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

by Matt Barreto, Gary Segura

  Romney had two chances to make inroads with Latinos in 2012, both of which he squandered. First, the US Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the Arizona SB 1070 law, which authorized state and local police to ask anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally for proof of citizenship, and which was decried as racial profiling against all Latinos. President Obama spoke out firmly against SB 1070, and in fact it was the Obama Department of Justice that sued the state of Arizona. When the Supreme Court ruled that three of the four provisions in the Arizona law were not constitutional but allowed the fourth provision—the one allowing police to ask for proof of citizenship—Romney issued a statement that he opposed the federal government’s interference in states’ rights and believed that Arizona should have the freedom to enact its own laws. In contrast, Obama commended the Supreme Court for striking down three-quarters of the Arizona law and vowed that his Department of Justice would continue fighting the fourth provision until it too was overturned. Obama called the law an attack on all Latinos that had to be stopped. Romney continued to refer reporters to his statement that states should be free to pursue their own laws.

  As discussed earlier, the final and ultimately most critical moment for Latino outreach was the DACA policy. When Latino registered voters were queried on their social connectedness to undocumented immigrants, a full 60% said that they personally knew someone who was undocumented, and one-sixth of them said that someone in their family was undocumented. While the Obama administration’s deferred action policy was greeted with full-throated enthusiasm by Latino voters, Romney opposed it.

  Eager to deflect the heat from the immigration issue and salvage any possibility of nudging Latino voters into the Republican column, Romney stressed the connections between the economy under Obama’s administration and the financial stress so many Latinos were experiencing. In a preemptive effort to counter President Obama’s message to Latino leaders in early June 2012, Romney issued a statement, with accompanying graphics, declaring that Latino economic fortunes had faltered during the president’s administration.28 Romney’s strategy was to draw attention to the high unemployment rate, increased poverty levels, and lower median household incomes among Latinos.29

  OUR SURVEY EXPERIMENT

  To test our predictions about the importance of the immigration issue for Latino voters, we fielded a survey experiment during the 2012 presidential election campaign among Latino registered voters in five battleground states. From June 12 to June 21, we asked respondents whether a candidate’s position on immigration would make them more or less likely to support that candidate (see Table 8.3).30

  Although numerous immigration cues have been tested by campaigns and studied by academics, including the effects of using the term “illegal” versus the term “undocumented” and emphasizing cultural threats over economic threats, we focus on generic candidate statements perceived as welcoming or hostile toward immigrants.31 A large body of research has documented the centrality of emotions in political evaluations.32 Our manipulation of immigration statements here cuts to the core of the affective dimension of the immigration debate.

  The descriptive results of the survey experiment are presented in Table 8.3 with observations for all of the five battleground states combined and also broken down by state. The respondents who received the welcoming immigration message broke three to one toward offering more support for the candidate. At the lower end, in Colorado and Virginia, the welcoming message garnered 56% and 58% “more likely” support, respectively. At the upper end, Arizona candidates with a welcoming message marshaled 65% “more likely” support, and for Florida candidates it was 71%.

  In sharp contrast to this pattern, only 17% of Latinos overall were more likely to support a candidate who staked a position hostile to immigrants. While the proportion of Latinos who were “more likely to support” a candidate with a welcoming message ranged from 56% to 71%, the range for a candidate with a hostile message was bracketed by a low of 12% in Arizona and a maximum of 21% in Florida. Assuming voter-candidate congruence on the issue of the economy, a welcoming cue had a net effect of +64 points in mobilizing Latino support (the difference between “less likely to support” and “more likely to support”).

  TABLE 8.3Responses to Candidate Statements on Immigration in Five Battleground States in the 2012 Election

  Source: Latino Decisions/America’s Voice, Five Battleground States Survey, June 2012.

  Note: Figures shown are column percentages. Data are weighted to reflect Latino statewide demographics.

  Perhaps more telling than the positive mobilizing effect of a welcoming message were the differences we observed in the proportion of Latinos who were less likely to support a candidate. Assuming that the response “less likely to support” is an expression of lower enthusiasm, we note that the divide is especially stark by immigration cue. Among Latinos exposed to the welcoming immigration message, an overall 3% indicated that they were less likely to support the candidate, compared to nearly half of them (49%) who gave this response when cued with a hostile immigration message. In other words, even when a candidate holds a position on the economy shared by the Latino voter, his or her use of a hostile cue on immigration will have a net effect of -32 points.33

  In short, a welcoming immigration message brings two of three Latino voters into a candidate’s fold, but a hostile immigration message leaves a candidate with only one in six Latino voters who are “more likely” to offer support.34 If turnout from the perspective of a campaign is about rallying voters to the ballot box, then an unwelcoming immigration message is counterproductive to a Latino mobilization strategy because it saps away enthusiasm for the candidate. Based on these data collected in June 2012, we find it remarkably clear that the Republican candidate’s strategy as a restrictionist on immigration would be problematic for his prospects in keeping Latino support that November, even assuming that many Latino voters agreed with his solutions for the economy.35

  We turn next to our attempt to better capture the importance of the economy and immigration to Latinos by using attitudinal measures about key policy statements from the two candidates, incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney.

  ANTI- VS. PRO-IMMIGRANT RHETORIC

  Starting from the results reported in Table 8.3, we looked to see whether the effect of anti-immigrant rhetoric versus more welcoming messages could be observed in specific subgroups of the Latino electorate. For example, we might have expected that Latinos who said fixing the economy was the number-one issue would be less persuaded by a candidate’s rhetoric on immigration policy so long as they agreed with that candidate on the economy. In fact, just the opposite was true. Even for Latinos who said fixing the economy or creating jobs was their top concern in the 2012 election, hearing an anti-immigrant statement made them far less likely to support even a candidate with whom they agreed on the economy. This result is striking because this group of voters just reported at the start of the survey that the economy and jobs were their number-one issue of concern.

  FIGURE 8.1The Net Effect of Immigration Statements on Candidate Support, 2012

  Source: Latino Decisions election eve survey, 2012.

  The same trend held for Latinos who did not mention immigration as either their first or second most important issue. Yet when confronted with either anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant statements, this group was also strongly responsive to the immigrant messaging.

  Finally, we find the same strong trends holding for US-born third- and fourth-generation Latinos—those for whom immigration is not part of their immediate family’s Latino identity. Still, these US-born third- and fourth-generation Latinos were very persuaded by what candidates said on immigration in 2012—even beyond the candidates’ positions on the economy.

  Despite finishing second to the economy as the burning issue of concern to Latino voters, immigration proved to be a critical—if not the critical—issue of the November 2012 election. Even years of inaction on
immigration by the Obama administration—and worse, years of the adverse actions reflected in breathtaking deportation rates—coupled with a persistently slow recovery from a recession that was devastating in the Latino community were not enough, in the end, to move the Latino vote into the GOP column.

  This surprising resilience from the Obama campaign can be credited, in our view, to three key factors. First, as we showed in Chapter 3 and again here, Latinos consistently trust Democrats over Republicans when it comes to securing their economic interests. A year out from the election, in November 2011, Latinos still blamed George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, for their economic troubles. And they placed greater trust in the president and his co-partisans to lead them back to prosperity.

  This economic effect was no doubt aided by Latinos’ considerable preference for a government that addresses economic trials rather than relying on the free market. That Latinos are progressive and believe that government should solve problems made an economic appeal from the Romney camp that much harder to sell.

  Second, despite his administration’s terrible record on deportations, Obama took two giant steps toward recovering his position on the issue of immigration. The prosecutorial discretion memos in the summer of 2011 can be understood as the administration finally coming to grips with the importance of the issue to the president’s political prospects. Aiding this effort were courageous DREAMers, outspoken and committed immigration activists, and some clever polling. More importantly, further DREAM activism resulted in the more effective DACA program. More than any other event in the 2012 campaign, DACA signaled the turnaround of the Obama relationship with Latino voters.

  Finally, the most reliable weapon in any Democratic campaign to mobilize Latinos sprang into action—the Republican Party. Republican primary candidates pushed the party further and further to the right on immigration, to the point that the most moderate candidate in the field—and the eventual nominee—embraced a policy of making 11 million people miserable in hopes of driving them out of the country. How unsurprising that this policy was off-putting to the spouses, children, neighbors, and coworkers of those he hoped to drive away.

  MULTIPLE VISIONS OF LATINO VOTING INFLUENCE

  As discussed in Chapter 6, asking whether Latinos can “single-handedly” determine an electoral outcome is too stringent a definition of influence. Instead, we have considered three dimensions in measuring Latino electoral influence: state-specific demographics, including group size and growth rate; electoral volatility with respect to registration, partisanship, and turnout; and the degree of resource mobilization. Among the relevant factors are the rates of party registration, the pre-election polls of vote intention, targeted Latino campaign spending, media coverage of Latino voters within a state, estimated turnout rates, the overall size of the Latino population, and the group’s growth rate. Taken together, these factors help explain where and when Latinos are influential in presidential politics.

  In his 2013 book Mobilizing Opportunities, Ricardo Ramírez takes a holistic approach to analyzing the power and influence of the Latino electorate, focusing on state-level context and mobilization efforts and asking about the nature of Latino influence across different states. He asks the basic question: were Latino voters—or some other group of voters—actually influential in the election outcomes? One approach to answering this question has been called the “pivotal vote” thesis; Ramírez rightly takes issue with it for being too results- or outcome-driven. Our view is that, although this may be but one among several important ways to understand group-based political power, the search for “pivotal blocs” will continue to have considerable appeal in media accounts of elections as well as within campaigns themselves. So we consider the pivotal vote thesis here, though we are careful to make some important improvements and caveats, per Ramírez’ recommendations in Mobilizing Opportunities.

  There are two fundamental ways in which a campaign can help its candidate: getting potential voters to actually show up and vote, and convincing likely voters to cast a ballot in favor of their candidate. These tasks are not equivalent in their relative merits, nor do they remain constant throughout a campaign or among different candidates. Candidates spend time and resources reaching out to different subgroups of voters, and they have different approaches in different states. Not only do campaigns take different approaches, but some may go so far as to try to demobilize or suppress the vote. Here we take an expanded view of what it means for Latinos to be influential and provide examples of candidates and campaigns expending significant resources vis-à-vis the Latino electorate.

  The fact that some noncompetitive states are Latino-heavy presents an obstacle to effectively assessing Latino voting influence. How could Latinos possibly be so influential in presidential politics if they are concentrated in California, New York, Texas, and Illinois, which are not battleground states? As FiveThirtyEight.com analyst Nate Silver stated in 2012, “Almost 40 percent of the Hispanic vote was in one of just two states—California and Texas—that don’t look to be at all competitive this year.”36 However, the question to ask is not what percentage of all Latinos are in competitive states, but rather what percentage of voters in competitive states are Latino and whether the margin of victory is likely to make this group crucial to the outcome. To the extent that many Latinos across the nation share some important concerns, the fact that a growing share of all voters are Latino in Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and even new destinations such as North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa, and therefore could have significant electoral influence, suggests that Latinos do matter—even if Latinos in California, New York, or Illinois do not matter at all.

  Louis DeSipio and Rodolfo de la Garza asked how electoral outcomes would differ under alternative scenarios, but this is the wrong approach.37 Instead, we replace their somewhat narrow, deterministic notions of influence with probability-based assessments for each state and for an election as a whole. Rather than simply asking whether a state’s choice for president would have been different in the absence of Latino voters, we ask: how likely is it that a set of states will all have votes close enough that they will fall into a range of plausible Latino influence and so the winner of the election will hinge in turn on these states?

  To capture the range of plausible influence in our model, we consider two realistic scenarios that are the best for each candidate. For instance, within each state, what was a plausible level of Latino voter turnout and percentage of Latino votes cast for Romney that would have been optimal from Romney’s point of view, and what combination would have been optimal for Obama? Then we determine the probability of an election outcome falling somewhere between these two plausible extremes. Once the election is over, the analysis remains essentially the same, except that instead of asking how likely it is that the election was decided by a set of Latino-influence states, we ask about the probability of such an outcome, in retrospect, given what we know now.

  Campaign strategy is driven by a clear assessment of which scenarios are more or less likely, and a post-election reassessment must similarly deal with probabilities. Thus, while some speculate on how different history might have been if the 2000 Gore campaign had expended a little effort to train the elderly Jewish voters of Palm Beach County in how to read the now-infamous “butterfly ballot,” few would think of this small group of voters as singularly influential; we recognize the situation in Florida in 2000 as unique, since it arose from the confluence of an enormous number of systematic and random factors.

  Using the best information available, the question of group influence becomes: what was the probability that the Electoral College vote and the vote margins within the states would be such that the group of interest might be deemed a decisive factor? When we compare the relative influence of Latinos and African Americans, as well as the combined influence of both groups, in the 2012 presidential election, this is the question we’re answering.

  To illustrate the dynamic of Latino influence in the 2012 presidenti
al election we created an interactive website that allows users to visualize what Latino influence looks like.38 Combining real-time weekly polling data from every state for both Latinos and non-Latinos with the estimated share of all voters who will be Latino, website users can see what would have happened if Latino turnout had been somewhat lower or higher than expected, if the candidates had gotten more or less voter support than expected, or both. If Latino turnout had been somewhat low in Colorado, or Latino voters had broken more heavily for Romney in Florida, how would the overall Electoral College have changed? From interacting with this Latino influence map, it becomes quite apparent that the Latino vote had major implications for the outcome of the 2012 Electoral College. Had Latino voter turnout rates been somewhat lower, Virginia and Colorado would have gone to Romney. Had Latinos in Florida or New Mexico leaned more toward Romney, Obama would have lost both states. The Latino vote map at the website shows these different scenarios from the 2012 election.

  In many of these same states, African Americans were also a large factor in election outcomes. Had black voter turnout been lower, Obama would have lost Virginia and Pennsylvania. Because both minority groups were targeted extensively by the Obama campaign, we think it makes sense to assess both Latino and black influence in 2012, as well as the combined Latino and black influence.

  Given the data populating our Latino vote map, and drawing on the work of the political scientist Andrew Gelman, we have assessed the influence of Latinos and African Americans on the election outcome in every single state; we provide a combined minority influence score for some states in Table 8.4.39

  Table 8.4 reports our results from 10,000 statistical simulations on the actual outcome of the 2012 election, in selected states, and calculates the proportion of simulations in which each state’s voting puts it in the interval of voting power for Latinos, for African Americans, and for Latinos combined with African Americans. Nevada exemplifies the potential synergy between Latinos and African Americans better than any other state: the probability of combined influence is over 90%, well more than the sum of the individual probabilities of influence. We find similar stories of Latino and black influence in Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the probability of minorities swinging the state result ranged from 78% to nearly 100%.