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Monday, November 19, 2012

Demographics of the Illinois General Assembly

Illinois State Capitol

Ed McClelland over at the Ward Room notes the racial and gender breakdown of the Illinois General Assembly:
In the House, only 24 of the 71 Democrats elected this year are white guys. There are 31 women, 18 African-Americans and six Latinos. (Some of these categories overlap, obviously.) Of the 47 Republicans, 36 are white guys, and 11 are white women.

In the Senate, white guys do a lot better. They make up half the 40 Democratic senators elected this year. The Democrats have 10 African-Americans, four Latinos and 11 women.

Of the 19 Republican senators, 15 are white men and four are white women.

So overall, white men make up 39.6 percent of the Democratic legislators in Springfield -- almost exactly their proportion in the state as a whole -- and 77.2 percent of the Republicans.
Hat-tip Capitol Fax and there are already 21 comments to the posting there already. One more quote from Ward Room I do wonder what this means:
David Wasserman, House editor for the Cook Political Report, told CNN that the racial and gender polarization in Washington means that “both parties are distilling to their core, and they are living in parallel universes.” 

That seems to be true in Springfield as well, except than in Illinois, the Democrats’ universe is a lot bigger.
Well I can see that politics right now are quite polarizing today!

1 comment:

Gerard said...

See, this is the problem with government. I don't know if you've ever read Human Action, but Ludwig Von Mises distills it to its essence. When the state is omnipotent, then everything becomes balkanized, i.e. each group or tribe seeks to get as much possible for its band, whether it's affirmative action, welfare, agricultural subsidies, etc... The only thing that results is more friction between different ethnic, religious groups and nationalities, etc...

This is the conundrum for the left. The fact that there are more immigrant groups it can draw votes from is a good thing from their perspective, but it sows the seeds of its own destruction as each group battles for "its share" of the pie, i.e. wealth confiscated from taxpayers.

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