At its Washington national headquarters Monday, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) hosted a 2014 midterm election preview for the national media that featured panelists Matt Barreto and Gary Segura, co-founders of Latino Decisions. Barreto and Segura presented key findings drawn from recent LD research, offered insights and lessons learned from recent national electoral cycles, and provided predictions for journalists and political analysts covering the midterm elections nine weeks from today.
Barreto and Segura were joined on the panel by NCLR’s Clarissa Martinez de Castro, Center for American Progress’ Vanessa Cardenas, and Voto Latino’s Jessica Reeves. NCLR president and CEO Janet Murguia welcomed the journalists and introduced the panelists. “In this midterm election year, both parties are calculating that anti-immigrant voters will be more motivated and influential than Hispanic voters,” said Murguia, in her opening remarks. “The only way to make sure that both parties respect Latinos is to continue growing our electorate and expanding our political power.”
Speaking first—and citing research from a blog post by LD’s Gabriel Sanchez—Martinez pointed out that while 12.2 million Latinos voted in 2012, another 11.1 million Latinos who were eligible did not. Referring to those Latinos on the electoral sidelines, Martinez said, “When you think of the potential we have to influence state and national elections, that potential is enormous.”
Matt Barreto then guided the audience through a detailed presentation that identified specific U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be “Latino influence” contests—elections where the share of Latinos may be significant enough to alter the result. Given that survey of the political-electoral landscape for the 2014 midterm cycle, Barreto asked the question of most concern to Latino advocacy organization and the media in the room. “We wonder: what are the campaigns doing?”
From there, Barreto turned to mobilizing potential of the immigration issue, and specifically President Barack Obama’s authority and actions (or inactions) related to deportation policies. In his presentation, Barreto also noted that LD polling research has shown that a vast majority of Latinos voters (38 daily, and other 30 percent weekly or monthly) rely upon Spanish language media as a source for their information and news about politics.
Following the panel presentations, national political reporters posed a variety of questions:
- Responding to a question about efforts to pass restrictive state-level voter ID laws and their potential impacts on Latino turnout, Gary Segura described voter ID laws as a “very serious threat” to voter access for communities of color. “The biggest threat is not that people don’t have the necessary identification, but that a significant majority of people who do not have the necessary ID don’t know that they don’t have the necessary ID,” he said.
- In response to a related question about efforts to mobilize Latino voters, Segura explained that LD polling indicates that the average number of reported political contacts made by campaigns to Latino voters is often half the number reported by white and African American voters, which may itself have a suppressive effect on Latino voter turnout, enthusiasm and information about candidates and campaigns.
- And to a question about the potential electoral impacts of the controversial issue of immigration, Barreto explained that the post-June 2012 effect of President Obama’s DACA decision was “the single most important mobilizing factor” for Latino voters in the 2012 presidential campaign. To which Segura added, in the wake of the President’s refusal to use executive action to stem the record-setting flow of deportations in the run-up to the 2014 elections, “This Administration’s inability to learn from its own successes is remarkable.”
The pervasive theme throughout the panel was the potential—often frustrated, sometimes realized but almost never fully appreciated—of unregistered or under mobilized Latino voters to fundamentally alter the electoral calculus in American politics, and what, if anything, advocacy groups, the political parties and voting rights leaders ought to be doing to improve turnout among and attract the votes of Latino Americans.
Thomas Schaller is political director at Latino Decisions, a political columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
