Do Latinos Always Vote for Latinos?
Latina Lista poses the following question:
Soon, our numbers will rival the Anglo population. Yet, will we be able to put aside our desires to elect Latinos/as and vote colorblind based only on qualifications/experience?
VivirLatino (funny how the name loses the alliteration in the translation) continues the discussion.
Being a pollster, I thought I would offer a statistic. The July 2004 Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation National Survey of Latinos: Politics and Civic Engagement asked a question that attempted to get to that very issue:
This is not the response of a political bloc in the making. I would argue (and I have been arguing on this site) that much of why there is no political bloc in progress is because there is no such thing as a Latino political identity.
My mother was born in Nicaragua, my father in Costa Rica. My wife was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States with her parents. My brother married a woman of Puerto Rican descent; one of my Nicaraguan-born cousins married a Miami-based Cuban immigrant. As much as our cultural heritages overlap – the value we place on family, our Catholic upbringings – we nonetheless do not share a common political identity. For example, my in-laws and my parents live within 10 miles of each other in suburban Los Angeles yet do not think in terms of a collective “we” when it comes to politics. My parents’ Mexican-American next-door neighbors view the new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, as one of their own. My parents do not. Just because Villaraigosa speaks ever-improving Spanish does not make my parents identify with him. Meanwhile, the fact that both my sister-in-law and cousin-in-law are fluent Spanish-speakers would not overcome the ideological predispositions that are typical of their different islands of origin. Getting them to talk politics would be a disaster.
All the focus on Latinos as an ethnic category of burgeoning importance has the effect of obscuring the fact that being Latino is not like being white or being black. To the extent that a white political sensibility exists, it derives almost entirely from never having to face discrimination from the majority on the basis of skin color. Much of the black political identity comes from being ineluctably defined as a minority by virtue of skin color. With Latinos, skin color is not an obvious marker of ethnic identification. Some Latinos are recognized as Latinos only if they choose to be. Other Latinos are categorized as a minority simply by their appearance. This is only one of the factors that conspires against a shared Latino political identity.
Latinos’ level of political participation and their vote differ widely as a result of their nativity, their country of origin, the area in which they live, their affluence and their religion, to name only a few factors. For example, 68 percent of Latinos in Colorado voted for Kerry; only 44 percent in Florida went with Kerry. Fifty-six percent of Protestant Latinos voted for Bush, while only 33 percent of Catholic Latinos supported the president. Not only does a first-generation Mexican factory worker in Ohio have little in common with a first-generation Cuban doctor in Florida, but he also has little in common with a sixth-generation Mexican-American business owner in New Mexico.
There’s not even much chance of a Mexican-American voting bloc, let alone a Latino voting bloc. Look at Martha Ruiz and José Gutierrez. Their political interests are likely to be very different.
Personally, as a Democratic pollster, I like Maegan la Mala’s question:
How can Latinos gain access to positive and meaningful experiences that will lead to positions of real power on all levels of government when there are still huge disparities in access to basics like education and healthcare?
If Democrats do the following, we’ll keep the next Republican nominee for president from building on George W. Bush’s 40 percent share of the Latino vote:
1. Stop thinking about Latinos as a monolithic entity,
2. Clearly distinguish ourselves from Republicans on access to education and health care,
3. Demonstrate to all voters why increasing access to those who don’t have it benefits everybody, and
4. Communicate this message to the various Latino groups in the manner most effective with each (in other words, not just Spanish-language television).
Not only will we do better with Latinos, we’ll do better with a lot of other voters, too. In the words of my old boss, Stan Greenberg, and my new friend, Michael Alvarez, “The Democrats will stem the erosion of the Hispanic vote, not by chasing the defectors or waving the partisan banner, but by rediscovering their own values and beliefs.”
October 20th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Pineda Consulting » Do Latinos Always Vote for Latinos?
Very interesting post in response to Latina Lista and VivirLatino. Hey its almost as if we have communication!
“This is not the response of a political bloc in the making. I would argue (and I have been arguing on this site) that much of why th…
October 21st, 2005 at 2:19 pm
I certainly agree that latinos cannot be viewed as a monolith with respect to politics or anything else (music, food, movies, etc.). however, I think the poll question would tell us more if if were rephrased: “I will usually pick a Latino candidate if the other choice is an equally-qualified non-Latino candidate.” I suspect the numbers would be quite different from your poll results.
October 21st, 2005 at 5:59 pm
It’s not my poll! It’s the Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation’s poll. They did ask the question you’re describing. Fifty-eight percent of Latino voters agreed that they would be more likely to vote for the Latino candidate rather than the non-Latino with the same qualifications, 35 disagreed. Still a long way from voter bloc material, if you ask me.
October 21st, 2005 at 6:45 pm
Oh, sorry. But thanks for the info. Fifty-eight per cent seems like a high number to me, though. Maybe not a voting bloc by some standards, but certainly large enough to put someone into office in a close election, no?
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. While I agree that the number is high enough to make a difference in a tight election, it still seems like low number to me. It’s like 73 percent of Latino voters are saying, “What do you take us for? Of course we’re not going to vote for one of our own if he or she is not the best-qualified for the job.” More than 4 out of every 10 Latino voters aren’t even willing to say they’ll vote for the Latino candidate if that candidate has the same qualifications as the non-Latino. “We live here,” I read into the numbers. “We’re Americans. We have specific ideas about what government should be doing to improve our lives and the lives of our children. Sometimes Latino candidates shares those ideas, sometimes they don’t. But if they don’t, I’m not voting for them.”
Another interesting finding from the Pew/KFF poll is that Latino non-citizens didn’t think their voting brethren would be so fair-minded. Almost two-thirds of non-citizens (64 percent) said that they thought that Latino voters would pick a Latino candidate over a better-qualified non-Latino.
By the time Latinos have become voters - the shamefully small 18 percent who actually do - they are politically mature and ready to vote their interests as they define them. Sometimes their interests are defined along the lines of country of origin (much more so than ethnicity), sometimes along religious lines (for example Protestant and Catholic Mexican-Americans), sometimes over generational lines (recent immigrants vs. 6th generation Mexican-American families in New Mexico), sometimes socioeconomic status. As a result, I don’t think that a candidate for political office can count on too many votes by simply saying, “I’m Latino, vote for me.”
Still, the Greenberg poll from last June showed that 52 percent of Latino voters believe that Democrats share their values, compared to only 34 percent who say the same about Republicans. Meanwhile, 45 percent of the growth of American population expected between 2000 and 2020 is Latino, meaning we’re going to have more and more Latino voters in the years to come, especially if eligible Latinos start registering at a rate approaching the rate of whites, blacks and Asians. Latinos may never become a bloc and there will never be a one-size-fits all way of reaching them, but the future of the Democratic Party depends on our being smart about Latino outreach and about giving Latinos equal opportunity to achieve the American dream.