Hispanic Voters in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential General Elections

In the highly contested 2004 presidential campaign, Republican George W. Bush captured a slim majority of the popular vote (Federal Election Commission 2005). Bush received 50.73 percent of the vote compared to 48.27 percent obtained by Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The 2.46 percent difference was larger than the 0.51 percentage difference that separated Bush and Al Gore in 2000 (Federal Election Commission 2001). Consequently, it is of interest to determine the groups with whom Bush specifically and the Republican party more generally made gains in 2004 over the level of support they received in 2000. Using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), we examine the extent to which Bush and the Republicans made gains among an increasingly important group and growing segment of the U.S. population, Hispanic Americans. Results from the NAES demonstrate that Bush made inroads with Hispanics in 2004. This did not mean, however, that Hispanics had more favorable impressions of Bush in 2004 than they did in 2000. Party identification among Hispanic registered voters was comparable for the two time periods. According to the National Elections Pool (NEP) exit poll, President Bush garnered 44 percent of the Hispanic vote (Kenski and Kenski 2005). That marked the second straight presidential election in which the Republican party significantly increased its share of Latino voters. In 1996, Robert Dole won 21 percent of these voters, and in 2000, Bush won 31 percent (Connelly 2004). There has been disagreement among political researchers and activists over the level of support Bush received from Hispanics in 2004 (Dunham 2004; Fears 2004). In an exit poll conducted by the William C. Velasquez Institute, Bush won 34 percent of the Latino vote, results similar to those found in 2000 (Dunham 2004). If the NEP exit poll figures are correct, then the story these numbers tell is one that questions whether Hispanics can be considered a voting bloc. After the 2004 election, political strategists argued that Hispanic voters may be breaking from their traditional Democratic voting patterns, no longer resembling a monolithic voting bloc at all. Instead, this "bloc" may become a demographic group that splits its votes more evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates (Kasindorf 2004). Democratic candidates may no longer be able to count on a majority of these voters to show up to the polls and vote for them. Despite evidence of an "emerging Democratic majority" (Judis and Teixeira 2002) fueled partly by Latino voters, other research suggests that a large portion of these voters has not yet settled on a political party. Unlike African Americans, who Democratic candidates rely on as a voting bloc, Hispanic voters may be more open to appeals from both political parties (Shapiro 2005). This line of argument suggests that there are still large segments of Latino voters that could be mobilized--arguably by either party--but simply have not been. A theme of the research in the recently published volume titled Muted Voices edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio (2005) is that Latino voters could be a much more powerful bloc if elites and Latino interest groups would only mobilize them. One implication of this situation for political parties is that with the right message, either party could appeal successfully to a large number of these voters. The research in this area sketches a kind of "field of dreams" scenario: if a political party can offer the right message to mobilize Hispanic voters, then they will respond. In other words, "if you ask them, they will come." The latest chapter in the debate about shifting Latino voters involves the extent of Bush's gains among Hispanics in the 2004 presidential election. Statisticians have challenged the NEP exit poll results. Some public opinion researchers have charged that those numbers are biased because they interviewed too few Latinos and too many suburbanites. …