Latino Voters Research Articles

DIVERSITY AND POTENTIAL: THE LATINO ELECTORATE IN THE 2016 ELECTIONS

IntroductionLatinos1 are the fastest growing ethnic minority group living in the United States today. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 removed immigration quotas and opened the door to a wave of immigrants from Latin America. From 6.3 million largely US-born citizens in 1960, the Latino popu- lation has grown to 55.3 million people - 17.4% of the total US population in 2014. The US census bureau estimates that by 2060, 119 million Latinos will reside in the United States and account for over a quarter of the population.2Accordingly, Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic group among eligible voters in the United States. An estimated 27.3 million Latinos - 11.3% of the potential US electorate - will be eligible to vote in the 2016 elections. Based strictly on voter turnout trends from presidential election years dating back to 2000, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund estimates that 13.1 million Latinos will cast ballots, which would mark a 17% increase in turnout and an 8.7% increase in the Latino share of vote since the last presidential election in 2012.3On February 29, 2016, American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies jointly sponsored the second Annual Latino Public Affairs Forum (ALPAF), which considered the potential impact of the Latino vote on the 2016 elections.4 Panel discussions were based around three primary questions:* What effect will Republican positions and rhetoric have on Latino voters?* Are Democrats building upon or losing their historic advantage among Latino voters?* Are there other wild card factors that might influence the impact of the Latino vote?Participating scholars, practitioners and advocates who spoke at ALPAF 2016 identified a number of key points to keep in mind when considering the potential impact of the Latino vote on the 2016 elections, including:* Latino voters are not a homogenous voting bloc. Not only can they trace their family heritage to various parts of Latin America, but they also reside throughout the United States. In 2016 they will be younger and better educated than past Hispanic electorates, and the issues they care about are issues that all US citizens care about. Indeed an increasing number of them are citizens by birth and, even for those who are naturalized rather than birth citizens, they think of themselves primarily as US citizens rather than as members of an immigrant community.* Immigration is a significant wedge issue that at times has served to mobilize the Latino community in opposition to nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Historically this has benefited the Democratic Party and disadvantaged the Republican Party. Given the shifting demographic makeup of the United States, ALPAF panelists were largely in agreement that to triumph in national elections the GOP must abandon the hostile rhetoric that has at times characterized its approach to immigration.* Education, the economy, and health care are the day-to-day policy issues most concerning to Latinos, and their positions on these issues do not map `strictly along conventional divides between conservative and liberal stances. While Democrats have generally done well among Latinos, ALPAF panelists noted that this segment of the electorate is concerned with issues that go well beyond immigration. On the Republican side, ALPAF panelists identified local and state elections as the most promising sites for developing a base of Latino support predicated on shared aspirations for economic opportunity and entrepreneurialism. It is in these sub-national electoral spaces that GOP candidates can eschew the national party's immigration issues and instead focus on concerns that may have a wider appeal within the Latino community.* Turnout remains the top factor limiting Latinos' political influence. …

Latinos and the New American Majority

Since the 1980s, every major election cycle brings the declaration that the Latino vote will be decisive in selecting the next U.S. President. But after nearly every election, the post-mortem is “not this time,” leaving many to wonder when and whether that “Hispanic” decade will ever come. While there are some hopeful signs, the general story is that the latent political power of Latinos goes underutilized and unrealized for a series of reasons.

Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts

Legislative redistricting alters the political and electoral context for some voters but not others, thus offering a potentially promising research design to study many questions of interest in political science. We apply this design to study the effect that descriptive representation has on co-ethnic political engagement, focusing on Hispanic participation following California's 2000 redistricting cycle. We show that when redistrictors draw legislative boundaries in California's 1990, 2000, and 2010 apportionment cycles, they systematically sorthigher-participating Hispanic voters into majority-Hispanic (MH) jurisdictions represented by co-ethnic candidates, biasing subsequent comparisons of Hispanic participation across districts. Similar sorting occurs during redistricting in Florida and Texas, though here the pattern is reversed, with less-participating Hispanic voters redistricted to MH districts. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in redistricting largely unknown or underappreciated in previous research. Ignoring this selection problem could significantly bias estimates of the effect of Hispanic representation, either positively or negatively. After we correct for these biases using a hierarchical genetic matching algorithm, we find that, in California, being moved to a district with an Hispanic incumbent has little impact on Hispanic participation in our data.

Latino Electoral Participation: Variations on Demographics and Ethnicity

Using the 2012 Latino Immigrant National Election Study, the 2012 American National Election Study, and the 2012 Current Population Survey, we document the demographic factors that influenced Latino (native-born and immigrant) voter turnout and participation in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate multivariable models of turnout and participation, including standard demographic characteristics (education, income, age, gender, marital status) as explanatory variables. Our findings indicate that the relationships between these characteristics and participation are much less consistent across these datasets than the conventional wisdom would suggest. Understanding these results likely requires survey data—with large sample sizes—including information on the resources (including education and income) available to immigrants in their home countries to better understand the lingering influences of immigrants’ experiences in their countries of origin on voter turnout.

Improving Ecological Inference by Predicting Individual Ethnicity from Voter Registration Records

In both political behavior research and voting rights litigation, turnout and vote choice for different racial groups are often inferred using aggregate election results and racial composition. Over the past several decades, many statistical methods have been proposed to address this ecological inference problem. We propose an alternative method to reduce aggregation bias by predicting individual-level ethnicity from voter registration records. Building on the existing methodological literature, we use Bayes's rule to combine the Census Bureau's Surname List with various information from geocoded voter registration records. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology using approximately nine million voter registration records from Florida, where self-reported ethnicity is available. We find that it is possible to reduce the false positive rate among Black and Latino voters to 6% and 3%, respectively, while maintaining the true positive rate above 80%. Moreover, we use our predictions to estimate turnout by race and find that our estimates yields substantially less amounts of bias and root mean squared error than standard ecological inference estimates. We provide open-source software to implement the proposed methodology.

Bringing race back in: black politicians, deracialization, and voting behavior in the age of Obama

Bringing Race Back In empirically investigates whether post-racial campaign strategies, which are becoming increasingly common, improve black candidates' ability to mobilize and attract voters of all races and ethnicities. In contrast to existing studies, this analysis demonstrates that black candidates who make positive racial appeals (for example, racial appeals that indicate that the candidate will either advance black policy interests or highlight the candidate's connection to the black community without attacking outside political players) not only perform better among blacks; they also improve their standing among Latino voters. Moreover, these appeals do not diminish white voter support. This finding counters conventional wisdom, which suggests that black candidates can succeed in majority white settings only if they distance themselves from the black electorate. Following President Barack Obama's 2008 success, both scholars and the popular media began examining how black candidates address race and racial issues in their campaigns, and scholars and journalists are now exploring whether black voters rally around black candidates who fail to discuss racial issues or distance themselves from the black community. Bringing Race Back In addresses both of these issues by using a wide variety of data sources and a number of sophisticated statistical techniques. The study utilizes content analysis of over two thousand newspaper articles on over thirty presidential, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections with African American candidates in combination with the quantitative analysis of state exit polls and U.S. Census voter surveys. In addition to its significant contribution to the scholarship on American politics, African American studies, campaigns and elections, and public opinion, the book also provides valuable insight for political practitioners who want to better understand how deracialized campaigns influence the electability of black candidates in the Age of Obama.

When Reports Depress Rather Than Inspire: A Field Experiment Using Age Cohorts as Reference Groups

A large field experiment sent mail to randomly selected low–turnout propensity, young Latino voters in Colorado during the 2008 presidential election. One treatment reported that 90% of young Latinos intended to vote in the election. A second treatment added the fact that only 20% of young Latinos actually voted in 2006. A third treatment provided the additional fact that 40% of older Latinos voted in 2006. Compared to the control group, the treatment reporting low levels of prior turnout decreased participation in the 2008 election. This unintended consequence of the campaign provides evidence of the effectiveness of descriptive social norms for purposes of electoral mobilization.

When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout

Immigration enforcement, and deportation in particular, has been shown to have social and psychological effects on the non-deported as well, but its political effects have gone largely unexamined. I use the staggered implementation of Secure Communities, an information-sharing program between the federal government and local law enforcement, to estimate the short-term effects of stricter immigration enforcement on Latino voter turnout. A difference-in-differences analysis indicates that enrollment in Secure Communities led to an increase in county-level Latino voter turnout of 2–3 percentage points. This relatively large effect appears due to greater Latino activism in the wake of program implementation, rather than individuals responding to particular police interactions. These results extend the existing literature on mobilization in response to threat, demonstrate that policies can have far-reaching and unexpected political implications, and suggest that the current immigration debate may have major consequences for the future makeup of the American electorate.

Precinct Closing Times in Florida During the 2012 General Election

Abstract The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act has spurred a search for measures of election performance that extend beyond race-based registration and turnout rates. We contribute to this endeavor by studying patterns of precinct congestion in Florida during the 2012 General Election. With precinct closing times as proxies for congestion, our study covers 5,302 total Election Day precincts in Florida. We show that there was tremendous variance in closing times in Florida on Election Day in 2012 and that precincts with greater proportions of Hispanic voters closed disproportionately late. This finding holds even controlling for the number of pollworkers per precinct. Broadly speaking, voting place congestion in the 2012 General Election appears not to have affected all Floridians equally, and most notably the post-Shelby electoral environment in the United States continues to reflect racial disparities. With the loss of the Voting Rights ...

The Effects of Candidate’s Ethnic Source Cue and Party Affiliation on Hispanic Voters’ Homophily Perceptions and Voting Intent

Because of the rapid demographic shifts in the United States (US), it is vital to examine how voters of different ethnic backgrounds perceive the ethnic source cue of a candidate in political advertising and how such perceptions influence voting behaviour. We used a post-test-only experiment to investigate the effects of candidate’s ethnic source cue and party affiliation on voters’ homophily perceptions and voting intent. A total of 335 college students from a large southwestern university in the US were recruited to take part in a post-test-only experiment. Results from multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) found that candidate’s ethnic source cue and party affiliation have significant main effects on voters’ homophily perceptions and voting intent. The moderating effects of voters’ own ethnicity, party identification and gender were also found to have statistically significant effects on voters’ homophily perceptions and voting intent. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Viable Republicans or fool's gold? The consequences of confusing Latino respondents with Latino voters

Consistent survey evidence supports the notion that Latinos are more ideologically conservative than their party identification would predict, making them ripe for party switching. However, when controlling for citizenship, generational differences, and policy attitudes, the partisan picture looks much different and much less optimistic for Republicans hoping to keep Latino voters “in-play.” Much of this puzzle is caused by a lingering confusion about Latino respondents versus Latino voters. Socially conservative Latino respondents are much more likely to be non-citizens and non-voters, providing them with little plausible electoral role. Previous research has underestimated this problem because scholars have been more interested in the acquisition of Latino partisanship, regardless of whether the respondents are viable voters or not. Using the 2006 Latino National Survey I demonstrate that ignoring citizenship and voting likelihood produces the misleading (but venerable) truism that conservative Latinos are available Republican voters.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place: the relationship between Latino/a's personal connections to immigrants and issue salience and presidential approval

The Obama administration has simultaneously marketed the prospect of providing undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship through comprehensive immigration reform and overseen mass deportations of mostly Latino immigrants. While it is clear that immigration policy was highly influential to Latino voters in 2012, it remains unclear how this political hypocrisy is being interpreted by Latino voters. As deportations have risen steadily during the Obama administration, there has been little research on how deportations and personal connections to undocumented immigrants have influenced the political attitudes of the Latino/a electorate. Using a nationally representative survey of 800 registered Latino/a voters administered in 2013, we explore the relationships between personal connections to undocumented immigrants and issue salience among Latinos as well as Latinos’ views of President Obama. This study finds that registered Latino voters who know deportees and undocumented immigrants are more likely to report that they think the President and Congress should act on immigration policy versus all other policies. Moreover, Latino voters who know someone who is undocumented are less likely to have favorable views toward President Obama. This study has implications for our collective knowledge of how direct and indirect connections to policy outcomes influence the political behavior of the highly influential Latino/a electorate and how political and policy outcomes will be influenced in the future when a much higher proportion of the electorate have such connections.

How support for Latino candidates encourages municipal reforms: evidence from the Local Elections in America Project

Scholarship rightfully emphasizes how electoral institutions affect minority representation and policy outcomes. But how do racial and ethnic environments shape institutions? We address this question by examining how support for Latino candidates affects attempts to modify rules regarding governance and elections. To do so, we rely on new data from the Local Elections in America Project and the International City/County Management Association. We find that the percentage of votes that go to Latino candidates, as well as changes over time in Latino vote share, predicts the probability that a reform effort will take place. Both relationships are nonlinear and suggest a high degree of strategic behavior on the part of elite actors within cities.

The US Congressional Immigration Agenda: Partisan Politics, Policy Stalemate and Political Posturing

In this paper, we examine patterns of congressional action and inaction on immigration issues in the USA over the past two decades, with attention to the impact of partisan polarisation and examples of the effects of public opinion on members' votes and the immigration agenda itself. Our analysis covers 391 immigration policy votes between 1993 and 2012. Analysing 10 Congresses allows us to test hypotheses about the effects of partisan polarisation on immigration policy-making in Congress over time. Congressional attention to immigration issues has waxed and waned, and relatively few bills were enacted in the period under study, although there were a considerable number of procedural votes on immigration measures. The relatively short list of enacted legislation over the 20-year period is due to the mechanisms that exist for stifling major change such as comprehensive immigration reform. On the other hand, in 2012 pressure for meaningful immigration reform increased as the result of powerful pro-reform coalitions, and the rising importance of a constituency of Latino voters.

Group-based appeals and the Latino vote in 2012: How immigration became a mobilizing issue

We evaluate a theory of campaign learning in the context of immigration and the 2012 Latino vote. Following events in Nevada and Arizona after the 2008 election and prior to the 2012 election, we argue and show that Obama's campaign team learned from several Democratic U.S. Senate campaigns in how best to mobilize the Latino vote on the issue of immigration. As a result, we argue, this campaign learning led to an increase in the Latino vote for Obama. To demonstrate this, we compare a group-based appeals model against a traditional vote-choice model, and show that variables measuring Latino Outreach had the greatest impact on the 2012 Latino vote – above and beyond party identification and other traditional vote-choice predictors.

Racial attitudes effects on voting in 2012: An introduction to the Symposium on the U.S. Presidential Election

This Symposium on voting in the 2012 U.S. presidential election emphasizes the effects of racial attitudes. While voting was highly polarized along racial and ethnic lines in 2012, the Symposium articles agree that racial attitudes were not the dominant factor in the election. The articles show that racial attitudes had a wide range of effects on the election, affecting attitudes toward the Democratic Party, toward Barack Obama as a person, toward Mitt Romney, and toward the Tea Party, with heightened effects among Hispanic voters, but racial resentment does not explain the drop in Obama's support among whites from 2008 to 2012. As in 2008, race was only a subliminal issue in the 2012 election. Racial resentment still exists among some whites, but its effect was smaller than expected during a recession. Still, racial attitudes should be expected to continue to affect voting in the post-Obama era.

Labor Unions and the Mobilization of Latino Voters

Despite large population gains, political observers commonly refer to Latinos as a “sleeping giant” because of low voter turnout. Conversely, steady declines in union membership have led some to label organized labor a “dinosaur.” Several unions have made special outreach efforts to Latinos to rebuild their ranks and improve Latino political participation. Incorporating insights from the Civic Voluntarism Model, we find union affiliation increases Latino voter registration and turnout, and disproportionately so in comparison with non-Latinos and in recent elections. We conclude that continued declines in union membership have significant implications for Latino political power and inequalities in political voice.

More expendable than slaves? Racial justice and the after-life of slavery

The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by the detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, the demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who kill, humiliate, and threaten immigrants with impunity. The public discourse on immigration is defined by racist anti-immigrant editorials, ballot measures, Congressional speeches, and public affairs “debates”, that are often more adequately described as hate speech. All these things contribute to an environment that definitely undercuts Latino voters and perhaps more importantly Latino non-voters including children, undocumented people, and people residing in detention. This stage of the struggle for immigrant rights reminds people of slavery, bondage, the convict lease system, and resistance to them as well as the direct action taken to mobilize after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and to press for Anti-Lynching legislation. It is not accidental that this toxic atmosphere reminds us of enslavement – because slavery has an afterlife of enduring gratuitous violence at its heart. Using Saidiyah Hartman's concept of the “after-life of slavery” and Dale Tomich's work on the “second slavery” this paper more fully articulates the relationship between slavery and myths about emancipation, on the one hand, and immigration from colonized places, on the other. Robust pan-ethnic coalitions must support immigration rights that are more keenly aware of their relationship to contemporary black survival, struggles for racial justice, and the role that race plays in US empire. The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by the detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, the demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who kill, humiliate, and threaten immigrants with impunity. The public discourse on immigration is defined by racist anti-immigrant editorials, ballot measures, Congressional speeches, and public affairs “debates”, that are often more adequately described as hate speech. All these things contribute to an environment that definitely undercuts Latino voters and perhaps more importantly Latino non-voters including children, undocumented people, and people residing in detention. This stage of the struggle for immigrant rights reminds people of slavery, bondage, the convict lease system, and resistance to them as well as the direct action taken to mobilize after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and to press for Anti-Lynching legislation. It is not accidental that this toxic atmosphere reminds us of enslavement – because slavery has an afterlife of enduring gratuitous violence at its heart. Using Saidiyah Hartman's concept of the “after-life of slavery” and Dale Tomich's work on the “second slavery” this paper more fully articulates the relationship between slavery and myths about emancipation, on the one hand, and immigration from colonized places, on the other. Robust pan-ethnic coalitions must support immigration rights that are more keenly aware of their relationship to contemporary black survival, struggles for racial justice, and the role that race plays in US empire. The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who humiliate, kill, and threaten immigrants with impunity, a racist public discourse that discourages electoral participation in the present and the future.

Religious influences on Latino ideology and vote choice: are Evangelical Catholics different?

This paper seeks to assess the impact of religious variables upon the political attitudes and actions of Latinos in the USA. Using the Latino National Survey, the largest survey of Latinos in the USA, this paper posits a theory of religion as a cognitive heuristic derived from an individual's personal belief or the external framing through the interactions within a church community. This is tested through an often overlooked religious subgroup of Evangelical Catholics within the Latino community. It finds that Latinos who identify as Evangelical Catholics and those who frequent religious worship are significantly more likely to vote for the Republican candidate and to self-identify as conservative.

Book Review: Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of Latinos on Network News, by Otto Santa Ana

Otto Santa Ana Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of on Network News. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 295 pp.Media audiences might have impression that news and commentary on U.S. Latino community is common. They might recall how mass media reported on 2012 Latino vote and how important it was for President Obama's reelection. addi- tion, they might have heard about Latino groups or from Latino voices in reports about immigration. Yet stories covering are less frequent than audience might think. And those of us concerned with media's biases and impact still know little about larger questions of how Latino community is represented in media, and how this representation affects society.These questions were addressed by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor of Chicana/o Studies, Otto Santa Ana in Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of on Network News. this book, he not only offered a clear and detailed picture of how Latino community has been represented in U.S. net- work news, but also suggested ways in which this representation can be improved in interest of accuracy and fairness. addition, he provided mass communication scholars and students a detailed description of how TV news content can be sampled and analyzed.The book is divided into two parts. The first presents analyses of specific news stories broadcast by ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN in 2004. his research into network coverage of Latinos, Santa Ana found that out of more than twelve thousand stories broadcast by networks that year, less than 1 percent address Latino issues. This is one in a hundred ratio that he alluded to in title of book.The author compared 2004 network news stories with other stories that they did not broadcast, finding that TV news often ignored Latino topics of importance. detailing Latino stories covered in newspapers and ignored by networks, Santa Ana demonstrated that the scarcity of television network news stories about is not due to absence of newsworthy items (p. 21). He found that stories about considered newsworthy were those involving dramatic political events, human calamity or natural disaster, among few other topics.In this analysis of broadcast news, Santa Ana first offered a general picture of net- work news coverage of Latinos, and then a detailed comparison of how a single story was covered on different networks and, in some cases, in newspapers. The thorough examination of these news stories provides some valuable insight as to failures and successes of TV news reporting. However, failures are more salient in this book. For instance, Santa Ana pointed to media's lack of general knowledge about Latino community, as evidenced in their failure to differentiate Latinos' heritage, especially for those who do not originate from Caribbean countries. More specifically, he explained that networks seldom differentiated Mexican, Central American, and South American origin, arguing that they operated with indifference or ignorance about diversity of Latino communities and individuals (p. 82). addition, he found that many stories were constructed without citing expert sources, which might have added informed insights to news being reported.Throughout book, what Santa Ana seemed most concerned about were effects of misrepresentation of in these highly influential news outlets. For example, he argued that media can publicly include and exclude a certain segment of population, concluding, In our nearly comprehensive study of a recent year of network news, single major finding is their gross disregard of Latinos (p. 15).In addition to network news' neglect of and their stories, he pointed to another negative effect of their coverage-the misrepresentation of members of this community. …