overall voter turnout in predominantly black and Hispanic Milwaukee neighborhoods compared to the last midterm elections in 2018.
It’s not clear how the Republican effort in Milwaukee has affected the behavior of black and Hispanic voters, and Spindell’s emails detail a number of strategies aimed at these communities. Among them is the “Negative Black Radio Commercial”.
Two ads, funded by the Wisconsin Republican Party and obtained by the Associated Press, hit Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers and Lieutenant Mandela Burns, who is running for U.S. Senate.
In one ad, a harsh-sounding narrator claims that Evers and Burns “failed miserably” to protect their families from “violence, mayhem, and death.” Elsewhere, the same narrator says that Evers is helping students of color perform better in school, or public school students using taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools. He stated that he did not support this.
Wisconsin has long faced the nation’s largest performance gap between white and black students. Most of them live in Milwaukee.
Evers won re-election, but Burns narrowly lost to Republican Senator Ron Johnson. Spindell said in an email that voter turnout in Milwaukee is down 37,000 from where he was in 2018.
Barnes, who is black and is from Milwaukee, declined to comment on Spindell’s remarks.
Wisconsin does not record the race or ethnicity of its voters, and John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University School of Law, doubts about drawing conclusions about racial voting patterns from such limited information. Johnson’s own analysis of election results also showed that voter turnout declined in 2022 in black-majority, Hispan-majority constituencies, but the latest demographic data According to the 2020 Census, the city of Milwaukee disputes the claims it makes. Outdated information about the voting age population.
Regardless of actual turnout, Neumann-Ortiz said he sees a lack of enthusiasm among Hispanic voters. She attributed the Wisconsin legislative map to the problem. The map shows a strong Republican majority in both houses of Congress in states where voters elected Democrats as governors, attorneys general and secretary of state.
“Disillusionment has lowered the level of participation,” says Neumann-Ortiz. “If they really want to make inroads, they will stop trying to undermine the ability of Latinos to vote.”
Milwaukee’s black community organizers echoed that sentiment in their 2022 campaign trail, disaffected and mobilizing young black voters while working to elect Burns the state’s first black U.S. Senator explained that it is difficult to
Polls also show that black support for the Republican Party increased nationally during the interim period.
Still, Milwaukee advocates say years of Republican-led efforts to make voting more difficult have helped voters in Democratic-majority Milwaukee, where Black and Hispanic residents make up about 60 percent of the population. is a really thinly veiled attempt to silence the
Under former Republican Governor Scott Walker, Republicans in Wisconsin have worked hard to implement the voter ID proposal and limit the days and hours of early voting. The conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court last year outlawed ballot drop-boxes and enacted other Republican priorities when it said voters couldn’t have their ballots returned to them by someone else. Did. Courts also have limited clerk’s ability to fill in ballot information, such as incomplete addresses.
Neumann-Ortiz called the effort “death by 1,000 cuts to create a barrier.”
Kyle Johnson, political director of the Milwaukee-based Black Leadership Organization for Communities, said in a statement, “Election after election left us as a black organization and black people in some areas. We have to explain why voter turnout is declining: “Many of us have been sounding the alarm about what nefarious tactics are being used to suppress voters, and Spindell’s comments make me wonder. It reinforces what we already knew.”
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