How Will Minorities Vote In This Election?

On the surface it seems that answering this question would be the main reason to study race and politics. Why else would studying minority voting matter? Studying the voting patterns of any group is useful mostly for answering the question why different groups of people vote a certain way? Throughout our history, minority voters have been affected by the same issues that have affected the majority, but there have been other issues that didn’t directly affect the majority, White Americans, in the same way. Civil Rights, segregation, racism, job discrimination, to name a few. So why are these things important today? Because they affect where we are and where we’re going. How do today’s prejudices affect voting? These are difficult complex questions.

African Americans today overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, but this has not always been the case. From the 1860’s until the Great Depression the Republican Party enjoyed very consistent African American support because Republican Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. There was a major shift of African American support from the Republicans to the Democrats resulting from Roosevelt’s New-Deal Coalition. From the 1930's to the 1960's, the Democratic and Republican Parties competed on a roughly equal level (if we compare their civil rights platforms) for black votes, and Republicans could earn a substantial minority of the black vote. This changed in 1964, when presidential candidate Barry Goldwater refused to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At that point, blacks began to perceive that the Democrats had the more progressive civil rights platform. Since then, blacks have overwhelmingly voted for Democratic candidates.

In the upcoming 2008 election, there seems little to suggest that blacks will change their voting behavior. We have a strong Democratic candidate who also happens to be Black, and Democrats retain their substantive advantage on civil rights issues. However, Asians and Hispanics voting is a little harder to predict.

For starters, the terms “Latino” and “Asian American” encompass many different ethnic groups, whose political outlooks can vary. For instance, Cuban Americans are more likely to identify and vote as Republicans, while Mexican, Puerto Rican and Central Americans are more likely to identify and vote as Democrats.

Recently, the Republican Party has done particularly well among Latino voters. After engaging in targeted outreach efforts to Latinos in 2000 and 2004, Bush saw his share of the of the Latino vote increase 9 percentage points between 2004 than 2000. However, given the Republican Party’s more recent anti-immigrant stances, it is unlikely that Republicans are going to replicate that level of success among Latinos in this election.

For Asian Americans, there has been an overall trend towards the Democratic Party. While many Asian Americans do not profess to have a partisan preference, those who do express a partisan preference are more likely to identify with the Democratic. Asian immigrants from totalitarian regimes are more likely to identify with the Republican Party, though. However, both parties have done a lackluster job in reaching out to members of the Asian American community. This means that both parties may potentially overlook key votes that could change the course of the election in moderately competitive states such as Washington State.


For further reading:

Edward Carmines and James Stimson. 1989. Issue Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rodolfo de la Garza and Louis DeSipio (Eds.). 2005. Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Pie-te Lien, Margaret Conway and Janelle Wong. 2004. The Politics of Asian Americans. New York: Routledge.

Tasha Philpot. 2007. Race, Republicans and the Return of the Party of Lincoln. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.