In Spring of 2010, I wrote a thesis on the voting trends of Hispanics in the United States. This blog was created out of that project as I intend to republish these findings to provide more content to Hispanic voting behavior.
In politics, the issue of the Hispanic vote usually comes up during discussions about immigration and most views are generally one-sided. For example, many Republicans believe that there’s nothing to be done to sway Latino voters and use John McCain’s support of immigration reform as an example. Latino voters voted for Bush in high percentages, 40-44 percent of the Hispanic electorate, but overwhelmingly voted for Obama in 2008 despite McCain’s record on immigration reform. Citing these figures, groups like the Center for Immigration Studies conclude that Latinos won’t vote Republican, Republicans shouldn’t worry about Latino backlash on immigration, and so on and so forth. The issue goes the other way too, many groups overstate the importance of immigration to Hispanic voters when issues like jobs, economic security and education are more important to Latino voters.
This blog was created to provide a resource for those looking up ongoing information on the Hispanic electorate. Too often, the Hispanic vote is misrepresented in news stories as a monolith or single-issue constituency. Hispanics are diverse, coming from a number of countries with different histories, voting propensities and partisanship identities. Hopefully, this blog will be different, with a mix of various articles on Hispanic voting trends, Latino trends and commentary. As an amateur political scientist, I will be focusing on the topic of Hispanic voting trends but also delve into topics other marketing and outreach trends. For the time being, I have comments wide open but I will rigorously filter out any spam, self-promotion or unconstructive comments.