Latino Attitudes and Support for Barack Obama : Three Windows into a (Nearly) Baseless Myth

In the 2008 national election, a Latino race narrative suggesting that racial prejudice among Latino citizens shape their electoral choices. Specifically, racial views were offered as an explanation for high levels of Hispanic support of Hillary Clinton and as a rationale for the superiority of a Clinton general election campaign rather than an Obama one. The implication was that racial sentiment would undermine support for Obama. In this effort, we examine each of these contentions. We argue, first, that examination of polling data from the pre-primary season through the early months of the Obama administration offers no support for the Latino race narrative. Second, we show that, while Latino voters often express racial sentiments indistinguishable from whites, these sentiments played little role in creating a preference for Clinton. Rather, racial sentiments — while important to white voters — are unrelated to the differentiation of Clinton from Obama among Latino citizens. Finally, we demonstrate a significant disconnect between those racial sentiments and Latinos' vote choice in the general election. In so doing, we explore the relative explanatory power of explicit, indirect and implicit measures of racial sentiment and find that an indirect measurement, specifically the Racial Resentment Index, retains the greatest predictive validity. Taken together, our results suggest that, Latino racial views notwithstanding, there is no evidence for racial attitudes affecting Latino preferences in either the primary or general election processes