Mobilizing Opportunities: The Evolving Latino Electorate and the Future of American Politics

Notes

Notes 1. State Contexts, Mobilization, and the Evolving Latino Electorate 1. “Super Tuesday” took place on February 5, 2008, when twenty-three states held the Democratic Party primary. 2. Mitt Romney used the phrase “binders full of women” during the second U.S. presidential debate with President Barack Obama in an attempt to highlight how he sought to hire more women for top positions while he was governor of Massachusetts. The phrase went viral and became an Internet meme that Romney’s political opponents would use to attack him. 3. Days before the 2012 election, Matt Barreto of Latinos Decisions echoed earlier observations made by Pachon and de la Garza (1998) about “Why Pollsters Missed the Latino Vote—Again!” Barreto (2012) highlights the historical misrepresentation of Latino voters by pollsters due primarily to the undersampling of Latino voters generally, but particularly to the undersampling of Spanish-dominant Latinos or neglecting to have bilingual interviewers . 4. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012. 5. As I note later in this work, a state-centered approach recognizes the heterogeneity of the Latino population and inherently recognizes that there is not one “Latino Electorate” but fifty Latino electorates. 6. There were also segments of the population who arrived as guest workers during the Bracero Program. Some of these guest workers returned to their home country while others eventually settled in the United States. 7. The endogenous thresholds are those whose change is driven by the Latino population , whereas the exogenous thresholds are those external conditions such as competitive elections. 8. Pastor and Sanchez (2012) argue that the gap between the potential and actual rates of naturalization may be due to inadequate civic infrastructure to help immigrants through the naturalization process. While citizenship is one barrier addressed by proactive mobilization , it is not the only one. 9. See Félix (2008) for examples of Latino organizations that help immigrants through English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and Civics Exam preparation. 10. I use the mean presence and mean percentage growth as the cutoff in the X and Y axes. 11. California alone accounts for 2.5 million unauthorized immigrants. 12. This is based on the immigrants who became LPRs since 1985 (Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration [CSII], University of Southern California, 2011, LPR Status and Naturalization Data). 144 Notes to Pages 20–32 13. It is unclear what factors are most responsible for why otherwise eligible Latinos do not register to vote. 14. This drop in Latino descriptive representation can be partly attributed to unfavorable redistricting, but also to the inability to ensure that outgoing Latino elected officials were replaced by co-ethnics. 15. It is also the case that while Latinos in Florida comprise a significantly smaller percentage of the population, they benefit from relatively more influence than Latinos in Texas. In some states like Colorado and New York, Latino electoral presence has witnessed relatively modest growth over time. 16. The term “Hispanos” is often used to describe the Latino or Hispanic population in New Mexico. 17. There is a long-standing debate as to what are the most significant engines of partisan transformation. The explanations include change in party affiliation of existing voters (Erikson and Tedin 1981, 1986); elite cues about issues and ideology (Carmines and Stimson 1989; Carsey and Layman 2004); and the influx of new voters (Campbell 1985; Andersen 1979). These explanations are not inherently mutually exclusive. To the extent that Latinos have the potential to transform American politics, we must look to all three, but I focus primarily on the mobilization of Latinos as new voters. 18. The increasing participation at the polls as a result of perceived political threat should not be viewed as a panacea for mobilizing Latino electoral participation. The reality is that there were still significant segments of the established Latino electorate in California during the 1990s and throughout the United States in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century that were not mobilized by the context, and even among those who were, the initial effect appears to have diminished over time. 19. Given party neglect of those who are perceived to either not vote or not be able to be mobilized, Latino organizations did the heavy lifting that political machines and party organizations once did for other new electorates. 20. While southern states have been required to collect the racial category in voter registration , there are no such mechanisms outside the South. The...