Political segregation mirrors residential segregation along party and racial lines

Evidence

Residential segregation tends to be reflected in and reinforced by what might be called “political segregation.” African-American voters tend overwhelmingly to vote for Democratic Party candidates. Of the roughly 200 Republican members of the US House of Representatives, none is black and the three Hispanics are all Cuban American. Of the more than 3,500 Republican members of state legislatures, just 16 are black and 13 Hispanic. Democrats other than white, by contrast, number approximately 70 US Representatives, and 20 percent of Democratic members of state legislators. In recent Presidential elections Republicans accordingly have taken to strategies of discouraging blacks from voting, going so far as to intimidate elderly black people from showing up at polling booths. Thus uniformed state troopers in swing states such as Florida have asserted themselves visibly in the doorways of polling stations to remind African Americans of the historical horrors of casting a vote, and older black people, registered Democrats all, have been visited at home by investigators on trumped-up charges of voter fraud. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 469

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to scholarship on voter suppression and the partisan geographic sorting literature (e.g. Bill Bishop’s ‘The Big Sort’). — connects to: Municipal boundary lines perpetuate racial and class segregation — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1349
• QUESTION: The claim that state troopers in Florida doorways were deployed to intimidate black voters — is this widely documented or contested? Worth verifying against contemporaneous news reporting.