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Nearly every aggregate study of minority legislative representation has observed outcomes of elections (officeholders), rather than the supply of minority candidates. Because of this, scholars have left a large amount of important data, the election losers, out of their models of minority representation. The evidence presented in this article demonstrates that voters in the United States cannot choose minority officeholders because there are rarely minority candidates on the ballot. I use state legislative candidate data from Carsey et al. () and Klarner et al. () to test models of Latino representation that correct for first‐stage selection bias. Once candidate self‐selection is taken into account, the probability of electing a Latino increases enormously. I then use data from 2010 to make out‐of‐sample predictions, which clearly favor the conditional model. Thus, our current understanding of Latino representation is significantly biased by ignoring the first stage of an election, a candidate's decision to run.

AbstractDo voters in white districts systematically obstruct minority representation? Despite a great deal of public and scholarly attention, this question remains largely unresolved. We demonstrate that the narrow focus on the relationship between white voters and minority representation is inadequate to understand why we do not see more minority-elected officials in the United States. We use a matching technique to investigate three theoretical perspectives of descriptive representation using a unique dataset from the 2012 general elections for state legislative seats in 14 states, the first elections after the 2010 redistricting process. Our findings challenge the venerable notion that minority candidates consistently underperform in white districts, and complicate our understanding of the political expression of bigotry in the voting booth.

Deracialization literature has a rich history, but it has generally focused on local-level black candidates in nonpartisan environments. This article extends the deracialization literature to a competitive statewide context and focuses on Latino candidates, offering a broader partisan environment where established deracialization theory and voter response are tested at the individual level. Both John Salazar's and Ken Salazar's successful 2004 campaigns for national office are explored using qualitative and quantitative data. The combined approaches yield evidence that Latinos in competitive partisan environments are influenced to deracialize their campaigns and that conservative non-Latino voters are positively and significantly influenced by these nonracial messages.

In the end, it came down to two brothers from Colorado's San Luis Valley. After all the talk of a tight presidential race, the power of the first time voters, 527 groups, Amendment 36, voter intimidation, and voter fraud, the story of the 2004 election in Colorado concerned two Latino farmers earning historic victories on Election Day. Ken Salazar and his older brother, John, became the first Latino senator and U.S. Representative, respectively, to be elected in the state of Colorado.1 That these victories took place in Colorado and not in states such as New Mexico or California that have larger bases of Latino voters and long records of electing Latinos to Congress creates new questions for those who study Latino politics. The answers to these questions may uncover the beginning of a new pattern in Latino politics, or they may simply reveal a blip on the screen, a unique event of no long-term consequence to Latinos in the United States. This chapter targets a number of puzzles regarding the condition of Latino politics in Colorado in 2004. The most intriguing question surrounds the ability of Ken and John Salazar, both Democrats, to win tightly contested elections in a moderately conservative state that supported George Bush by 9 percentage points (145,000 votes) in 2000. To be sure, John Kerry and the Democrats made some gains in the state, losing to Bush by only 5 percentage points (100,000 votes),2 but further analysis of the results reveals that Ken Salazar outgained Kerry (his statewide ticket partner) in sixty-two of Colorado's sixty-four counties . This feat required the Salazars to run campaigns that differed from the typical Latino Democrat, campaigns that we label "nonracial." Turning the tables on (or borrowing from) the Republican playbook to skim Latino voters from the Democrats, these candidates were able to appeal to Latino voters while converting a large number of nonLatinos . The successes of these campaigns, we argue, speak to some of the fundamental issues in Latino politics in the twenty-first century, making the Salazars a metaphor for the strategic fluidity of race and ethnicity in a changing national environment. Is the nonracial campaign the best way for Latinos to achieve descriptive representation in the new century? More specifically, is this the best strategy for electing Latinos to national and statewide seats in Republican-dominated areas? If so, what impact will these Latino elites have on policy? Are Latino voter preferences changing, and what does this mean for the two major parties at the national level?

Although research on immigration politics is extensive, few scholars have systematically connected immigration politics to the president's rhetoric over time. This is surprising since all modern presidents have referenced immigration in their public statements and presidents play a central role in setting the policy agenda. The primary purpose of this paper is to explain the president's immigration rhetoric since 1953. Thus, we collect all presidential speeches on immigration through the Obama Administration, calculating the president's monthly attention to immigration, and the relative negativity of the president's remarks. We theorize that presidents' motivation to speak about immigration policy is driven by the attention others devote to immigration policy, and key interventions in the immigration policy debate. Rhetorical tone, we think, is a function of the changing policy definition of immigration generated by Prop 187 and the Post-911 era. Our results show that the content of presidential rhetoric on immigration is indeed a product of these factors, providing us with clear evidence as to when the president devotes public attention to one of the central issues of American politics.

Abstract We use state legislator ideology estimates (standardized W‐nominate values) to examine whether Latino and African American legislator ideological differences can be explained away by traditional constituency characteristics like partisanship and demographics. We find instead that both Black and Latino legislators are unique "types." Our evidence supports the theoretical presumption that there is a minority dimension to legislative voting and that it is uniquely personified by minority officeholders. White, Black, Latino, Democrat, and Republican representatives are all examined for responsiveness to different partisan and racial/ethnic populations. The dataset includes all 50 state legislatures from the 1999–2000 legislative sessions, including information from the U.S. Census, NALEO, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Gerald Wright's Representation in the American Legislature Project, and CQ Press's Almanac of State Legislative Elections.

AbstractThe creation of racial/ethnic majority-minority districts lies at the heart of debates regarding the utility of descriptive representation for minority policy advocacy. The general puzzle that emerges from these debates, however, rests on the possibility that by electing representatives who are policy outsiders, minority interests would exert little influence in the policy decisions of median-dominated institutions. The authors present a model that shows how majority-minority districts can act to (1) increase the likelihood of electing minority representatives who are unique policy advocates and (2) concurrently increase the level of institutional status of descriptive representatives. The empirical analysis employs a novel data set of observations on political, sociodemographic, roll-call and institutional position, covering twenty U.S. states in the late 1990s and over 2,600 state legislative seats to show how majority-minority districts produce policy outsiders as well as institutional insiders.

Deracialization literature has a rich history, but it has generally focused on local-level black candidates in nonpartisan environments. This article extends the deracialization literature to a competitive statewide context and focuses on Latino candidates, offering a broader partisan environment where established deracialization theory and voter response are tested at the individual level. Both John Salazar's and Ken Salazar's successful 2004 campaigns for national office are explored using qualitative and quantitative data. The combined approaches yield evidence that Latinos in competitive partisan environments are influenced to deracialize their campaigns and that conservative non-Latino voters are positively and significantly influenced by these nonracial messages. Adapted from the source document.

This book thoroughly explores presidential rhetoric on immigration over time. Well written by noted scholars in the field, this book is of interest to students of scholars of political communication and rhetoric, immigration policy, and presidential studies.

Headlines touted a "wave" of women and minority candidates running in the 2018 elections, leading some to conclude that 2018 was the new "year of the woman" and perhaps "year of the candidate of color" (Lai et al. 2018). In fact, the number of women and candidates of color contesting US House elections was so high in 2018 that for the first time on record, White men were the minority of Democratic House nominees (Schneider 2018). Surveys taken immediately before the 2018 midterm elections indicated that women of color were the "ideal candidates" for Democrats, suggesting a changing voter demand for a more diverse field of candidates (Easley 2018).