Why don’t Latinos vote?

By E.M. | NEW YORK

VOTER turnout for American Latinos lags about 20 percentage points behind that of white and African-American voters. In the presidential contests of 2008 and 2012, for example, when turnout among blacks exceeded that among whites, more than half of voting-aged Latinos stayed home. With this year’s mid-term elections at hand, Americans are wondering: why don’t Latinos vote?

A mix of individual and environmental factors are at play. Non-voters, some Americans might argue, fail to realise the importance of an individual vote. Political scientists claim that individual characteristics such as educational attainment and income may explain why some Americans vote less often than others. But voter-turnout records show a more complicated picture. Latinos without high-school diplomas actually vote more often than whites without them, according to a book by Bernard Fraga, a political scientist, called “The Turnout Gap”. Mr Fraga argues that campaigns and political parties are doing a lousy job of targeting Hispanic voters. Instead of going after all voters, campaigns usually focus extra efforts on the voters who are most likely to show up, reinforcing existing turnout patterns and failing to mobilise new voters. Another explanation is that Hispanics are not as unified in their identity as is widely believed. Florida’s Cuban-Americans are much more conservative than the state’s Puerto Rican population. In Texas, “Hispanic” is used in reference both to Mexican-Americans whose families have lived in the state for hundreds of years and to recent migrants from Central America. In comparison, black Americans have a comparatively unified identity and a history of mass political organising since before the civil-rights era. The hypothesis that Hispanics share a political identity—something that campaigns can use to target, and ultimately mobilise, voters—might be mistaken.