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The story of how and where Latino voters will matter, I contend, is not a story of revolutionary change. Instead, it is a story about evolutionary change in the Latino electorate and the factors that propel the growth in the pool of Latino eligible voters. The tremendous growth in the number of Latino voters is not the endpoint. More Latinos will be eligible to vote in the next eighteen years than the total number of current Latino registered voters. Just as the Latino electorate is evolving, so is the perception of it by pundits and scholars. It didn’t take long after the November 6, 2012, election for political pundits to revise their commentary about Latino voters or their role in the 2012 presidential election and beyond.1 A day after the election, the New York Times touted the record Latino turnout and their solid support of Barack Obama. “Defying predictions that their participation would be lackluster, Latinos turned out in record numbers on Tuesday and voted for President Obama by broad margins, tipping the balance in at least three swing states and securing their position as an organized force in American politics with the power to move national elections” (Preston and Santos 2012). Similarly, a CNN news story proclaimed: “Latinos not only helped Obama win in key battleground states, but they made up 10% of the electorate for the first time ever” (Rodriguez 2012). The theme of “unprecedented presence” of the Latino vote and the electoral consequences reverberated in most mainstream media outlets. In reporting based on Fox News exit polls, it was remarked that “Latino voters have never had a greater and more significant impact on a presidential election in history” (Llenas 6 THE EVOLVING LATINO ELECTORATE AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS 120 Mobilizing Opportunities 2010). A day later, a Los Angeles Times editorial announced “Tuesday’s Winner and Losers.” The editorial’s assessment was that Latinos were “winners” because “their overwhelming backing of Obama and other Democrats is widely regarded as a key factor in Tuesday’s results, prompting much soulsearching by Republicans about how they can better appeal to this growing demographic” (Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2012). But not all pundits were as quick to concede that the presidential election had made Latino voters “winners.” Allison Kopicki, the polling editor at the New York Times, and her coauthor, Will Irving, dissected exit polls to determine if the outcome of the election would have been different without any Latino voters or through manipulated changes in Latino voter preference .2 According to this analysis, Latino voters were inconsequential in Iowa and New Hampshire. Barack Obama also could have won Ohio, Virginia , and Pennsylvania with substantially lower levels of Latino support. Even before acknowledging that Mr. Obama did need a majority of Latino voters to emerge victorious in Colorado, Florida, or Nevada, Kopicki and Irving (2013) largely write off the Latino vote because with the wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, “along with the safe Democratic states that Mr. Obama should have carried regardless of the Hispanic vote, the president would have reached 283 electoral votes, winning the Electoral College without needing to win a majority of the Hispanic vote in each state.” They further warn that Republicans interested in winning back the White House in 2016 need to reexamine the exit poll results if the intended strategy is crafted solely focused on Latino voters or immigration policy. Tempting as it may be for academic analyses of the role of Latino voters in national party politics to be dismissive of the punditry noted above, it is important to highlight the similarities to the two scholarly approaches to the study of Latino politics noted at the beginning of the book. The skeptical journalistic interpretation that Latinos were not crucial to the outcome of the presidential election parallels academic accounts that have applied the “pivotal vote” thesis in previous election cycles and concluded that the role of Latinos has been largely muted by non-Latino voting preferences and contextual factors beyond their control (de la Garza and DeSipio 1999, 2005). The less sanguine view that Latinos are rarely “pivotal voters” neglects the many ways in which this electorate has impacted election dynamics beyond the ballot box. By helping shift some states from competitive to safe Democratic or by enlarging the Democratic advantage in expensive media markets, Latino voters have allowed for election resources to be spent in [13.59.36.203] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23...

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