Latino America: How America's Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation by Matt Barreto Gary Segura

Author:Matt Barreto, Gary Segura [Segura, Gary M.; Barreto, Matt]
Language: por
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610395021
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE 2012 CAMPAIGN

As campaigns have become more technologically sophisticated, they have fine-tuned the practice of micro-targeting specific messages or appeals to different subgroups of voters. In 2012 targeting Latinos became a significant endeavor for both presidential campaigns: in key battleground states such as Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia, Obama spent nearly $20 million on outreach to Latino voters, and Romney spent $10 million. Some researchers have found that campaigns that target Latino voters with ethnically salient get-out-the-vote appeals win more Latino votes.25 Data on campaign advertising also reveal that Spanish-language television and radio advertising can increase Latino turnout.26 The outreach efforts during the 2012 campaign were hardly “by the book,” however, nor were they equal in their effort. To understand why ethnically based messaging mattered so much in 2012, we first take a cursory look at the outreach efforts of the Obama and Romney campaigns.

In direct contrast to the 2008 election, in which Latino voters were fought over state by state in a competitive and long-lasting Democratic primary contest, the 2012 election included a Republican primary contest in which Latinos often felt under attack. Attempting to attract what they perceived as an anti-immigrant voting bloc in the conservative primary elections, the leading Republican candidates took a very hard-line stance against undocumented immigrants, bilingual education, and bilingual voting materials. Most importantly, Mitt Romney, who feared being called a moderate by the more conservative primary candidates, staked out a firm, unwavering, and unforgiving position on immigration. As mentioned earlier, Romney said that he would address the issue of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States through a policy of “self-deportation.” In repeated follow-up interviews and debates, when asked what self-deportation actually meant, Romney explained that he wanted to institute a series of laws that would crack down on unauthorized immigrants by making it so impossible for them to work that, unable to make ends meet, they would have no choice but to “self-deport” to escape their miserable lives in America. While this may have sounded reasonable to some Republican primary voters, Romney’s “self-deportation” statement and continued explanations of the policy sounded ridiculous to most Latinos. On November 7, 2012, the day after the election, Latina Republican strategist Ana Navarro quipped via Twitter that looking at the exit poll data for Latinos, “Romney just self-deported himself from the White House.”

The “self-deportation” comment was not Romney’s only trouble with Latinos. During a presidential debate, he said that he would “veto the DREAM Act.” About the same time, Romney named Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, as his principal adviser on immigration. Kobach was the architect of the Arizona SB 1070 anti-immigrant legislation (see Chapter 7) and had a hand in crafting copycat legislation in Alabama; he is widely despised by Latino activists. In addition to his close connections with Kobach, Romney appeared in photographs alongside Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the law enforcement officer from Maricopa County, Arizona, who perhaps more than other figure today embodies anti-immigrant and anti-Latino policy. Nationally known

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