Let’s just get this out of the way right up top: Republicans like white people. The Anglo-Saxon kind, anyway. They like them better than people of color; they like them better than people who might self-identify as white themselves, but are considered in the United States to be “other.” People of Latinx decent, for instance, or as they are referred to in the United States census, people of “Hispanic origin.” Republicans don’t like them as much as “non-Hispanic whites.”

How do we know this? Well, now we know this because one of the GOP’s top advisors is on record saying so.



For much of the last two years, civil liberties advocates, Democrats, and some people who might know a thing or two about voting rights have been warning that the Trump administration is trying to skew the 2020 census by adding a question that would ask the country’s residents if they are U.S. citizens, either by birth or foreign-born and naturalized. Adding such a question—which has not appeared on the decennial survey in any form since 1950—would, according to enfranchisement watchdogs, discourage some of Latinx heritage from responding to the population count, and would also lay the foundation for altering how U.S. law defines “one person, one vote.”



It’s an open debate about which would be the bigger crime—both would shift political power away from cities and away from states with large immigrant populations—but the administration and its defenders have denied that this is what they’re after, couching the need for such a question in process and civil rights terms. Last week, however, someone found the smoking gun.

It came in an odd form: a twist one might expect from a John Grisham book. The New York Times reported on Thursday that the estranged daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP operative who had “achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering,” had discovered some hard drives. Those hard drives—left in storage when Thomas died last year—revealed that Hofeller played a central role in the Trump administration’s decision to push for the citizenship question on the census. Why? No need to guess—Hofeller recorded it for posterity (or some other reason he took to the grave): Doing so “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”