The American People: Can you Guess Who They Are?
Voter Suppression 2022 — Home on the Range Part 1 — The Numbers
Senator John Barrasso, the Republican senator from Wyoming, understands the American people. Perhaps better than any of us, and certainly better than I do. He does, after all, represent them. I can only comment on them.
John said, “The American people know exactly what president Biden, and Senator Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi are trying to sell. People aren’t buying it.”
If I was black, I might think: “Does he mean his people? This guy represents exactly what is wrong with arrogant privileged white pricks like him. Let’s do some simple math on “Americans.”” Here’s this guy coming from a state where he represents not even 600,000 people, or, in his words, “Americans.” The population of California is 39.5 million. California is about 12% the population of the US, or one in every 8 Americans. Wyoming has about 000.175% the population of the US.
Whites are 92.5% and blacks are 1.3% in Wyoming. Whites are 35% and blacks are 6% in California. There are 78,000 blacks in Wyoming. There are 2,340,000 blacks in California. There are 4 times as many blacks in California as there are people in Wyoming. Yet you claim speak for us? One senator from Wyoming’s vote counts 65 times that of one senator from California proportionally in representative power. He is 65 times more powerful.
White conservative voters in Wyoming are 65 times more powerful than liberal whites in California
Of course, I’m not black. So, my outrage is misplaced as I don’t know what a black person might feel, and I certainly don’t want to think all blacks feel the same or vote in a block. Instead, the math shows just numbers, no feelings.
But it does show obvious conclusions. White senators, predominately male, from midwestern states like Wyoming or other ones under 3 and half million (I wanted to get Utah in there as it’s part of the Midwestern clump of red on the map) have disproportionately small numbers of and percentages of blacks. The whites don’t have to depend on the black vote to win, or even worry about a misstep since they don’t have, too.
Blacks are more of an afterthought since there as always been few relatively and never a threat physically or politically, unlike in the South. When these cowboy senators speak from all Americans, they don’t think of blacks and can remain as dismissive as the bad senator from Wyoming.
In fact, if just Californian blacks were a state, they would be bigger than Nebraska, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming. That’s 6 red states, 12 senators, enough to crush any vote where race is an issue.
The blacks in California marginally have a piece of the vote of Senator Alex Padilla (D- CA). Since whites, Asians, and Latinos make up 81 percent of the state, he can reliably pull from them to keep winning without the black vote. Of course, he is for it, as it costs him little politically and he probably believes in voter suppression being a real thing anyway.
But Senator Barrasso [pronounced Bear-Ass — OH?] goes on: “Democrats don’t need a message reset. They need a better agenda for the nation. But we’re about to vote on tonight has nothing to do with the priorities of the American people.” Sure, the white Americans don’t have the same priorities, since they already have his vote.
It’s clear to emphasize looking at the numbers and percentages that the minority white Republican senators are restraining blacks, if not callously or ruthlessly like in the South, then at least dismissively like in South Dakota ro Wyoming, and that blacks are not represented in their mindset when he says, “the American people.” What’s also clear is that he is directly echoing Mitch McConnell’s “Freudian slip” that blacks vote the same as “Americans” vote.
What they both mean is clear: blacks don’t count when they mentally calculate their victory, their senate voting power can stay intact.
