Effect of Election Day Vote Centers on Voter Participation

In this article we study the effects of Election Day vote centers on voter turnout. Specifically we examine Texas and Colorado’s experience with alternative arrangements for the number and location of Election Day voting places and its impact on voter turnout in the 2006 and 2008 elections. We test our hypotheses at both the aggregate (i.e., county) and individual levels. We find evidence that vote centers increase voter turnout in presidential and midterm elections, and particularly among infrequent voters in midterms

Emerging Pattern or Unique Event? The Power of the Non-Racial Campaign in Colorado

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

Deracialization and Latino Politics: The Case of the Salazar Brothers in Colorado

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\u27s and Ken Salazar\u27s 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

Replication Data for: One Run Leads to Another: Minority Incumbents and the Emergence of Lower Ticket Minority Candidates

This repository includes data and code needed to recreate Figure 1 in the main text and all tables and figures in the Online Appendix of "One Run Leads to Another: Minority Incumbents and the Emergence of Lower Ticket Minority Candidates.

Structural choices and representational biases: The post-election color of representation

Representation scholars link descriptive representation of blacks and Latinos in legislative bodies to substantive policy representation. We examine this relationship on local school boards where issue salience is high, the cost of gaining legislative access is relatively low, and nonpartisan elections produce a greater likelihood of linking policy preferences to racial cues. Theoretically, we connect substantive representation to the method of election; blacks and Latinos elected at-large face different constraints than their ward-elected counterparts, and thus behave differently on an at-large board than they would on a ward-elected one. This theoretical story suggests a number of hypotheses that we test using cross-sectional data from 1000+ school districts in Texas. Using OLS, we find that the type of election has significant direct and indirect effects on the hiring of black and Latino administrators and teachers to the school district, after controlling for other factors. We find that election type has descriptive representational effects for Latinos, but more importantly, electoral constraints produce variable substantive policy outcomes once both black and Latino officials take office