FIGURE 6.11The Rate of Membership in Latinos for Obama Groups and the Money Raised, 2008
FIGURE 6.12The Combined Index of Latino Influence in the 2008 Election
Source: Map created by the authors based on Index of Latino Influence.
FINAL ANALYSIS: THE INFLUENCE OF LATINOS ON THE 2008 ELECTION
Our findings indicate that both the Vargas and de la Garza claims about Latino voter influence in 2008, mentioned at the outset of this chapter, are overstated. The Latino vote did not deliver the power punch in what became a landslide victory for Obama, but Latinos were far from irrelevant. Latino influence was greatest in Nevada and Florida, two of the most hyped battleground states; both flipped from Republican to Democrat from 2004 to 2008.
No matter what metric we use, our analyses demonstrate that Latinos, like any other group, have an influence that is not absolute but rather tempered by a combination of factors. Latinos alone cannot be credited for the Obama victory—or for the two prior Bush wins for that matter. At the same time, discounting the entire Latino electorate as categorically irrelevant to the outcome in 2008 is a misguided generality that overlooks a measureable influence that was critical to constructing a winning coalition in specific states.
Thinking about political influence in broad terms allows us to understand more about racial and ethnic dynamics at the mass and elite levels, and it highlights the relevant trends that address substantive questions regarding the role of Latinos in presidential politics. Importantly, the approach we outline and demonstrate here can be applied in different types of elections and to other segments of the electorate. This framework attends to factors that are theoretically relevant to an increasingly diverse electorate and will be useful over the long term as the racial and ethnic politics research develops.
As we look back on the 2008 election, we now have a clearer vision of whether and where Latinos had an effect. The Iraq War and the economic meltdown of 2008 dominated the issue agenda, and Latinos had little interest in what John McCain had to sell on those two issues, despite his long-standing support for immigration reform. Though the two-party vote among Latinos varied by a number of key factors, including national origin and generation, it is clear that most Latinos—and nearly all Latinos with a strong attachment to Latino pan-ethnic identity—voted for Barack Obama. Indeed, the attraction to Obama was so powerful that Latino Democrats demonstrated lockstep unity while many Latino Republicans strayed away from the fold to vote for the Illinois senator.
Dozens of academic research studies have been published on the sole topic of racial attitudes and voting in 2008. Some political science journals have devoted entire symposia issues to this issue, and their papers have empirically proven that racial attitudes had a noticeable effect in 2008. Efforts to isolate a racial effect among Latinos, however, have yielded little evidence of Latino reluctance to vote for black candidates. Beyond the high level of Latino support for Obama in November 2008, any variation in expressions of racial resentment appears to have been unrelated to voter choice—in clear contradistinction to the findings for non-Hispanic whites.
Obama began his presidency with strong enthusiasm from the Latino electorate. Could he keep it?
*An earlier version of part of this chapter appeared as “Measuring Latino Political Influence in National Elections” by Matt Barreto, Loren Collingwood, and Sylvia Manzano, Political Research Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2010).
Chapter 7
WHAT THE GOP VICTORY IN 2010 HAS TO SAY ABOUT LATINO POLITICAL POWER
The story of the 2010 midterm election was dominated by the Tea Party, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the sweeping Republican victory that emerged. The GOP took control of the House of Representatives and numerous state legislatures and gubernatorial offices in a variety of states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, as well as in heavily Latino states like New Mexico and Nevada. On the face of it, the 2010 election would appear to refute our central claim—that given the current distribution of policy and party preferences and the issue agenda of the GOP, Latino population growth is moving the country relentlessly toward the Democrats and their candidates. The results from 2010 compared to those from 2006 would appear to make this claim for Latino electoral influence specious on its face. Political observers would be quick to suggest that Latino voters didn’t make a difference in 2010.
They’d be wrong.
First, in 2010 the issue of immigration and the GOP attempts to legislate against immigrants rose to become a primary yardstick—if not the primary yardstick—whereby Latinos judged the GOP. The passage of SB 1070 set into motion the immigration dynamic that defines the Latino-GOP relationship to this day. (We cover this relationship in much greater detail in Chapters 9 and 10.)
Second, the results of the 2010 election, rather than refuting our claims regarding demography, illustrate its increasing importance. The 2010 election varied little from elections before or since in how the electorate responded to the parties. The GOP was able to drive up its share of the vote among whites, while the standard decline in turnout by left-leaning voters, seen in all midterm elections, made that white vote share more determinative.
Finally, Latino voters and the issue of immigration were of pivotal importance in saving the Senate for the Democrats and in other significant elections. In short, 2010 would have been a lot worse for the Democrats without the Latino effect, from the reelection of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to the election of Governor Jerry Brown in California.
Rather than demonstrating the residual weakness of the Latino voting bloc (and by extension, our argument), the 2010 results laid the groundwork for Latinos’ historic contributions in 2012—and the immigration debate in the 113th Congress.
THE WARM-UP
Before we examine 2010 up close and begin to tell the immigration story—which will be an almost constant subtext for the remainder of the book—we must ask an obvious question: why was immigration almost wholly missing from the story of 2008? The answer is easy: the two major-party candidates (and Obama’s primary rival Hillary Clinton) all held basically the same views on immigration.
More specifically, however, the complete absence of immigration from the 2008 general election was a cross-aisle conspiracy of silence, if you will. John McCain’s support of comprehensive immigration reform in the US Senate in 2007 very nearly derailed his entire presidential campaign. By midsummer in 2007, McCain’s fund-raising was dried up and he was laying off staff. Anti-immigrant rhetoric was ramping up strongly in the GOP at that time, and McCain, long a champion of immigration reform, was on the wrong side within his own party. By the time he made it through to the general election, he had no incentive to raise immigration as an issue.
Why didn’t Obama raise it, then, if the issue had the potential to create such mischief for his opponent? Then-senator Obama believed that immigration was a losing issue for Democrats, and this position was an article of faith among his advisers, Jim Messina, David Plouffe, and David Axelrod. They saw lots of negatives and little upside in engaging in an immigration debate. Though Obama did address immigration during the campaign when asked about it, immigration was not a focus of his message, and it played little role in his public outreach. Immigration was the great unspoken issue in the 2008 general election.
Midterm elections are different from general elections: they are won on party core constituents, not on the part-time voters and ticket-splitters—those with less interest in the political system, weak attachment to either party, and low levels of information—who occasionally turn up for presidential elections but almost never for midterms. The midterm demobilization of the president’s electoral coalition is almost an American tradition.
As the Democrats looked ahead to the 2010 election, they realized that on almost every key issue the president had forsaken a core constituency, either through inaction or in the process of trying to attract and retain moderate and independent voters. Gay and lesbian activist
s had organized a boycott of fund-raising by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Organizing For Action (OFA) because of the president’s inaction on LGBT legislative priorities. Organized labor had worked tirelessly for the Obama candidacy in hopes of achieving a more pro-labor regime, including card-check union organizing elections. What they got for their efforts was a tax on union-quality health care plans. Financial reform advocates were still waiting for the first perp-walk of Wall Street charlatans (who continued to receive taxpayer-subsidized bonuses over little or no White House objection). Civil libertarians got no torture trials or indictments for transgressions of the previous administration associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “war on terror” (and none ever appeared), and the prison at Guantánamo remained open. The Democratic base was, to say the least, restless in 2010.
For Latinos, the promise of immigration reform—signaled during the campaign for action during the administration’s first year, then before the midterm election—was as yet unfulfilled. Instead, stepped-up enforcement by the border patrol, including sweeps and raids that targeted working mothers and fathers rather than employers and criminals, were justified with the claim that this was the price of buy-in by those on the right for comprehensive immigration reform. In 2014, as we write this, the same logic is in place.
The collective effect of this rightward drift and frequent inaction by the Obama administration was a shocking enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, which was documented widely in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Latinos were no exception. When Latino Decisions attempted to estimate this effect among Latinos in a March 2010 poll, we found Latino enthusiasm for voting in an upcoming election at an all-time low.
In 2006, when Republicans held the White House, the Senate, and the House and immigration marches mobilized millions of Latinos around the country, interest in the midterm elections was at record levels (Figure 7.1). Four years later, many Latino voters saw no urgent need to turn out. In an April 2006 Latino Policy Coalition survey (which we helped write), 77% of Latino registered voters stated that they were certain to vote, a measure of enthusiasm that grew by September 2006 to 89% who were determined to vote. By that November, about 60% actually voted. In 2008 enthusiasm was higher, but that’s generally true in presidential election years.
Compare those numbers to March 2010, when just 49% of Latino registered voters said that they were very enthusiastic about voting. Since 60% of Latinos turned out in 2006, when their self-reported enthusiasm was 77%, what would that spell for 2010 if the starting point for enthusiasm was only 49%?
The low enthusiasm for voting mirrored the low levels of excitement about both the Democratic and Republican Parties. When party members were asked how their excitement for their party had changed since January 2009, neither party had close to majority excitement (see Figure 7.2). Republicans in Congress, who made little attempt to reach out to Latinos, continued to suffer a credibility gap—18% of Latinos were more excited about the GOP, compared to 62% who were less excited and 20% who registered no change. Since Latinos nationwide generally reported a GOP partisan identity between 16% and 20%, that excitement number in 2010 should be read as reflecting core partisanship, but the high number for “less excited” suggests that there had been some hardening of Latino attitudes against the GOP, even by 2010.
FIGURE 7.1Election-Year Enthusiasm for Voting among Latino Registered Voters, 2006, 2008, and Early 2010
For Democrats, however, the numbers weren’t much better: 38% of Democratic Latinos were more excited about the party, 40% were less excited, and for 22% there was no change. This significant variation from normal partisan patterns was strongly suggestive of the disappointment level felt by many Latino voters leading up to the 2010 midterms. Perhaps some of the decline in enthusiasm was inevitable—no administration can live up to all voters’ expectations at the time of election. But there were no excuses for the Democrats: from 2008 to 2010, they controlled all three elected branches of national government. Knowing who was in power, Latinos knew where to channel their disappointment—so the Democrats’ numbers were net negative.
FIGURE 7.2Self-Reported Excitement among Latino Registered Voters about the Two Political Parties, March 2010
In March 2010, then, Latino excitement about Democrats and enthusiasm for the 2010 midterm elections was lower than when Obama was elected, and lower than it was for the 2006 midterms. With the stage set for significant declines in Latino turnout, it was an open question, early in that year, whether any event or policy action could restore Latino energy and support for the Democrats.
SB 1070, THE DREAM ACT, AND IMMIGRATION IN 2010
As it has done for a generation, and as it did for Democrats in 2006, the saving moment came over immigration. Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy actions served to poison their brand with Latino registered voters.
On April 23, 2010, Jan Brewer, the elected Republican secretary of state in Arizona who had succeeded to the governorship of that state upon the appointment of Democratic governor Janet Napolitano as secretary of Homeland Security, signed Senate Bill 1070 into law. Dubbed the “papers please” law, the statute included a series of restrictions and penalties on undocumented persons, as well as changes to how law enforcement officials would interact with persons “suspected” of being undocumented. The sweeping elements of the law were subject to multiple legal challenges and widespread opposition by immigrant and Latino advocates.
Latino Decisions polled Arizona’s Latino registered voters just seven days later, on April 30. That poll was the first—and, for some time, the only—poll of Latino citizens regarding their views of the law.
Opposition to the law was widespread and intergenerational. Arizona Latinos whose grandparents were born in the United States—that is, fourth-generation or more—were opposed to the law by more than a two-to-one margin. Among the generations who had arrived in the United States more recently, opposition was even higher. The reason was clear—the vast majority of Latino voters in Arizona believed that ethnicity (racial profiling) would be the mechanism of enforcement. Any Latino citizen and/or legal resident of the United States could conceivably be stopped and asked for identification that would prove that their presence in the United States was legal. Imagine being a fourth-generation US citizen but being legally required to carry your documents with you at all times!
Whether targeted against immigrants or not, SB 1070 imposed a burden on all Latinos through its racial mechanism of enforcement. Over three-quarters of our Latino registered voter respondents believed that the law was explicitly racial and would never have been adopted if most immigrants were white.
The partisan effects of the passage of SB 1070 were immediate. In the minds of the Latino electorate in Arizona, the GOP was overwhelmingly to blame for its passage, which was accurate in terms of the legislative votes in the Arizona legislature. Among Latino voters, 59% held the GOP responsible, compared with just 2% who believed that the Democrats were to blame. However, we’d be remiss if we failed to point out that one-third of Arizona voters (33%) blamed both parties. This, too, had a basis in the legislative record, as several Democrats either voted for the legislation or were conveniently absent for the roll call.
FIGURE 7.3Latino Registered Voters’ Beliefs Regarding Whether SB 1070 Was Passed Because of the Racial Composition of the Immigrant Population, Arizona, April 2010
The second major event on the issue of immigration occurred in September. The administration’s actions had continued to dampen Latino enthusiasm for participating in elections and supporting Democratic candidates, even after Obama’s Department of Justice filed suit to block some of the provisions of SB 1070. The turnaround came in September less than six weeks in advance of the midterm election. On September 21, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, himself facing an uphill path to reelection, brought forward a cloture vote on the DREAM Act, an immigration policy proposal, originally authored by Republicans, that would grant legal
status to some undocumented persons who had been brought across the border (or had overstayed their visas) under the supervision of parents or guardians and hence had no culpability in their undocumented immigration status. If such individuals were attending college or volunteering for the military, they would receive legal status. The cloture vote fell three votes shy, 56–43 (with Senator Reid switching his vote to the minority at the last moment for procedural reasons). Of the forty-two sincere “no” votes, forty-one were cast by the Republican minority.
FIGURE 7.4Latino Voters’ Perceptions of Democratic and Republican Actions on Immigration Reform, August–September 2010
When Harry Reid brought the DREAM Act to the floor, Latino Decisions was in the midst of a weekly tracking poll. The data from the poll showed that 77.5% of Latino registered voters supported the DREAM Act amendment, versus just 11.5% who opposed it.
At the same time, the Democrats saw a favorable turn in perceptions that they were working on immigration reform. In the week prior to the vote, our data indicated that 61.1% of Latinos felt that Democrats were either ignoring or blocking immigration reform; that number dropped to 53.8% during the week of the vote. Likewise, the percentage who thought that Democrats were actively working on passing reform went up from 25.7% to 30.8% in one week. This trend, which continued for the remainder of the 2010 electoral season, is illustrated in Figure 7.4.
As a result of the DREAM Act cloture vote, Republicans continued to suffer reputation decline among Latino voters. Just three weeks earlier, our tracking poll reported that 63.2% of Latino registered voters were “less excited” about the GOP—in the wake of the vote, 71.3% were saying that they were “less excited” about the GOP compared to a year earlier. Just weeks before the 2010 election, the GOP brand was heading in the wrong direction among Latino registered voters.
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