LATINO GROUP IDENTITY, SOLIDARITY, AND VOTE CHOICE
The literature on African Americans has posited an important effect of group consciousness or identity on both the formation of political preferences and the likelihood of acting on them.14 Michael Dawson’s concept of “linked fate” is the perception on the part of African Americans that their individual experiences are likely to be closely tied to those of others in their group. For instance, an individual who perceives that all African Americans are doing better and believes that she will thus do better too is exhibiting a sense of linked fate. Dawson goes on to identify the “black utility heuristic,” meaning essentially that, because of their sense of linked fate, many African American voters make judgments about candidates and policies based on what they believe is good for the group overall.
Do Latinos have such a sense of group solidarity? And if they do, is it associated with their voting choices? An expanded ANES in 2008 afforded us a chance to directly test this possibility among Latinos. Pan-ethnic solidarity, as a political resource, is a more problematic notion for Latinos than it is for African Americans precisely because of the national-origin and generational variations we discussed earlier. It is not immediately clear that Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Dominicans, and Cubans should necessarily perceive one another as common members of a single group.15 Latinos have some characteristics that tend toward commonality, including the Spanish language and their Roman Catholic tradition, history of Spanish colonialism, and increasingly overlapping media and entertainment worlds. On the other hand, their unique national origins, their unique racial histories, and their different experiences in the United States might undermine any sense that the group of all Latinos is (or should be) a unified political actor.16
The scholars who conducted the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) in 1989 saw only limited evidence of pan-ethnic consciousness, a result suggesting that pan-ethnic identification was very unlikely to be much of a political resource. More recent work, however, has documented a substantial increase in pan-ethnic identification.17 Moreover, there is growing evidence that expressions of pan-ethnic political commonality and linked fate are associated with increases in a variety of “desirable” political activities, including knowledge, sophistication, and propensity to register, to vote, and to engage in civic association.18 Curiously, pan-ethnic identification is also associated with more positive assessments of associations between Latino interests and the interests of African Americans. By extension, then, we expected that stronger Latino pan-ethnic solidarity would be associated with votes for Obama.
And that in fact turned out to be the case. Based on our model estimates, moving from the lowest to the highest levels of self-reported group identity decreased the probability of a Latino citizen’s vote for McCain and increased the likelihood—by over 13%—that that citizen’s vote would go to Obama. Those Latinos who more strongly expressed a sense of commonality and linked fate with other Latinos were significantly more supportive of Barack Obama’s candidacy. Solidarity among Latinos has a political effect.
RACIAL ATTITUDES AND THE 2008 LATINO VOTE
Finally, we examine once again the highly charged claims that Latino citizens are ambivalent about voting for black candidates, as articulated by the Clinton campaign’s Latino pollster Sergio Bendixen. John McCain was unique among 2008 Republican candidates: his extensive contact with Latino community leaders and the perception of him as a Latino advocate on immigration made a GOP vote in his case (let alone a simple abstention) easier to swallow. If racial sentiment was strong, negative, and politically relevant for Latinos, that should have been borne out in the 2008 data.
Even if the trope of black-brown conflict does not seem to hold water, Latinos are not free of prejudice or discriminatory views toward African Americans. The racial histories of Latin American societies are varied and complex, and there is a literature suggesting that Latino views of African Americans are reminiscent of white views.19 So the claim that racial attitudes might dampen Latino support for Obama was not actually that far removed from similar claims about white voters.
Comparisons between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites on three different measures of racial sentiment are reported in Table 6.1. The first is a simply battery of stereotypes capturing old-fashioned, negative beliefs about African Americans. We use the comparison of the evaluations of blacks and whites on the lazy-to-hardworking scale and on the intelligent-to-unintelligent scale.20 The second measure is a four-item index we call “racial resentment”: designed to measure antiblack attitudes, this index uses ambiguously worded items that racially motivated respondents can respond to truthfully without fear of identifying themselves as prejudiced. Two of the items are sympathetic to African Americans, and two of the items are critical.21 The third measure is the affect misattribution procedure (AMP), which estimates the unconscious presence of racial sentiment in a respondent’s judgments.22
Latinos’ mean responses on stereotype measures, the AMP, and the negatively valenced items in the racial resentment index are statistically indistinguishable from those expressed by non-Hispanic whites—that is, there is no meaningful difference in how the two groups score on average. The only distinctions are on the positively valenced items in the racial resentment index: Latinos are less likely than whites to reject these sympathetic statements, and this difference alone drives the difference we find in the overall index. Overall, it is fair to say that while Latino views may be slightly more generous toward their black fellow citizens, Latino beliefs about African Americans look a lot like white beliefs.
TABLE 6.1Comparing Measures of Antiblack Affect or Racial Sentiments between White and Latino Respondents, 2008
Source: American National Election Study, 2008.
Note: RR = racial resentment; AMP = affect misattribution procedure.
The big question, however, was this: would Latinos vote based on racial attitudes in the same way that white voters did? Latinos may in fact hold stereotypic views of African Americans similar to those held by whites, but we expected that the effect of these views on their voting would be smaller or absent altogether. Research on Latino voter preferences has repeatedly shown an electorate that is more sophisticated than widely believed and that Latinos vote consistently with their issue preferences (on school vouchers, abortion, gun control, and other matters), are less swayed by symbolism than previously believed, and are not significantly affected by “social” appeals like anti-abortion and anti-gay policy positions.23 However, did Latinos’ racial sentiments cloud their judgment in 2008?
The results of our analysis clearly demonstrate that no black-brown divide existed in 2008. In other words, racial resentment, or animus, while not altogether absent among Latinos, did not play a meaningful role in shaping their preferences in the 2008 election. Among whites, antiblack attitudes were a significant predictor of voting against Obama, so antiblack attitudes in this group signaled a decrease in the probability that they would vote for Obama that was quite robust. Just 25% of whites holding the most negative views on the racial resentment scale voted for Obama, compared with 90% among the least resentful. Yet for Latinos this variable appears to have carried no particular political salience—that is, it was not statistically significant in their vote choices with a black candidate running for president. This relationship is best depicted in the graph of predicted probabilities found in Figure 6.5. Although the slope is positive, it is not statistically significant, and in fact the confidence bounds widen noticeably around those with conservative racial beliefs.
FIGURE 6.5Marginal Effects of Racial Resentment on Probability of Voting For Barack Obama in 2008, Latinos and Non-Hispanic Whites
Source: Based on statistical estimations by Gary Segura and Ali Valenzuela.
We also addressed the topic of group relations and racial attitudes between Latinos and blacks by including a variable about antiblack attitudes to see whether this contributed to voting against Obama among Latinos, and als
o among whites. Unsurprisingly, Latinos who agreed that African Americans and Latinos have political and economic issues in common were significantly more likely to vote for Obama. Coupled with our earlier finding that Latinos with a high sense of shared linked fate were also more likely to support Obama, the data give us strong reason to reject the idea that Latinos and African Americans are at odds with each other over political representation, or that Latino racial attitudes are so extreme as to prevent a coalition.
There can be little doubt that racial sentiments continue to play a role in American elections, and 2008 was no exception. Despite the election of an African American president, the evidence remains strong that racial sentiments remain an important covariate of party attachment and, beyond, predicted support or opposition to the Obama candidacy and even strength of views on him. Obama’s share of the white vote was considerably less than half, diminished vis-à-vis Kerry’s in several states, and extremely small in a number of deep-south states.
Curiously, and in contrast to claims by pundits and scholars alike, the evidence suggests that racial thinking played a significantly weaker role in the voting decisions of Latinos in 2008 than in the voting decisions of whites. When weighed against other factors, racial sentiments do not appear to have entered into Latinos’ evaluation of the Obama candidacy.
SO LATINOS SUPPORTED OBAMA—TO WHAT EFFECT?
Despite constituting the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos typically receive only superficial attention from candidates and the media when it comes to presidential politics. The peculiarities of the Electoral College, a state-level winner-take-all system, has led Latino politics research to focus on explaining Latinos’ negligible influence on the outcomes of presidential elections. The political climate changed in 2008 when mainstream media outlets and campaigns, not just advocacy groups, began repeatedly to describe Latinos as the single most important voting bloc in presidential elections. For example, Arturo Vargas, head of the prominent National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), bluntly proclaimed in a 2007 op-ed, “Latino voters will decide the 2008 election. The Latino vote is positioned as the power punch that may deliver the knockout blow in 2008.”
The noted Latino politics expert Rodolfo de la Garza of Columbia University vehemently countered this narrative and related media hype, however, by arguing that “the Latino vote is completely irrelevant. The myth was created by Latino leaders who wanted to convince politicians nationally about how important Latinos were.”24 Latino voters were heavily concentrated in uncompetitive states such as California, Texas, and New York, de la Garza pointed out, and too small in number to matter in contested states.25 These diametrically opposed interpretations from recognized experts would leave observers and scholars puzzled in 2008.
The truth is that it is difficult in presidential elections, if not impossible, for any single group of voters to claim a unique influence in determining the outcome. Despite this difficulty, interest groups, advocates, the media, and scholars spend considerable time debating afterwards whether one group or another tipped the scales. In 2000 it was argued at length that votes for the independent candidate Ralph Nader “cost” Vice President Al Gore the election and that “soccer moms” ensured a Bush victory.26 In 2004 it was repeatedly said that his gains among Latinos influenced Bush’s reelection and that evangelical “values” voters turned out in great numbers to ban marriage for same-sex couples and secure Bush’s second term.27 During the 2008 presidential contest, it was the turn of the Latino vote, which received more hype than ever. Latinos’ strong preference for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary fed speculation that Latinos could make or break the election. The Associated Press reported—and others agreed—that low Latino support for Obama could doom him in key states, whereas large gains in the Latino vote could lead to a Democratic victory in Republican-leaning states such as Florida, Nevada, and Colorado.
On the one hand, it is true that the Latino electorate cannot meet the empirical threshold necessary to back up claims that they single-handedly determined Obama’s victory. The fact that Obama defeated John McCain by 365 to 173 in the Electoral College doesn’t suggest that it was a close contest. And in any event, the “did the [fill in the blank] group cast the deciding vote?” question is shortsighted—very few segments of the electorate could meet such a daunting standard of influence. Moreover, there is more than one way to measure group influence in an election. Post-election tallies are informative, but they can be too narrow an interpretation of “influence.” All this being the case, and despite Obama’s significant margin of victory, we argue that Latino voters were still quite influential throughout the campaign, from the drawn-out primary to Tuesday, November 4, 2008.
We use the 2008 election here as a basis for a new framework to evaluate Latino influence beyond vote tallies. We have identified three dimensions to use in measuring Latino influence in electoral politics:
1.Demographics: Measured as coethnic group size and growth rate in the state
2.Electoral volatility: Specifically, changes in registration rates, partisan preference, or turnout compared to prior contests
3.Mobilization: Measured as the media coverage and resources devoted to courting Latino votes
Using these three broad categories, we assess a wide array of publicly available data to create an overall index of Latino influence in each of the fifty states. This approach moves beyond the zero-sum definitions of political clout that neglect these consequential realms of influence.
A newly mobilized or fast-growing electorate can alter the issue agendas of campaigns and debates, cause campaigns to divert resources from other groups, make formerly safe states competitive and competitive states safe, reshape the platforms on which nominees run, and even alter the electoral behavior of other groups in society.
In the 2008 presidential contest, fourteen states were clearly identified as swing states that would determine the election outcome, leaving thirty-six states, because of their lopsided partisan leanings, in the “unimportant” category. On election day 2008, 120 million votes were cast, and of those, 40 million came from the fourteen battleground states—accounting for 33% of all votes. So it should come as no surprise that a majority of all voters—white, black, Latino, Asian—reside in noncompetitive states.
Our analysis shows that Latinos were very influential in seven swing states: Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. Further, we find evidence of extensive Latino mobilization, though it led to a lesser overall impact, in Arizona, Ohio, California, Texas, Missouri, and Minnesota, foreshadowing a greater degree of influence in these six states in 2012 and beyond.
Just four years earlier, Republican president George W. Bush had won close to 40% of the Latino vote overall, as well as winning the Latino-heavy states of New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida. For Obama to win in 2008, some or all of those states had to swing, and the Latino vote was vital.
CAN “GROUPS” REALLY INFLUENCE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS?
Ordinarily, the unique structure of presidential elections, from primaries to the general election, diminishes mass influence on electoral outcomes. Most voters reside in noncompetitive general election states, and the fact that very few minorities reside in early primary states limits their ability to influence the early stages of presidential politics. But 2008 was different: Latino influence was palpable well before the first contest of the primary season took place. In 2004 and 2008, George W. Bush received a well-publicized, slightly higher-than-average share of the Latino vote.28 The actual change in the Latino preference for Republicans was quite small substantively: Bush’s receipt of about 7% more of the vote than usual from 8% of the electorate made a difference of just 0.56% in November 2004. But in an era of close presidential elections, half a percent was enough to motivate the Democratic Party to alter the primary calendar to include a Latino-influence state early in the season. Nevada was the third state to h
ost a Democratic nominating contest. Including this Western state with a growing Latino electorate early in the process was a strategic decision. The party wanted to shore up Latino support, which they feared was softening, and enable Latinos to have more influence in determining the party nominee. These changes to the primary election calendar were the catalyst for a larger Latino influence in the general election as many competitive Democratic contests continued to highlight the Latino vote as a key demographic.29 When the general election campaign season arrived, the record turnout in the primaries, in addition to their experience with Latino electorates in their home states, made both the Obama and McCain camps keenly aware of the Latino vote.
It is a truism that turnout peaks when elections are decided by a small margin.30 It stands to reason, then, that the political environment should be evaluated prior to election day so as to identify the factors that will contribute to creating the perception of a competitive race. States can be characterized as competitive when certain conditions apply, foremost among them being: pre-election polls indicating a very close race; media reports framing the closeness of the contest as important to the outcome; and candidates spending millions on advertisements and voter outreach in the state. When these conditions hold in a state, its voters are influential because the political environment is competitive. Such conditions are set well before a single ballot is cast.
Once the votes are tallied, however, even seemingly competitive contests may yield lopsided margins, for a variety of reasons. One party may have made a stronger outreach effort, for example, or conducted a superior get-out-the-vote drive. So even if the election result appears noncompetitive, the state may continue to be important during the actual campaign because of the significant resources and attention invested there.
Latino America: How America's Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation Page 10