Latino Voters Research Articles

Free and Fair? The Differential Experiences of Voting Barriers and Voting Policies in American Midterm Elections

Abstract In this research note, we provide evidence about burdens people face when voting and who benefits from policies designed to mitigate those burdens. Using pre-and-post 2018 midterm elections panel surveys in Wisconsin, we show that Black voters estimate greater time getting to the polls and Hispanic voters report longer wait times once they are there. Regarding who takes advantage of policies purported to ease these burdens on voting—early voting, voting by mail, and absentee voting—our analysis reveals that that those facing temporal disadvantages are not the groups benefiting from these electoral policy affordances.

Los Amigos de Wallace: Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign and the bid to capture the Latino vote

Los Amigos de Wallace: Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign and the bid to capture the Latino vote

“The quiet revolution”: convenience voting, vote centers, and turnout in Texas elections

ABSTRACT Polling place consolidation makes administering voting easier but scholars question the effect on turnout. Vote centers (which consolidate polling locations) are theoretically less expensive to administer and convenient for many voters, but less is known about the impacts on specific racial communities or across election cycles. Using Texas’ registered voters’ list from the Secretary of State’s Voting Division, this paper uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to calculate estimated driving distances from each registered voter’s residence to a vote center location. The results show that the displacement of traditional precinct-level voting and the increase in distance between polling locations takes a greater toll on voter turnout for voters in midterm (but not presidential) elections and rural counties with more Latino voters. The implications demonstrate that vote centers can boost turnout in some elections but that the location of vote centers significantly effects turnout among ethnic minorities.

Háblame de tí: Latino mobilization, group dynamics and issue prioritization in the 2020 Election

Abstract What motivated Latinos to turnout in 2020 in the middle of a global health pandemic that has devastated their community financially, physically and mentally? How might we explain Latino support for each one of the Presidential candidates in the context of these crises? In this paper, we tackle these questions through an investigation of the factors that drove Latino turnout in 2020 and what might explain Latino favorability for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. To contextualize these findings, we compare these results to the 2016 election. We find that the most predictive factors of Latino turnout in 2020 were perceived group discrimination and mobilization efforts by campaigns and other organizations. We also find that Latino candidate preference in 2020 can be best explained by issue prioritization. Latinos for whom the economy was the most important issue were more likely to support Donald Trump. However, Latinos for whom COVID-19 and racism towards the Latino community were the top pressing political priorities were more likely to favor Joe Biden. These findings continue to shed light on the diversity and heterogeneity of the Latino vote and speak to the significance of outreach efforts by political parties, candidates and community organizations.

Book Review: The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History

Book Review: The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History

The Nuances of the “Latino Vote”: Toward the Unpacking of the Panethnic

This article reviews predictions made in an earlier piece entitled “Searching for the ‘Sleeping Giant’: Racialized News Coverage of Latinos Pre‐2020 Elections” (Gonzalez‐Sobrino 2020).

The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History

The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History

The integrative force of political institutions? Direct democracy and voter turnout across ethnic and nativity groups

Much has been written on the positive effect of direct democracy (initiatives, referendums) on voter turnout. However, we have limited knowledge about potential differential effects on voters belonging to various ethnic groups. The paper argues that depending on a group’s responsiveness to the political context, direct democracy can (dis-)integrate voters (from) into the electorate. Empirical analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement survey data, together with data on the absolute use of direct democracy across US states, corroborates this theoretical expectation, however lending more support for the disintegrating assumption. Frequent direct democratic elections further widen the negative voting gap between first-generation Asian voters and voters living in the US for three generations or longer, whereas they tend to diminish this voting gap for first-generation Hispanic voters. The disintegrative pattern for first-generation Asian voters remains even significant when excluding California from the state sample, yet not the integrative tendency for first-generation Hispanics. Additional analyses using alternative measures of direct democracy and voting, and applying statistical adjustments to address causality concerns, confirm the robustness of these findings, which shed light on the so-far underexplored (dis-)integrative potential of political institutions.

Has the Sleeping Giant Awakened in Kansas? An Overview of Latino Voting Behavior in the Sunflower State

The purpose of this study is to provide a contemporary look at Latino voting behavior in the state of Kansas. Data collected from the United States Census Bureau are synthesized with historical records to outline the growth of the Latino population in the state. This analysis describes the size of the Latino population of Kansas and specific Hispanic origins of Latino Kansans, both of which affect their electoral impact. The focus then shifts to examining pre-electoral polls, exit polling data, US Census estimates of voter registration and turnout, and additional relevant research from the 2018 and 2020 elections. The analysis reveals that the Latino (predominantly Mexican American) population in Kansas has grown exponentially in the past century (especially since 1970) and the "sleeping giant" is beginning to show signs of awakening in the Sunflower State. Most saliently, the current and future importance of the Latino vote in Kansas and nationwide is demonstrated by the fact that beginning in 2020, Latinos likely surpassed the African American share of the electorate in the US and may have already done so in Kansas. A second finding is that Kansas Latino voters reflect the voting behavior of Latinos nationwide. Lastly, when the Latino vote is taken into consideration alongside the African American vote in Kansas, this electoral coalition was decisive in the 2018 gubernatorial election and may tilt future close elections in the state.

The role of Hispanics in the political processes of the United States: the presidential election of 2020

The racial-ethnic composition of the U.S. is changing. The U.S. Hispanic community is expanding rapidly, strengthening its role in the political processes of the state. To carry out the study, comparative, statistical, historical analyses and formal modeling were applied. The article examined the composition of the U.S. Hispanic community, Latino voters, their political participation from 2000 to 2020, including the impact of Coronavirus pandemic on their voter turnout. The article analyzed key issues for Hispanics, investigated factors which define their party affiliation and identified the impact of their support on the outcome of elections from 1980 to 2020. A record number of Hispanic Americans voted in the 2020 presidential elections, playing a vital role in the outcome.

Latinx Agencies: Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants

Latinx Agencies:Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants Kris Klein Hernández (bio) Benjamin Francis-Fallon , The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava , The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump . New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin , Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Michael Fortner's 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: "black middle-class morality" and "members of the black silent majority" compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to "prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against 'hoodlums' instead of seeking reform of society." 1 Fortner's analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration's origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan's "war on drugs." 2 Fortner asked scholars to take "black agency seriously" when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance. 3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes. 4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner's reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class. 5 Yet Fortner's book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities, [End Page 599] how have people of color contributed to conservative, and at times, racist legislation? I start this review essay with Fortner's consideration of agency for a myriad of reasons. The three books under consideration all examine groups of people who have been understood within the lens of conservativism, traditional (white Euro-American) values, and at times, religious exclusion. Framing an analysis of these monographs through the lens of structural agency helps move past political and cultural attitudes to grapple with the everyday choices that Latina conservatives, Hispanic Republicans, and Pentecostal Mexicans have made over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Like Black Silent Majority, some of the content in these monographs illuminates the lives of people of color who helped forge federal policies that have been characterized as exclusionary or conservative. Benjamin Francis-Fallon's 2019 The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History is one of several recent introductions to post-1960s U.S. politics that detail how Latinos and Hispanics contributed to and ultimately helped shape American government. Francis-Fallon illustrates how scholars of political science and history must reconsider the role that Latinos played within the federal administrations of presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and even into the Bush eras (both George H.W. and George W.) In eleven chapters, the author demonstrates how Latino politics even "transformed the [U.S.] Republican Party as well," providing the reader a bird's-eye view into American politics (p. 5). In short, the monograph is a good entry into the growing field of Latinx political history, and will no doubt help spawn further regional studies into Latinx political science and Latinx history. I appreciate how Francis-Fallon begins his monograph with a quick overview into early Cuban, Mexican American, and...

Gingles Unraveled: Hispanic Voting Cohesion in South Florida

The Voting Rights Act protects the ability of racial and language minority groups to elect candidates of choice by prohibiting states and localities from diluting those groups’ votes when drawing electoral districts. The Fair Districts provisions of the Florida Constitution include a similar ban on vote dilution, plus further protections against diminishing (retrogressing) existing minority voting strength. A key element of proving vote dilution or retrogression is that the minority group votes cohesively. Historically, minority voting cohesion has often been uncontested or easily proven in VRA suits. But in South Florida, Hispanic citizens are voting less cohesively than they used to. This Article investigates the legal issues that arise when the assumption of cohesion unravels. First, this Article investigates to what extent the Hispanic community in South Florida is cohesive. It then proposes several alternative approaches to the vote dilution and retrogression framework to better align doctrine with the real-world conditions of voters and communities.

Latino Political Attitudes: Myths and Misconceptions.

The Latino population explosion is changing the electoral calculus in American politics. But Latino voters are often misunderstood, their heterogeneity underappreciated, the importance of their religious identities overstated, and their political clout ignored because of geographic concentration. In this article, we address these widely held misconceptions.

Voto latino y su influencia electoral en los Estados Unidos

El presente artículo analiza la importancia del voto latino en las elecciones presidenciales del año 2020 en los Estados Unidos, considerando el crecimiento de esta población en los últimos veinte años y su composición por grupos nacionales. Se documenta el crecimiento demográfico de este grupo producto de los flujos migratorios, en contraste con su tendencia para convertirse en ciudadanos norteamericanos que afecta su peso electoral. Finalmente, se describe su ubicación geográfica para considerar el peso electoral de esta comunidad en los “estados batalla” o “estados columpio” donde se define la mayor competitividad para la conformación del Colegio Electoral.

Voting by Mail and Ballot Rejection: Lessons from Florida for Elections in the Age of the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic and its concomitant need for social distancing have increased the attractiveness of voting by mail. This form of voting is nonetheless not a panacea for election administration in the time of a public health crisis, as a widespread move to ballots cast by voting by mail risks exacerbating existing inequities in mail-in ballot rejection rates across voters and jurisdictions. This motivates our examination of the roughly 9.6 million and 8.2 million ballots cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections in Florida, respectively, including over 2.6 million vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots cast in each. Using a selection model that analyzes all ballots cast and those VBM ballots not counted in Florida in these two elections, we find that younger voters, voters not registered with a major political party, and voters in need of assistance when voting are disproportionately likely to have their VBM ballots not count. We also find disproportionately high rejection rates of mail ballots cast by Hispanic voters, out-of-state voters, and military dependents in the 2018 general election. Lastly, we find significant variation in the rejection rates of VBM ballots cast across Florida's 67 counties in the 2018 election, suggesting a non-uniformity in the way local election officials verify these ballots. As interest in expanding mail voting swells as a consequence of the novel coronavirus, protecting the rights of all voters to participate in electoral politics requires a characterization of the correlates of VBM ballot rejection with an eye toward considering how disparities in ballot rejection rates might be rectified.

Review: Power Shift: How Latinos in California Transformed Politics in America, by George L. Pla and David R. Ayón

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Power Shift: How Latinos in California Transformed Politics in America, by George L. Pla and David R. Ayón George L. Pla and David R. Ayón. Power Shift: How Latinos in California Transformed Politics in America. Berkeley: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2018. 323 pp. Paperback $30.00. Louis DeSipio Louis DeSipio louis desipio is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies. His research interests include Latino politics, the process of political incorporation of new and formerly excluded populations into U.S. politics, and public policies shaping immigrant incorporation, such as immigration, immigrant settlement, naturalization, and voting rights. He is the author of Counting on the Latino Vote: Latinos as a New Electorate (1998) and coauthor of U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century: Making Americans, Remaking America (2018). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2020) 97 (3): 229–231. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2020.97.3.229 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Louis DeSipio; Review: Power Shift: How Latinos in California Transformed Politics in America, by George L. Pla and David R. Ayón. California History 1 August 2020; 97 (3): 229–231. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2020.97.3.229 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions.2020California History Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Do Voters Prefer Just Any Descriptive Representative? The Case of Multiracial Candidates

Although scholars of representation have examined variation in voter support conditional on shared demographic traits, we know little about how voters respond to candidates who belong to multiple racial categories. Multiracial candidates challenge how we think about and study representation. I theorize that multiracial categories provide mixed information about how well a candidate adheres to group norms of identity, resulting in a multiracial advantage across groups, but a disadvantage within groups. A conjoint survey experiment on 786 White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters and a separate analysis of support for a multiracial candidate in a real-world election support these claims. Thus, multiracial candidates have the advantage of building coalitions with voters from other groups, but they are disadvantaged when appealing to co-racials with strong racial identities. These findings demonstrate that future research on representation must engage multiracial elites.

Searching for the “Sleeping Giant”: Racialized News Coverage of Latinos Pre‐2020 Elections

Latinos are often thought as potential game changers in the political world in the United States. As the media discusses and analyzes the 2016 election and the path to the 2020 elections, narratives on the role of Latinos leading up to the 2020 election have started to emerge. In this article, I seek to examine how U.S. daily newspapers frame the role of Latinos in the 2016 election and leading up to the 2020 elections. Previous literature has focused on the racialized media coverage of African American politicians and the effects of racial priming; however, extant literature has not explored how Latinos are framed in U.S. media when it comes to electoral politics. Using a sample of newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, I found that newspapers largely focus on the demographic changes while operating under various assumptions about those changes. First, newspapers frame Latinos as more likely to vote for a politician if they are Latino. Second, they construct Latinos as a monolithic ethnoracial group that has simplistic interests in immigration. Third, Latino voters and African American voters are often lumped into the same category when discussing mobilization. These narratives continue a tradition of framing Latinos in monolithic ways, while also showing slight departures from previous narratives.

Latinos por Trump? Latinos and the 2016 Presidential Election

ObjectiveThis article examines the unresolved puzzle of the Latino vote in the 2016 presidential election. The National Election Pool (NEP) estimated that Trump received 28 percent, which surprised many given Trump's rhetoric, but it was just one of several estimates (ranging from 18 to over 30 percent).MethodsWe analyze the 2016 and 2012 American National Election Study, Pew's 2016 and 2012 National Survey of Latinos, the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and various media polls.ResultsThe data indicate that (1) Trump improved on Romney among key groups of Latinos (Protestants, low income, and the third generation) but lost ground among others; (2) Clinton underperformed Obama across multiple dimensions; and (3) many Latino undecided voters and third‐party supporters broke late for Trump.ConclusionTrump did better than expected among Latinos. This highlights an increasingly diverse Latino electorate and complicates our understanding of the political implications of demographic change.

A Look Ahead at the 2020 US Elections: The Role of Candidate Diversity in Political Participation

An increasingly diverse population in the United States has given rise to a growing body of literature that analyzes the causes and consequences of descriptive representation. Using individual-level representative data on registration and voting for the entire United States over the 2008-2018 decade, we find that diversity in the candidate pool promotes the registration and voting of eligible-to-vote individuals, particularly those belonging to the youngest generations of voters, those located in swing states, and growing minorities, as in the case of Hispanic voters. Given the changing electorate, increasing candidate diversity might prove crucial in promoting political and electoral engagement.