Latino cabinet appointments and young Latino voters: A preliminary look at GOP efforts to attract Latino voters

The authors’ names are listed alphabetically.

Abstract

We examine whether the recent GOP efforts to make Latino cabinet appointments have appealed to young Latinos who comprise a large proportion of the Latino electorate. We found that young Latinos were not aware of many of these appointments and the appointment of Alberto Gonzales to the post of Attorney General was the most visible Latino appointment. Though many did not support Gonzales’ appointment, those we surveyed were eager to see more visible Latino appointments in the future and reported that their perceptions of the Republican Party and former President Bush were improved by the appointment. We also found that young Latinos’ support for the president was greatly impacted by their perception of presidential interest in their community and we argue that Latino representation in appointments may become increasingly important as the Latino population expands.

Acknowledgements

Partial funding for this research was provided by the CSBS Research Center and an earlier version of the manuscript was presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. We thank Bob Wrinkle, Matt Barreto and Stephen Nuño for their helpful comments and Nicole Hart for her technical assistance.

Notes

The authors’ names are listed alphabetically.

1 See Lopez and Minushkin (2008) for the most recent Latino partisanship survey.

2 The sample was constructed by going to every section of the required introductory political science courses early in the Spring 2008 semester and asking students to complete the survey at the beginning of the class.

3 2006 American Community Survey.

4 It is essential to note that there are regional differences among Latino communities in terms of their party identification and support. In Texas, Latinos are generally Democrats but they are comparatively more conservative than Latinos in other regions such as California or New York.

5 We want to stress that this issue rank-order question was asked prior to other political knowledge questions to eliminate any framing effect within the survey instrument.

6 Other appointments were excluded because less than 4% of respondents expressed the knowledge of those appointments.