February 15, 2008
The Spotlight Falls on Scholars of Hispanic Politics
With Hispanics accounting for nearly 25 percent of eligible voters in the Texas presidential primaries, many political analysts are asking why Hillary Clinton has done well with that demographic and whether she can continue to do so. Leading scholars of Hispanic politics are hearing their phones ring more often, and at least a few have seized the opportunity to publicize their work through newspaper columns.
A recent poll of likely Texas primary voters commissioned by the Texas Credit Union League found Hispanics there favoring Mrs. Clinton over Barack Obama by about a 2-to-1 margin. Her campaign has benefited from similarly high levels of Hispanic support in several other states, such as California, although Mr. Obama appears to be making inroads. Exit polls show he got about half of the Hispanic vote in this week’s primaries in Maryland and Virginia.
On the Republican side, John McCain appears to be faring well with Hispanic voters. Dan Balz of The Washington Post observes in an analytical piece posted online today that the Obama campaign’s lack of support among Hispanic voters poses both a short-term threat to his prospects in the remaining primaries and a long-term threat to his election should he become the Democratic nominee.
Among the questions yet to be resolved is whether it is simply the case that many Hispanic voters like Mrs. Clinton, or whether there is another reason more Hispanic voters have not gotten behind Mr. Obama. Late last month, Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton campaign pollster, threw a can of worms into the chili by telling The New Yorker that part of Mrs. Clinton’s appeal to Hispanic voters stemmed from their not showing “a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”
Enter the scholars of Hispanic politics.
In an op-ed article in the February 7 Los Angeles Times, Matt A. Barreto, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington, and Ricardo Ramirez, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern California, took issue with the suggestion Hispanic people will not support a black presidential candidate.
“There are many reasons why Clinton enjoys a large advantage among Latino voters,” the scholars said, “and none of them has anything to do with racism.” Among them: She has more name recognition; she has hired an independent Latino pollster; and she has aired more Spanish-language ads. The two researchers rattled off a long list of black mayoral candidates who won elections with the help of Hispanic voters, and noted that Mr. Obama himself did well with Hispanic voters in his 2000 bid for Congress and his 2004 bid for the Senate.
Maria De Los Angeles Torres, director of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote an op-ed article for the February 10 Chicago Tribune in which she argued that Mr. Obama had squandered support among Hispanics by going from being a strong support of immigrant rights to voting to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Roberto Suro, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and a former director of the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center, told the Morganton (N.C.) News Herald that the Clinton campaign had cultivated relationships with Hispanic leaders who “move votes,” such as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Dolores Huera, co-founder of the United Farm Workers.
A much different take was offered by Armando Navarro, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at Riverside and coordinator of a Hispanic organization called the National Alliance for Human Rights. He told the Associated Press that one of the forces at work may be competition between blacks and Hispanics and “the fear that with a black president ‘they’re’ really going to be in and ‘we’re’ going to be out.”
The assertion that Hispanic voters will not support a black president could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, and may hurt black-Hispanic relations in the long term, says Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford University law professor who wrote the new book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.
“It could make black voters more hostile to Latinos,” Mr. Ford told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “And Latinos who hear it might think that they somehow ought to be at odds with blacks. These kinds of statements generate interracial tensions.”
Peter Schmidt | Posted on Friday February 15, 2008 | PermalinkComments
Previous: New Polls Say Education Is a Big Factor -- but Not a Big Issue -- in 2 Key Pending Democratic Primaries
Next: Barack Obama Stronger Among College-Educated
Is this what blacks and Latinos have come to? Measuring themselves against others instead of themselves?
— marci Feb 20, 04:50 PM #