Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-TX-23) was defeated in the court-ordered runoff yesterday by Democratic Congressman quondam/Congressman futuris Ciro Rodriguez.
While the defeat must partly be ascribed to Bonilla's inability to improve upon or even maintain his share of the vote from the Nov. 7 primary, the predominant reason for Bonilla's loss was the court-ordered redrawing of his district to increase Hispanic representation. Abigail Thernstrom at the time reviewed the incoherence of the Supreme Court's reasoning (or lack thereof) on the matter of minority civil rights expressed in terms of a court-guaranteed right to have the "correct" party represent them, even when, as in Bonilla's case the "wrong" party's standard bearer is a member of the putatively unrepresented minority.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Bonilla Goes Down, Rodriguez Up
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2 comments:
Blaming it on redistricting (or to be more precise, on SCOTUS' overturning one small part of DeLay's mid-decade gerrymander) fails to explain why Bonilla did so much worse amonng Hispanic voters than he did in 2004:
"Based on the election results, it appears Latino voters - even among his
previous supporters - turned on him and supported ex-Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D). In
Maverick County (95% Hispanic), Bonilla won a miniscule 14% of the vote. By
contrast, Bonilla carried the county in his comfortable 2004 win, and President
Bush even performed respectably here in 2004 when he won 40%"
http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/12/did_the_latino.html
Hey, keep it up, right-wingers. By 2008 you'll have Hispanics as heavily Democratic as African Americans.
The point of the above post is that the redistricting required additional Latino voters (regardless of their demographically calculable partisan impact) to be put back into the 23rd District proved to be an insuperable obstacle to Bonilla's re-election.
Arguing that Bonilla's alienation of Latino voters was proximately fatal does not refute this. The anonymous poster argues that Latinos sank Bonilla, but doesn't acknowledge that the importance of the Latino vote was magnified by the Court's arbitrary requirement that the number of Latinos in the district be boosted.
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