How Illegal Immigrants Give Democrats the Edge in Close Elections
A recent Politico analysis revealed that an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants could give Democrats victory in 2016 through their concentration in big electoral vote states like California and New York. The 538 electoral college votes that determines a presidential election are mainly based on the number of U.S. House seats allocated from each state’s total population in the last census. Total population is presently defined to include illegal immigrants and other non-citizen immigrants. This is in part due to how the courts have defined the “whole number of persons in each state” according to the 14th amendment, a definition which is being challenged indirectly in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Evenwel v. Abbott.
Politico, in an article entitled: “Illegal Immigrants Could Elect Hillary Clinton,” reported that American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projected that Democrats would lose four electoral votes if non-citizens are not counted as part of a state’s population. Using citizen-only population, Steinhorn shows that California would lose five electoral votes, with New York and Washington each losing one electoral vote. “These three states, which have voted overwhelming for Democrats over the last six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes.” GOP stronghold Texas would also lose two and narrowly Democrat Florida one for a net loss of four for the Democrats in these five states with a higher than average non-citizen population.
Steinhorn also shows that using citizen-only population data “the following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania… Accordingly, for analytic purposes, three of the states that would gain electoral votes are Democratic. The remaining seven are fairly put in the GOP column for a net gain of four.”
Read the article “How Illegal Immigrants Give Democrats the Edge in Close Elections” on sfppr.org.
