Latino Voters Research Articles

Fluctuations of immigration salience: testing alternative explanations of policy salience among US Latinos

AbstractWhat makes immigration a salient issue among Latinos? We focus on immigration – one of the most pressing issues facing the United States (US) – and evaluate the factors that motivate immigration salience among Latinos over several election cycles. Although immigration policy has been linked with the Latino electorate over the period of our study due to high foreign-born rates and mixed-status families within this community, immigration policy has actually not been the dominant issue for the majority of Latino voters over this time period. Using survey responses from the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections, we test multiple theories of issue salience by exploring social, political and individual determinants of policy salience among Latino voters. We find that in addition to nativity, consumption of ethnic media and group identity are associated with reporting immigration as a salient issue. These findings provide a valuable addition to literature of public opinion on immigration and the origins of policy issue salience among ethno-racial minorities in the US.

Voter identification requirements, collective descriptive representation, and Black and Latino voter turnout

ABSTRACT Previous evidence on the racial and ethnic effects of voter identification (ID) requirements is mixed; some works find voter IDs decrease Black and Latino turnout, others find no effect, and some conclude they may increase non-white turnout. Though these findings seem contradictory, this study argues all are plausible under the right conditions, specifically, the (lack of) racial/ethnic collective descriptive representation. Collective descriptive representation, or the extent to which an individual is represented by multiple members of their racial or ethnic group in office, may mediate the impact of voter ID requirements by providing substantive and symbolic benefits that outweigh costs of obtaining IDs, and by providing ID information and social pressure through mobilization efforts. As such, it is likely that the discriminatory effects of voter IDs differ based on the extent to which voters are descriptively represented. Using voter surveys (2006–2018; N = 59 K Black, 54 K Latino) and a representative sample of national voter roll data (2012; N = 343 K Black, 279 K Latino), this study shows the effect of collective representation is larger in states with voter identification requirements, likely as campaigns attempt to offset the perceived negative effects of these requirements. However, this effect is only uncovered for Black, not Latino, Americans.

Email Mobilization Messages Suppress Turnout Among Black and Latino Voters: Experimental Evidence From the 2016 General Election – ADDENDUM

Email Mobilization Messages Suppress Turnout Among Black and Latino Voters: Experimental Evidence From the 2016 General Election – ADDENDUM

Ready or Not

Ready or Not Timothy Shenk (bio) By the time you read this, I will probably have given up on my New Year's resolution. My track record in this department is miserable, a catalog of broken promises to myself—books unread, exercises skipped, fingernails bitten. But I love the ritual anyway, along with the spirit of New Year's Eve. There's no such thing as a fresh start, but there can be moments when change breaks through our crusty routines. Which might be what's happening in American politics today. The overriding theme of our collective life since Donald Trump rode down that damned escalator in 2015 has been the toppling of guardrails, opening up the possibility of a radical break from the past—the kind that could either wipe out democracy or fulfill its grandest promises. Now, both options are still within reach, but neither seems quite so likely, at least in the short term. The populist right has taken a beating in two successive elections—first with Trump's loss in 2020, then with the broader rejection of MAGA in 2022. This time, failed Trumpish candidates were forced to accept defeat, flouting predictions about Republicans turning against democracy for good. Trump, of course, has made no such accommodation with reality. But he's limping into 2024 a diminished presence, leaving the GOP with two unpalatable options: either he takes the nomination and drags down the ticket again, or he loses and mounts a third-party bid that guarantees a Democratic victory. Neither scenario—Trump as albatross or suicide bomber—is guaranteed, but each one puts right-wing populists on the defensive. After months of anticipating a slaughter at the polls, the Democrats escaped a massacre in the midterms. But at the national level, Republicans carried the popular vote in the House of Representatives by a cozy margin, defying conventional wisdom that gerrymandering had given the GOP a structural advantage in Congress. Democrats won their stay of execution while losing their majority by carrying whiter, more affluent suburban districts at the same time that turnout for Black and Hispanic voters cratered. That leaves the party with a coalition that is whiter, wealthier, and still not large enough to stop Republicans from taking back the House. The underlying message of 2022, then, was the same as 2020: voters don't much like what they see in either party. That includes an eighty-year-old president with approval ratings in the low forties and the Democratic [End Page 4] stars of yesterday, which is why Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke have blown a combined $300 million on losing campaigns in the last four years. And, unfortunately, the distrust also extends to a democratic left that is stuck in the same deadlock as everyone else. The chapter in American history that ran from 2015 to 2021—the years that pushed both MAGA conservatism and democratic socialism into the mainstream—has come to a close. The same remorseless churn that tore through the truisms of the late Obama years is now ripping apart the cliches of the Trump era. Once again, change is coming, whether we're ready for it or not. Happy New Year. [End Page 5] Timothy Shenk Timothy Shenk is co-editor of Dissent. Copyright © 2023 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI)

Hispanics’ Perceptions of Candidates & Voting in the 2018 Texas Senate Election

ABSTRACT This study examines Hispanic voters’ use of campaign information to form beliefs about candidates, evaluate them, and make voting decisions. Accordingly, we test a model of Hispanic voting using survey data (N = 424) collected during the 2018 Texas senate election and featuring Anglo Democrat, Beto O’Rourke, and Hispanic Republican, Ted Cruz. Although pathways leading to voter support differed for the two candidates, results suggest that exposure to political communication guides voter perception of candidate attributes, such as the candidate’s ethnic identity, which in turn can influence vote choice. Taken together, findings highlight the contribution of campaign communication to Hispanic voters’ candidate preference and voting behaviour.

Latinos Shifting Republican?

Abstract This article utilizes the Latino Religions and Politics National Survey (n = 1,292) to provide a preliminary investigation into Latino religious and political identity and voting results in the 2020 Election. It provides important new data on the Latino vote lean by religion (Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic Charismatic), with special attention to the critical role that religion in general and Evangelicals and Pentecostals/Charismatics in particular may have played in helping to increase Latino Republican support for President Trump across the nation from 28 percent in 2016 to 32 percent in 2020 and increase his levels of support in Florida and Texas. While religion is just one of many important variables and factors that may help explain the recent if subtle Latino shift towards the Republican Party, it is nonetheless important.

The Impact of Police Killings on Proximal Voter Turnout

This paper studies how spatial proximity to pre-election police killings affects voter turnout. I argue that incidents of police violence have neighborhood-level effects. Nearby voters are more likely to learn about proximal killings than those further away. If perceived as unjust, police killings teach political lessons that reduce voters’ trust in government and political efficacy. In turn, this impacts voter turnout. Observing the 2016 presidential election, I test this theory using geolocated voter data and a difference-in-differences design with matched groups. I find that pre-election police killings reduce voter turnout by 3 percentage points in the killings’ one-mile radius. Space and race matter. Police killings reduce Black voter turnout by 5.9 percentage points in the killings’ one-mile radius, but Black voters one to two miles away from the killings are unaffected. However, police killings do not affect White and Latino voter turnout regardless of the distance.

Latinos, group identity, and equal opportunity on the 2020 California ballot

AbstractObjectiveRacial minority groups are often assumed to support equal opportunity policies, with most research focused on biracial contexts between Whites and Blacks. With a unique opportunity to study richer contexts from California's 2020 elections, we test whether Latino voters supported ballot measures associated with equal opportunity.MethodsUsing data on vote choice for Propositions 15 (raising commercial property taxes) and 16 (repealing prohibition of affirmative action) from a post‐election survey of California registrants, we use logistic regression to test whether Latino support for equal opportunity policies is higher than that of Whites.ResultsFor both propositions, while Latino support was higher than White support, it was not statistically different when controlled for partisanship.ConclusionThere is little evidence to suggest that California Latinos support equal opportunity policies more strongly than White voters. This lukewarm support may explain the fates of both propositions in the election.

Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting: From the 1965 Voting Rights Act to Present

After the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 and its protections were broadened ten years later to include “language minorities,” the law made the ballot more accessible to Black and Brown voters. Oliver Richomme explains that they would not merely participate in elections but became integrally involved in California's redistricting process, further complicating an already convoluted practice. Additional factors in the second half of the twentieth century made the drawing of lines on a map increasingly contentious.In Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting, Richomme argues that race and partisanship are closely linked to redistricting and that the political forces and events within a decade influence the subsequent decades’ redistricting process. To study the connection between race and partisanship and how redistricting changes over time, Richomme studies fifty years of California's history of redistricting. He claims that as the state's racial diversity continues to grow along with their demand for equitable representation (largely within the Democratic Party), redistricting reform will generate racial and partisan polarization. With no alternative to achieve racial fairness in electoral politics, the author insists that redistricting will persist as a “conundrum of American society” (p. 373).Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting starts to chart the evolution of redistricting in the 1960s. Chapter 1 explains how the courts in the sixties ended malapportionment in California, giving Black and Brown people in urban centers a stronger political voice. As these voters entered the political arena, they increasingly sought representation from candidates of their own background and so, instead of incumbent protection being a priority in the redistricting process, race rose to the top and became entangled with this political exercise. The second chapter describes how the California Supreme Court entered the redistricting process in 1971, adding another element to influence how boundaries were drawn. As California's Latino population grew between 1970 and 1980, both the Democratic and Republican Parties courted the Latino vote. With much at stake, chapter 3 shows how the Democrats strategically selected Black and Brown politicians to advance a redistricting model that increased the number of people of color elected within the party.By the late 1980s, Latino voters mobilized to advance their political gains and turned to the federal courts to redraw election districts while the Republican Party, in the 1990s, attempted to use direct democracy. Chapter 4 shows how Latinos successfully argued before the US District Court that Los Angeles County intentionally diluted Latino's voting power, leading to the creation of a majority district. The fifth chapter covers California's Republican Party, which spent millions of dollars, after losing political ground, to pass initiatives to make the redistricting process favorable to their party. The propositions failed and instead of appealing to Latino voters, Republican Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant measures pushed the Latino community away and toward the Democratic Party. These chapters clearly demonstrate the significant role the federal courts and direct democracy had on redistricting negotiations.In the last four chapters, Richomme demonstrates how divisions within the Democratic Party, passage of the California Voting Rights Act in 2001, and creation of the California Redistricting Commission in 2008 contributed to shifting the redistricting process away from the legislature to an independent citizens commission. The evolution of the state's drawing of election maps has mitigated partisan gerrymandering, but an independent redistricting commission still “needs to find the right balance between race and politics” (p. 371) writes Richomme.Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting succeeds in tracing California's history of redistricting. Richomme identifies key political events that moved both the Democratic and Republican Parties to continuously alter their approach to redistricting. And after the 1960s, using race to engineer majority-minority districts to achieve fair and equal representation seemed unavoidable. What is not fully explored is how the redistricting process has undermined the nation's supposed belief in color blindness. While both parties embraced the rhetoric of fair and equal elections, they remain grounded on a winner-take-all philosophy that is willing to use race as they see fit to win elections.This text builds on the growing scholarship that traces the total effects of the Voting Rights Act and its impact on redistricting process, particularly in California. As discussions about race and politics continue to dominate headlines, this important work can help people understand how these conversations will potentially shape the creation of new election districts.

The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman

Reviewed by: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman Kathryn Schumaker (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. By Sarah Coleman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook) Historians of immigration in the twentieth-century United States have long noted how restrictive policies created a class of unauthorized people who lived in the shadow of the law. At the same time, the 1960s spurred a revolution in individual rights, expanding the scope of claims all persons—including noncitizens—could make through the Fourteenth Amendment. Sarah Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America examines the people caught in between these two important developments, exploring the battles over the rights of unauthorized immigrants. This well-written and thoroughly researched book tells an often-surprising story that reveals how the states—and not the federal government—were frequently the laboratories of restrictive immigration policies in the late twentieth century. Coleman begins with Plyler v. Doe (1982), a landmark United States Supreme Court case that questioned the constitutionality of a Texas state law that allowed school districts to charge tuition to students who could not prove their legal status. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include a constitutional right to education. Could Texas charge tuition to unauthorized families or exclude them from public schools entirely? The first two chapters examine how these questions vexed the Carter and Reagan administrations, where officials saw unauthorized children as sympathetic figures, but also recognized that immigration [End Page 449] was a hot-button issue with voters. Though unauthorized immigrants were a convenient political target for members of state legislatures—especially in their inability to respond at the ballot box—officials were wary of punishing children. The Supreme Court eventually ruled the law unconstitutional in 1982. But the concerns about childhood that restrained some policymakers and judges in Plyler did little to deter efforts by state legislatures to target adults. Amid press warnings that linked rising unemployment rates to unauthorized workers, states passed laws criminalizing the employers who hired them. The next two chapters examine how this issue scrambled traditional partisan divides. The Chamber of Commerce and many Republicans opposed a federal law because it targeted business owners. Latino advocacy groups recognized that the law risked the possibility that, fearful of prosecution, employers could refuse to hire any identifiably Latino person. Ultimately, these concerns contributed to the passage of the 1986 federal immigration law that included (largely unenforceable) sanctions for employers, but also prohibited discrimination on the basis of alienage and national origin in hiring. The final chapters focus on the 1990s, when both political parties lurched rightward on immigration. The fifth chapter examines how immigration again came to the fore amid an economic downturn, culminating in Clinton-era welfare reform that ended the ability of noncitizens to access public benefits, including cash assistance and food stamps, regardless of their legal status. The final chapter explains how states paved the way for new restrictive immigration policies, leading Congress to ultimately buttress the authority of state and local officials to carry out immigration enforcement in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The Walls Within is a story of lawyers, judges, policy advisers, senators, and other elites as they made immigration law and policy in courtrooms and offices. Unauthorized immigrants existed abstractly for these people, especially for politicians who sought to use [End Page 450] immigration policy to woo conservative white voters (in the case of Clinton) or appeal to Latino voters (as Reagan did). The book, therefore, has less to say about how these legal and policy changes affected immigrants' everyday lives. Nonetheless it offers a clear policy and legal history of the fraught issue of immigrants' rights in the modern United States, especially in its contributions to the growing scholarship on federalism and immigration. [End Page 451] Kathryn Schumaker KATHRYN SCHUMAKER is a historian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s and is at work on a new book project about interracial families in...

The Conditional Effects of Latino Candidates and Partisanship on Latino Turnout

Does the presence of a Latino congressional candidate increase Latino turnout? An ongoing debate exists regarding the mobilizing effect of Latino candidates on Latino turnout. However, scholars on both sides of this divide have, as of yet, failed to detect the critical role that a Latino candidate’s partisanship may have on Latino turnout. Using national turnout data and leveraging the exogenous shock of redistricting between 2010 and 2012, we find evidence that while the presence of a Latino congressional candidate increases turnout among Latino co-partisans, the presence of Latino congressional candidates who do not share the partisan identity of Latino voters depresses turnout. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of the reinforcing power of shared partisan and pan-ethnic identities in empowering Latinos to vote.

Finding the missing link? The impact of co-ethnicity, pan-ethnicity, and cross-ethnicity on Latino vote choice

Surveys show that Latinos more strongly identify with their ethnic identities (i.e. national origin) than their pan-ethnic identity as “Latino/Hispanic.” Given the primacy of ethnic identity among Latinos, what impact does shared ethnic versus pan-ethnic identity between candidates and voters have on Latino vote choice? Studies suggest that an “identity-to-politics link” exists among Latinos; however, we believe the measurement of “co-ethnicity” should be reexamined. Using a survey experiment embedded in a module of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we randomize the ethnic, pan-ethnic, and partisan identification of a fictional male congressional candidate in a contest against a white non-Hispanic candidate to examine the role of shared ethnic identity on Latino vote choice. We find that Latinos, regardless of candidate partisanship, more strongly support co-ethnic candidates relative to candidates with whom they share a pan-ethnic identity. We also find that Latinos are significantly more supportive of a cross-ethnic Latino candidate compared to a pan-ethnic Latino candidate; and that Latinos are more likely to cross partisan lines to support a co-ethnic candidate. These results not only suggest that there exists a Latino “identity to politics” link, but that the extant scholarship has underestimated the size and scope of this electoral connection.

Email Mobilization Messages Suppress Turnout Among Black and Latino Voters: Experimental Evidence From the 2016 General Election

AbstractEmail can deliver mobilization messages at considerably lower cost than direct mail. While voters’ email addresses are readily available, experimental work from 2007 to 2012 suggests that email mobilization is ineffective in most contexts. Here, we use public data to reexamine the effectiveness of email mobilization in the 2016 Florida general election. Unsolicited emails sent from a university professor and designed to increase turnout had the opposite effect: emails slightly demobilizing voters. While the overall decrease in turnout amounted to less than 1 percent of the margin of victory in the presidential race in the state, the demobilizing effect was particularly pronounced among minority voters. Compared to voters from the same group who were assigned to control, black voters assigned to receive emails were 2.2 percentage points less likely to turn out, and Latino voters were 1.0 percentage point less likely to turn out. These findings encourage both campaigns and researchers to think critically about the use and study of massive impersonal mobilization methods.

Battling the Hydra: the disparate impact of voter ID requirements in North Dakota.

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

Hispanic Americans in the 2022 midterm elections

The article analyzes the factors that impact the role of Hispanic Americans in the 2022 elections. Comparative and discourse analysis, as well as the statistical and economic method, were applied. The article identifies reasons for their lower voter turnout compared to other racial-ethnic groups and the factors influencing its increase. Hispanic voters will shape the electoral trends of non-white America in the future. Among their group, there is a tendency to shift toward Republicans. The article discusses their key concerns and advantages of parties in these areas.

Key Factors Influencing the Hispanic Vote in the 2020 United States Election

The Hispanic vote in America has traditionally leaned more Democrat in the United States. Appealing to the Hispanic vote as a political tactic has been popular ever since Kennedys Viva Kennedy campaign to reach out to Mexican Americans, which formed a large part of his victory. This trend will only continue as Hispanic-Americans are the fastestgrowing demographic in America. This paper analyzes the influence of four factors on Hispanic voting in the United States to try and create hypotheses to predict on what considerations must be made when predicting the Hispanic vote.

Key Factors Influencing the Hispanic Vote in the 2020 United States Election

Key Factors Influencing the Hispanic Vote in the 2020 United States Election

Key Factors Influencing the Hispanic Vote in the 2020 United States Election

Key Factors Influencing the Hispanic Vote in the 2020 United States Election

Minmaxing of Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding and Geography Level Ups in Predicting Race

AbstractRacial identification is a critical factor in understanding a multitude of important outcomes in many fields. However, inferring an individual’s race from ecological data is prone to bias and error. This process was only recently improved via Bayesian improved surname geocoding (BISG). With surname and geographic-based demographic data, it is possible to more accurately estimate individual racial identification than ever before. However, the level of geography used in this process varies widely. Whereas some existing work makes use of geocoding to place individuals in precise census blocks, a substantial portion either skips geocoding altogether or relies on estimation using surname or county-level analyses. Presently, the trade-offs of such variation are unknown. In this letter, we quantify those trade-offs through a validation of BISG on Georgia’s voter file using both geocoded and nongeocoded processes and introduce a new level of geography—ZIP codes—to this method. We find that when estimating the racial identification of White and Black voters, nongeocoded ZIP code-based estimates are acceptable alternatives. However, census blocks provide the most accurate estimations when imputing racial identification for Asian and Hispanic voters. Our results document the most efficient means to sequentially conduct BISG analysis to maximize racial identification estimation while simultaneously minimizing data missingness and bias.

“What Are We?”: Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Election

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.