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month, the Center for Immigration Studies released a study on Latino
voting patterns entitled "Impossible Dream or Distant Reality?
Republican Efforts to Attract Latino Voters." Written by James
G. Gimpel and Karen Kauffman, the study concluded that Latinos
are reliably Democratic, and will continue to remain so. In fact,
Gimpel and Kauffman argue that, since Democratic margins among Latinos
will only grow, George W. Bush shouldn't even bother wooing them.
It's hard to argue with the first assumption. Last November, Latinos
voted for Al Gore over Bush by a margin of 62 to 35 percent, a 27
point margin. To Gimpel and Kauffman, this is proof positive that
all of the Bush campaign's efforts to target Latino voters were
for naught: "Nationally, the Bush campaign's effort to woo
Hispanic voters was mostly a failure, as the Latino vote showed
largely the same pattern of presidential vote choice that it had
in previous elections."
But maybe Gimpel and Kauffman should have read the election statistics.
Bush actually sliced a 51-point Clinton/Gore margin among Latinos
in 1996 nearly in half, to 27 points. This 24-point swing to Bush
was triple the 8 percent national swing to Bush (in which he nearly
erased Bill Clinton's 8.5 percent victory margin in '96). According
to VNS exit polls, the Latino surge toward Bush in 2000 outdid Bush's
gains in every other major bloc: ethnic, religious, educational,
age, income, or regional.
From there, the study's "proof" of a Latino surge to
the Democrats begins to unravel. Citing a 1999 Washington Post/Henry
J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard survey of Latino voters, Gimpel
and Kauffman posit a scenario in which emerging subgroups of Latinos
— including previous non-voters, new citizens, and illegal
immigrants (who would benefit from any proposed amnesty) —
will flood the electorate and vote more Democratic than the Latino
citizens of today. The authors concede that the Democrats' partisan
advantage narrows as Latinos start earning more: Among those earning
over $100,000, the gap is just 9.8 percent. But they tout the survey's
unlikely finding that while Latinos become more Republican as they
get wealthier, they actually vote more Democratic as they become
more educated.
That trend should raise a red flag. Educational achievement is
linked to earning capacity, with the highly educated sharing much
in common with the most affluent: Normally, these demographics consist
of roughly the same people. So why does the poll — which is
the basis for the study — show such a wide gulf between the
highest earners (where Democrats lead by 10 percent) and the educated
(where Democrats lead by 30 or more)?
Of course, the poll could be wrong. But if the Latino educated
really are different from the Latino affluent, maybe this is why:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Surveys
(CPS), Latino educational achievement has doubled in the last 30
years, with college graduation rates starting off from a very low
base of around five percent in 1971. This rapid increase means that
the bulk of the Latino educated are relatively young, and probably
not yet in a position to earn salaries of $100,000 or more. This
stands in marked contrast to your average Latino high-earner, a
fiftysomething small businessman who never went to college, but
pulled himself up by the bootstraps to become a success. The latter
is most likely to identify with a Republican message of individual
responsibility. The former, meanwhile, is likely to be doused in
academic liberalism, in a setting where ethnic grievances and victimization
are nurtured.
Latinos' low college-graduation rates reverberate throughout the
income ladder: Most Latinos are about half as likely to hold a college
degree as their white counterparts in the same income bracket. This
statistic speaks volumes about the Latino work ethic. Lacking the
same educational opportunities as whites, many Latinos were still
able to draw even in their standard of living, and they did it mostly
on their own.
The lower proportion of Latino achievers who are college-educated
confirms my hypothesis that the life experiences of young, educated
Latino liberals might be far removed from those of a larger group
of conservative-leaning Latinos who climbed the economic ladder
through hard work alone. This would mirror the politics of privilege
in the general electorate, where the moderately affluent vote Republican,
but the young educated veer to the left. (According to my analysis,
George W. Bush lost the battle for third to Ralph Nader in the precincts
surrounding Yale and the University of Wisconsin; he came pretty
close to it at the University of Virginia and Ohio State.)
So which group will ultimately win out? Of course, Gimpel and Kauffman
believe that as Latinos grow more prosperous, they will become more
like the emerging group of educated liberals, and less like today's
already-thriving conservative small-business class. But remember:
Radicals tend to blink when they first enter the business world,
in that rude awakening known as the first paycheck. Something about
surrendering a third of your pay to the government, and getting
very little in return, can make you think twice about voting Democrat
or Green.
Whether my theory is correct, or the poll is just wrong, eventually,
economics probably will trump any ideological indiscretions among
young Latinos (this happens when any young electorate matures).
Rising Latino incomes are likely to lead ultimately to a narrower,
not a wider, partisan divide.
Still, though flawed, Gimpel's and Kauffman's discussion does lay
out a serious objection to the notion of a rising GOP tide among
Latinos. The rest of the "study," however, contains barely
any facts at all.
Gimpel and Kauffman allege, for instance, that the Republican advantage
among Cuban Americans has dwindled to just six points. They also
assert that the Bush vote among Cubans is well below the highs set
by Ronald Reagan. This simply isn't borne out by the data. In the
majority Latino precincts of Miami-Dade County (the nucleus of the
Cuban population), Bush beat Gore by 74.6 to 24.7 percent, a whopping
26-point swing from four years before. (In the same precincts in
1996, Bob Dole couldn't even crack 60 percent.) The authors seem
to interpret Bush's one-point victory among Florida Hispanics as
a bad omen for the Cuban vote (haven't they even heard of Elian
Gonzales?) — ignoring the fact that, according to CPS data,
only 50 percent of Florida's Latino vote is Cuban. Running second
is one of the most Democratic groups of all, Puerto Ricans, at 25
percent, and their influx into the Orlando area (and into Orange
County) made it one of only two counties in the United States to
flip from supporting Dole in '96 to supporting Gore in '00.
Furthermore, Gimpel and Kauffman assume that Latinos march in lockstep
with Democrats on economic and social-welfare issues ("Latinos
are strongly attracted to the Democratic Party... because the Democrats
are in line with Latino policy preferences on education, health
care, and social services"). Yet they don't include a shred
of evidence to back up this claim. As Michael Barone shows in his
pioneering new book, The New Americans, Latinos are mostly
skeptical of the welfare state, and are more likely than other groups
to rely on work and family networks to get ahead. Latinos also tend
to agree with Republicans on social issues — and that counts
far more than the study's authors will admit. The fact that the
Republican party can't get its liberals and conservatives to stop
arguing about abortion and focus on tax cuts, shows that social
issues are not easily bottled up in American politics. And what
do Gimpel and Kauffman make of the election of right-winger Vicente
Fox to the presidency of Mexico? If Mexicans in Mexico can vote
for a conservative, isn't there at least some hope that their wealthier
American brethren can do the same?
It would be foolish to predict exactly what will happen with the
Latino vote in 2004, but the president's nimble courtship of Latinos
has been paying handsome dividends thus far: Bush has a 58 percent
job-approval rating among Hispanics. If he keeps it up, there's
no reason the GOP can't further improve its position. To really
understand this challenge, however, we'll need a guide to the Latino
vote that's less partisan than the Gimpel-Kauffman study.
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