With Negroes banned from carrying weapons to defend themselves and successfully denied the right to vote, what power base Republicans had in Texas and the other Southern States effectively evaporated. The literacy tests and poll taxes also weeded out many of the poorer White families, but that was no matter. Those the Democrats wanted to vote were granted grandfather status. The rest were just Poor White Trash who could not be trusted to vote the way they were told, so losing their votes was a feature, not a bug. Texas voter turnout dropped from nearly 90% to just over 20%, allowing the Democrats to generate a solid lock on political power. Similar disenfranchisement tactics in other Southern States built a nearly insurmountable Democrat majority that would dominate national politics for a century.