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

1. State Contexts, Mobilization, and the Evolving Latino Electorate

1 STATE CONTEXTS, MOBILIZATION, AND THE EVOLVING LATINO ELECTORATE In 2008, pundits heralded Latino voters as playing a significant role in the Democratic presidential primary. Having swept up most of the sought-after endorsements of Latino elected officials long before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, the Hillary Clinton campaign believed that Latino votes would follow suit. Latinos were seen as a key component of Clinton ’s campaign strategy, and it was expected that the growing bloc of Latino voters could help swing key states in February’s “Super Tuesday.”1 According to Sergio Bendixen, Clinton’s head of Latino outreach, February 5 “is the firewall, and the Latino vote in California is the most important part of the firewall. . . . If she can win California, no matter what happens the race is on” (Carlton 2008). Nine months later, Latinos would be seen as a bloc of voters crucial to the election of Barack Obama as president, having helped him win key swing states like Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and even Indiana and North Carolina (Barreto, Collingwood, and Manzano 2010). Four years later, there was renewed anticipation about the role that Latinos could play in the presidential election. In March 2012, Time magazine posited that “Latino voters will swing the 2012 election.” This cover story focused on the growth, presence, and preferences of the Latino electorate and the resulting consequences for the presidential election. Not all pundits or analysts were as upbeat about the role of Latinos or their willingness to coalesce behind one candidate in the general election. Less than one month before the election, some state polls such as the Tampa Bay Times/Bay 2 Mobilizing Opportunities News 9/Miami Herald poll of Florida voters suggested that Latino support only slightly favored the incumbent president. Other state polls, such as the one completed by SurveyUSA, claimed that Barack Obama held only an eight-point lead over Mitt Romney among Latino voters in Nevada. The Pew Hispanic Center, through its more systematic sampling of Latinos, estimated that support for Barack Obama would likely be much higher, but indicated that Latinos were less certain about voting than non-Latinos (Lopez and Gonzalez-Barrera 2012). Unlike English-language mainstream outlets , the impreMedia/Latino Decisions tracking poll consistently estimated a more than two to one preference for Barack Obama over the challenger Mitt Romney, and their election-eve report estimated high voter turnout. On election night, November 6, 2012, and in the days that followed, pundits trumpeted the significant role that Latinos played in the election and the role that they would play in years to come. An editorial political cartoon in the New Yorker highlighted the political establishment’s urgent need for “binders full of Latinos.”2 While the hype about Latinos’ potential impact on national elections has been a recurring theme in every presidential election since the mid–1990s, the media has only recently begun to pivot away from earlier metaphors of Latinos as a “sleeping giant” based on the disparity between the size of the Latino population and the potential but unrealized political impact of the Latino electorate. In the end, the noteworthy change in the landscape of American politics during the 2012 election was not the awakening of a Latino “sleeping giant.” Instead it was the apparent wake-up call to campaign strategists about the significance and evolving nature of the Latino electorate despite many signs of this change throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century . Media pundits, think tanks, and campaign strategists underestimated the level of political interest in the election among Latino voters. Not only was estimated turnout higher than had been predicted, but the partisan distribution of votes cast in favor of Barack Obama’s reelection also took many by surprise.3 One of the most cited revelations had to do with the fact that Barack Obama was the preferred candidate among Latinos in Florida for a second consecutive election. The political behavior of Latino voters in Florida in 2008 and 2012 is noteworthy beyond their presidential vote choice in one or two elections. These elections reflect the consequences of growth and change in the composition of the state’s Latino electorate whose partisan attachments are increasingly malleable. Moreover, it is not just in Florida where the Latino electorate is evolving. The change is taking place throughout the United States. State Contexts, Mobilization, and the Evolving Latino Electorate...