Reexamining the “Latino Vote:” Immigration and Identity Appeals in Political Campaigns

Abstract

Every three to four years, Latino voters make national headlines during the presidential election race. Commentators are often surprised that Latino voters do not act like one homogenous bloc, and some attention is given to partisan strategies to “court” the “Latino vote.” However, these discussions quickly fade away, only to resurface during the next presidential election as if nothing had changed. My thesis is a deep exploration of political campaigns and how they affect the decisions Latino voters make at the polls. I limit my focus to campaign messages that reference Latino identity or immigration because campaigns have historically targeted Latino voters through symbolic, rather than policy content, and because immigration is the one issue perhaps most closely associated with Latinos. My analysis is divided into two sections. In Part I, I use an observational dataset on political advertising to answer the question: Where and to what extent are campaigns undertaking Latino identity and immigration targeting? In Part II, I turn to voters, employing two original survey experiments with over 1,600 respondents to understand the electoral effects of these appeals. On the campaign front, my findings show how campaigns pay close attention to the demographics of their voters and see tradeoffs in appealing to Latino and anglo white voter bases. On the voter front, my results show that partisanship and political and cultural incorporation into U.S. society are key moderating variables in understanding Latino political behavior. These findings shed important light not only on the intricacies of political campaigning in the 21st century but on the future of U.S. democracy and elections.