Latino America: How America's Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation

by Matt Barreto, Gary Segura

  The political dynamics between African Americans and Latinos have been the subject of extensive academic research. Social science research and election results show that African Americans and Latinos share similar issue preferences and broad ideological positions, owing to their similar socioeconomic standing.15 Sometimes this commonality can yield real or perceived competition for scarce economic and political resources, such as public-sector jobs or even elective office.16 Others have found that, in the South and in politically competitive contexts, Latinos can hold negative racial stereotypes about blacks, perceive greater commonality with whites than with blacks, and see their own political gains in zero-sum terms.17

  There is an important caveat to these studies: research focused on mass opinion among Latinos that does not account for political context or leadership can lead to erroneous conclusions. Generalizations overestimate the scope of Latino antipathy and underestimate Latino willingness to vote for black candidates, even in the face of numerous election results to the contrary.18 Studies on Latino racial resentment typically examine the presence or magnitude of negative attitudes (antipathy measures are the dependent variables), but they spend less time considering whether those opinions are reflected in Latino voting behavior.

  The claim, then, that Hillary Clinton’s support was somehow evidence of Latino unwillingness to support African American candidates was wrong on its face. Latino voters have demonstrated strong support for African American candidates in the past, across a variety of circumstances. Black and Latino leaders, activist groups, and voters frequently bridge attitudinal divides in state and local elections. Harold Washington, David Dinkins, Wellington Webb, and Ron Kirk were all elected mayor of a major American city with Latino vote shares from 70% to 80%. More recently, African American mayors have won a majority of the Latino vote in elections against white women: in Cleveland’s 2005 mayoral contest, Frank Jackson won an estimated 65% of the Latino vote, defeating Jane Campbell. In Inglewood, California, Roosevelt Dorn won more than 70% of the Latino vote to defeat Judy Dunlap. Congresswoman Maxine Waters has regularly won over 80% of the Latino vote, sometimes even running against Latino opponents. Waters herself stated in a National Public Radio interview that “somebody said that Latinos wouldn’t vote for a black. They vote for me all the time. There are any number of instances where our districts are majority Latino . . . and they vote over and over [for blacks].”

  Among the African American candidates who have enjoyed the support of Latinos is none other than Barack Obama himself. Prior to running for the presidency, Obama had a solid record of success with Latino voters in Chicago and Illinois. In his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2000, Obama won more Latino votes than African American votes when he ran against incumbent Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary. In 2004, when Obama ran for the US Senate, more Latinos voted for him than for his Latino challenger, Gerry Chico, in the Democratic primary. A few months later, Obama went on to win 84% of the Latino vote in the general election. These three statistics were regularly ignored in news stories that reported on Obama’s alleged “Latino problem.” The claim that Latinos would not vote for Obama was easily refuted: it had no basis in reality.

  The theory of racial animosity among Latino voters was thoroughly examined in an analysis of racial attitudes and voting behavior among Latinos and non-Hispanic whites in the 2008 primary and general elections.19 We will turn our attention to those findings in the next chapter when we consider the historic Obama-McCain race. In the election in which the first African American nominee appeared on the presidential ballot, would antiblack prejudice significantly shape Latino voting attitudes? As far as the primary went, the claim had little empirical basis and was not a significant factor in the Clinton-Obama drama.

  LATINO SUPPORT FOR HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA, 2007–2010

  From the outset, Hillary Clinton enjoyed substantial support from all corners of the Democratic base. Throughout 2007 and well into the 2008 primaries, her nomination was repeatedly described as inevitable. It is not surprising that Clinton scored repeated two-to-one vote margins or better among Latinos in nearly every state. As she continued to win large majorities of the Latino vote throughout the primary season, political observers and professionals reported these results as validation of Obama’s “Latino problem,” one steeped in racist attitudes in the Latino community. But Clinton’s victories were the product of an established relationship with Latino voters, an effective Latino strategy, and her overall strengths as a candidate who had dominated the news just months before. Looking at changes in Latino voter opinions over time, it is evident that Obama’s problems were lack of name recognition and a very strong competitor—not Latino racism directed at him.

  Close examination of the trends from 2007 to 2010 provides a more complete picture of Latino opinions about the candidates and the factors contributing to their vote choices.20 The campaign for the Democratic nomination began in early 2007, Hillary Clinton made it official in January, and Obama announced the following month. Over the course of that year the share of Latinos with no opinion of Obama actually increased, from 35% to 43%. Among foreign-born Latinos, that figure was especially high: nearly 60% had no opinion of Obama in 2007. This is important to note in light of claims that singled out foreign-born Latino voters as especially driven by racial resentment to vote against Obama.

  Obama’s unfavorable ratings were quite consistent from 2007 to 2010. From when he was a relatively unknown political figure to the middle of his first term, Obama’s negative ratings remained at 20% of Latino registered voters. This is virtually the same share of the Latino electorate that also regularly identifies as Republican. When the primary campaign charged ahead in 2008 and dominated the news, the share of Latinos with no opinion about Obama dropped off sharply, and Obama’s favorability ratings rose from a mere 41.3% in August 2007 to 66.2% in February 2008. These strong positive trends took shape despite the fact that Obama continued to lose the Latino vote to Clinton by wide margins in state after state.

  Hillary Clinton’s favorability trends are remarkably different from Obama’s. From the start of her campaign in March 2007 until the middle of 2008, Clinton rated 80% or better among foreign-born Latinos. Across the entire Latino electorate, fewer than 10% had no opinion of her, and her unfavorable share was nearly the same as Obama’s. During the entire period when Obama kept losing the Latino vote to Clinton, his unfavorable ratings were no worse than hers. By the time Clinton conceded and officially exited the race in June 2008, Obama’s favorability ratings had risen to levels nearly as high as Clinton’s.

  As Obama became better known, his positive rating with Latinos also increased. He won 70% of the Latino vote in the general election, and his approval rating with this constituency peaked at 81% in April 2009, after 100 days in office. If Latino votes for Clinton had been racially motivated against Obama, then the share reporting no opinion of Obama would have eventually fallen into the unfavorable category. In reality, the opposite occurred: the share of Latino voters with no opinion about Obama steadily decreased as the campaign season grew older, and Obama’s positive ratings increased.

  BUILDING AND SUSTAINING THE LATINO FIREWALL

  As the primary season progressed both Clinton and Obama poured tens of millions of dollars into Latino-specific outreach and mobilization efforts.21 Clinton’s Latino-targeted campaign emphasized her long-standing ties with the community. English and Spanish ads referred to her as nuestra amiga (“our friend”), suggesting an almost personal relationship of long endurance.22 In front of Latino audiences, she cited her personal history working on voter registration in Mexican American neighborhoods and highlighted her familiarity with Hispanic culture.23 During the primary she picked up endorsements from more state and local Latino elected officials than any other candidate in either party.

  The Clinton campaign had an especially focused Latino strategy.24 Her campaign began with a Latino woman, Patti Solis Doyle, serving as campaign manager. A La
tino specialist pollster was brought onto the team too. Early on, Clinton locked up endorsements from influential Latino elected officials and political figures, then deployed them to mobilize voters. Former Los Angles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa served as a campaign cochair, making many appearances on Clinton’s behalf. Former HUD secretary and San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros appeared in campaign ads and at events across the country. Labor leader Dolores Huerta personally endorsed Clinton in 2007, then delivered the endorsement of her union, the 26,000-member United Farm Workers of America, in 2008.

  Obama’s Hispanic effort was far less sophisticated. There were few Latino elected officials at any level of government who had not already endorsed Clinton. Obama had few direct lines to the Latino local officials who could have been crucial to tapping into grassroots allies. Congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL), one of the few Latino elected officials to endorse Obama early in the campaign, criticized the Obama campaign’s Latino effort as “insufficient, poor, and ineffective.” With amigos like that, it is no wonder that Obama had difficulty dispelling the notion that he had a “Latino problem.”

  TABLE 5.2Candidate Favorability—Latino Voters in the 2008 Primary in Nevada, California, and Texas

  Source: Latino Decisions primary surveys, 2007, 2008.

  Because there are fewer substantive differences in primaries, the candidates’ personal qualities become more decisive factors. In this respect, Clinton held a tremendous advantage because of her familiarity to Latinos. She was well known and well liked. Throughout the campaign her team made sure to incorporate a Latino strategy. Never assuming that Clinton’s so-called Latino firewall would endure, her campaign actively worked to register, motivate, and mobilize Latino voters at every opportunity.

  LATINO VOTERS IN THE 2008 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY

  One way to establish that votes were pro-Clinton rather than anti-Obama is to look more closely at favorability ratings and vote choices specifically among Democratic primary voters. Latino Decisions surveyed Latino Democratic primary voters in California, Nevada, and Texas prior to their state party election; the survey data from these three states allow us to consider the factors that shaped Latino voter opinion during the primary contest.

  In most cases favorability ratings are highly correlated with vote choice.25 In this particular contest, however, Latino voters had a positive view of both candidates, even though they consistently voted for Clinton at much higher rates. Obama was rated favorably by 50% of the sample Latino primary electorate, but only 13% said that they would cast their primary ballot for him. In a California exit poll conducted by Loyola Marymount University, 93% of Latinos said that the country was ready to elect a black president, even as Clinton won nearly 70% of the California Latino vote.26

  It is important to account for the factors that explain why Clinton performed so well with this ever-growing constituency; it is not enough to establish that race was not a factor in Latino voter decisions. Our quantitative data analysis of Latino Democratic primary voters and qualitative evaluation of the Clinton and Obama campaigns provide a theoretically consistent explanation for her success with Latino voters: Clinton’s strong performance among Latino voters was rooted in her extraordinary name recognition within the Democratic electorate and effective Latino outreach effort.

  We turn first to the survey data collected in three states at different points in the primary season.27 These data show that name recognition and ethnic cues were predictive of both favorability evaluations and vote choice. As Table 5.2 reports, 76% of all Latino Democratic primary voters had a favorable impression of Clinton, and 48% had a very favorable view. The majority of Latinos, 50%, also had favorable views of Barack Obama, though his “very favorable” number was only 19%. His newcomer status worked against him—rather high proportions of Latino primary voters had never heard of him just weeks before their state election. California’s and Nevada’s Democratic Latino electorates knew little about Obama: 44% either had never heard of him or had formulated no opinion of him. In mid- to late 2007, when the candidates were heavily focused on intraparty debates, Obama was nowhere near being able to fill arenas and stadiums. Once his campaign became a national phenomenon, however, Latino voters learned more about him and his “never heard of” number dropped off substantially. By late February, when the contest had reached a fever pitch, both Clinton and Obama were commanding audiences that numbered in the thousands several times a day on the campaign trail. At that point, only 3% of Latinos in the Texas Democratic electorate were unfamiliar with Obama, and 66% had a favorable view of him.

  TABLE 5.3Primary Vote Choice among Latinos in Three States

  Source: Latino Decisions primary surveys, 2007, 2008.

  Obama’s increasing popularity did not come at Clinton’s expense. Her standing with Latinos never wavered: the fact that three out of four Latino primary voters liked Hillary Clinton gave her an incredible advantage no matter how much time passed on the campaign trail. Table 5.3 reports Latino primary voter preferences in the three states surveyed. Early in the campaign and later in the season, Clinton maintained her commanding share of the vote: 58% in Nevada, 64% in California, and 60% in Texas.28 Obama’s favorability ratings outpaced his vote share throughout the primary season. Even though his favorability ratings within the Latino community had increased by over twenty points over the course of a few months, his vote share with Texas Latinos was a mere 22%. Obama performed best among voters who were following the election closely: he picked up only 6% of the vote among those not following the election, but his share more than doubled to 15% among those closely following the race. Obviously, an unknown candidate is at a significant disadvantage in relation to a well-known, well-liked candidate.

  ISSUES AND ETHNIC TIES

  To assess what motivated Latino support for Clinton and Obama, we tested several favorability and vote choice models. We found that policy issues mattered differently for Latino voters than we might have expected; we also found that ethnic cues were especially important in shoring up Clinton’s base support. Neither immigration nor health care had a statistical relationship with favorability or vote choice, and her nuanced support for the Iraq War was actually a winning issue for Clinton. Obama had supported the states in issuing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, and Clinton had been associated with health care issues since her efforts during her husband’s administration.29 Still, the fact that these issues did not matter, but ethnicity did, makes sense for a couple of reasons. Both candidates advocated large-scale overhauls of the health care system and supported immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship; their plans differed only in the details. Clinton’s team, however, developed a strategy with the specific goal of appealing to Latino voters via ethnic appeals.

  Only one issue, the Iraq War, registered as a significant factor in candidate support: Latino Democratic primary voters who thought the Iraq War had not been worth fighting were significantly more likely to support Clinton over Obama. This may be somewhat surprising considering that Obama had consistently opposed the war, while Clinton agreed with the initial decision to send troops to Iraq and only later became a critic of the war. It is likely that her evolving position was not a political liability because it closely tracked the national temperament on this issue. Like most Americans, Latinos supported the war the first two years after the United States invaded Iraq. As the years went by support waned among the general public as well as among elected officials.30

  By all demographic indicators, including income, education, age, gender, language preference, and nativity, Hillary Clinton outperformed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary on favorability and vote choice. She ran especially strong with Latinas and working-class voters earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year. Despite having a foreign-born father, Obama did not capitalize on this potential connection with Latino voters: naturalized citizens were more likely to side with Clinton. Obama’s best showing, though it lagged far behind Clinton, was with college-educated Latinos
who were closely following the election.

  The two candidates had very different Latino outreach campaigns. Latino voters told us that they were more likely to vote for candidates who had been endorsed by coethnic leaders and that they placed a high value on their own ethnic identity. So it is not surprising that these same voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Clinton, who made these direct appeals. Fifty-six percent of Latinos with no interest in ethnic endorsements supported Clinton, but her support jumped to 67% among those who responded positively to the coethnic political cues—an increase of eleven percentage points.

  For Obama the opposite was true: he lost traction among those who placed a high value on Latino campaign outreach. Only 10% of those who responded positively to coethnic outreach said that they would vote for him, compared to 13% of those who did not respond to such appeals. This pattern fits with the reality on the ground: Clinton had many more state and local Latino officials vouching for her in campaign events and ads than Obama did. Among prominent Latino elected officials in the lead-up to the primaries, only Congressman Gutiérrez from Obama’s home of Chicago, as mentioned earlier, was an early endorser of Obama in his primary fight for the nomination.

  LESSONS LEARNED

  Latino voters made up a large share of the Democratic primary electorate in several states in the long 2008 nomination contest. The factors that shaped Latino turnout, opinions, and vote choices were quite varied. Voter participation surged owing to institutional forces—specifically, a nominee had not been determined when primaries were being held in the states with the largest Latino electorates, making the Latino primary vote of greater political importance than it had been in years past.

  The racialized narrative about Latino support for Hillary Clinton spread by pundits, journalists, and campaign insiders was nonsense in the extreme. Clinton enjoyed tremendous name recognition, a litany of prized endorsements, and the halo of approval from her husband’s two terms, whereas a sizable percentage of Latinos had never heard of Barack Obama. The fact that Obama’s vote share remained low despite his strong approval ratings says less about him and more about Clinton’s political strengths with Latino voters. Once he was nominated, Latino support for Obama reached levels consistent with—and even superior to—Latino support for past Democratic nominees.