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chapter 4 Does Ethnic Identification Trump Party Identification? Evaluating Latino Vote Choice in a Hypothetical Setting Latino voting preference is a relatively understudied topic among scholars of political behavior and Latino politics alike.With few Latino candidates running for of‹ce in the 1970s and 1980s, early scholars of Latino politics devoted little attention to the impact that co-ethnic candidates might have on Latino vote choice. Instead, early studies tended to focus on either participation (i.e., turnout) or party af‹liation but not on vote choice (see Stokes-Brown 2006). The research on Latino candidates was more descriptive in nature, focusing on major ‹gures such as Henry Gonzalez and Corky Gonzalez as case studies, not empirical analyses of Latino voters. What we know about Latino candidate preference is generally limited to surveys conducted by the media or policy centers and based on straightforward assessments of reported vote choice in congressional or presidential elections. In recent years, survey data from the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, the Pew Hispanic Center, and the Willie C.Velasquez Institute document the rates at which Latinos have voted Democratic or Republican in congressional races or voted for George W. Bush or John F. Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Thus, our understanding of Latino vote choice remains driven by partisan-attachment models, most likely examining a contest between an Anglo Democrat and an Anglo Republican (e.g., Kerry versus Bush, Gore versus Bush, Clinton versus Dole). Before turning to actual election results in chapters 5 and 6, I examine stated candidate preference in hypothetical elections with Latino and nonLatino options on the ballot, taking up the question of whether shared ethnicity affects Latino voting behavior. Speci‹cally, does the presence of a Latino 67 candidate mobilize the Latino electorate, resulting in support for the co-ethnic candidate that is stronger than partisanship or issue preference alone would have predicted? Since 2000, Latino candidates have gained national attention in both successful and unsuccessful bids for public of‹ce. In the fall of 2002, two Mexican American candidates, Tony Sanchez and Dan Morales, squared off in the Texas Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Sanchez went on to face Rick Perry in the general election for governor. In New Mexico in 2002, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor were Latino; Democrat Bill Richardson ’s victory made him the country’s only Latino governor. During the contentious 2003 California recall election, Cruz Bustamante was the only major Democratic candidate to contest the governor’s seat. The 2004 national elections sent two Latinos, Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) and Mel Martinez (R-Florida), to the U.S. Senate, while Utah residents elected two Latinos to the state assembly, bringing the number of states with Latinos in their legislatures to thirty-six.And in 2008, Rafael Anchia ran for U.S. Senate in Texas, bringing high-pro‹le Latino candidates to the political scene in almost every state with a Latino population. Thirty years ago, Latino voters rarely saw Spanish surnames on the ballot; today, most Latinos entering the polling booth will see Spanish surnames on the ballot for of‹ces ranging from the local school board to the U.S. Congress. Given the changes in the composition of viable candidates for all levels of of‹ce, reevaluating how voters make political decisions makes sense. Does a feeling of shared ethnicity with a Latino candidate provide a cue to Latino voters? In their analyses of existing research on Chicano and Latino politics, Ambrecht and Pachon (1974) and de la Garza and Garcia (1985) have noted that previous studies have downplayed the role of shared ethnicity. A decade later, DeSipio’s analysis (1996a) of Latino political behavior in the early 1990s reaf‹rmed the socioeconomic and resource-based model. Although DeSipio argues that shared ethnicity plays an instrumental role around a series of issue concerns shared in the Latino community, his ‹ndings (based on data from the 1989 Latino National Political Survey) do not support a signi‹cant association between shared ethnicity and political behavior. This chapter presents two improvements in modeling Latino vote choice: (1) inserting a Latino candidate as one of the options; and (2) controlling for an individual’s level of ethnic identi‹cation. I anticipate that in contrast to previous research, shared ethnicity will signi‹cantly affect Latino voting preference and that this effect will hold after controlling for standard predictors of political participation as well as election-speci‹c issues.1 68 / ethnic cues [3...

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