Abstract
Although scholars theoretically acknowledge the diversity of the Latina/o/x vote, few studies have investigated similarities or differences beyond those of the largest Latina/o/x groups. To better understand the nuance of the Latina/o/x vote, this article examines the political preferences of Colombian Americans relative to those of other Latina/o/x subgroups in the United States. We pool data from six surveys of Latinas/os/xs during the 2016 presidential election to construct the first and largest nationally representative sample of US Colombians. Our findings highlight many similarities between Colombian Americans and other Latinas/os/xs, including partisan affiliation and likelihood of voting. At the same time, there are differences in support for individual political candidates, which suggests that important sources of heterogeneity are present within the Latina/o/x vote. Although the concept of the “Latina/o/x vote” holds ground because of the commonalities shared by subgroups under this umbrella, the notable differences warrant careful analysis and consideration.
Resumen
Aunque los académicos reconocen teóricamente la diversidad del voto latino, pocos estudios han investigado más allá de las similitudes o las diferencias de los grupos latinos más grandes. Con el fin de entender mejor los matices del voto latino, este trabajo examina las preferencias políticas de los colomboestadounidenses en comparación con las de otros subgrupos latinos en los Estados Unidos. Agrupamos los datos de seis encuestas a latinos llevadas a cabo durante la elección presidencial de 2016 para construir la primera amplia muestra representativa de colomboestadounidenses a nivel nacional. Nuestros resultados resaltan las numerosas similitudes entre este y otros grupos latinos, incluida la afiliación partidista y la probabilidad de ejercer el voto. Al mismo tiempo, hay diferencias en el apoyo a candidatos políticos individuales que implican la presencia de importantes fuentes de heterogeneidad dentro del voto latino. Aunque el concepto del “voto latino” se mantiene firme dadas las características compartidas por los subgrupos agrupados bajo esta sombrilla, hay diferencias notables que ameritan consideración y un análisis más profundo.
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Notes
We use US Colombian and Colombian American interchangeably as gender-neutral terms to express individuals of Colombian descent living in the United States. This includes those who were born in Colombia (referred to as foreign-born), as well as those born in the United States who self-identify as having Colombian ancestry (referred to as native-born).
The pooled dataset includes data from six surveys, all of which were conducted and fielded by the firm Latino Decisions. Latino Decisions is the nation’s leading expert in Latina/o/x public opinion informed by social science methodology standards. Even though all six surveys were conducted at different points throughout the 2016 presidential election campaign, given Latino Decisions’ methodology and proportional sampling of the Latina/o/x population, we can be confident that the pooling of the data provides a robust and large-N dataset of various Latina/o/x national-origin groups in the United States. Respondents were recruited by Latino Decisions and its managing partner Pacific Market Research using large lists of registered voters from Catalist and an extensive database of consumer lists.
All six of the data were conducted with the goal of studying the political opinions and behaviors of the Latina/o/x population. As Appendix 1 indicates, two out of the six samples were conducted among Latina/o/x registered voters in the battleground states of Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. The remainder of the surveys sampled respondents nationally. Given that no particular preference was given to Latina/o/x voters of certain national origin, we have no reason to suspect that the dynamics that led Colombians to show up in the data were any different than those that led other Latinas/os/xs to also show up in the data. Also, given that at least two of the samples drew specifically from the battleground state of Florida, we believe this helped the inclusion of Colombians into the pooled data given that most of the US Colombian population resides in the state of Florida.
Other social scientists have used pooling as a method to increase their sample size specially when studying racial and ethnic minorities, given how few of them appear in any given national survey (Tesler 2012).
Given that most of the surveys were conducted prior to the election, we were able to obtain items that asked respondents only about the certainty of their participation in the upcoming presidential election. We coded only respondents who were very certain that they would participate in the election as “yes” and those less certain as “no”.
The ‘Something Else' category includes issues such as anti-Latina/o/x discrimination and race relations, criminal justice and incarceration, terrorism and foreign policy, global warming, housing affordability, abortion and gay marriage, among others.
By setting US Colombians as the reference category, we are able to compare them to the other groups.
In every model, we also incorporate variables that represent or account for each survey. These controls allow us to account for any differences that may exist between surveys that are not otherwise reflected in demographic and socioeconomic status characteristics. Although these variables are included in the models, the final tables do not reflect their values since they are not relevant to the analysis.
Although ordered logistic regression models would appear to be the best choice in examining an ordinal variable with five categories, we found that the favorability measures violated the proportional odds assumption. In an ordered logistic regression, it is assumed that the increase from one category to the next higher category is the same across all levels. However, this was not the case for the favorability measures. Next, we attempted to recode favorability into three levels: not favorable, neither, favorable. However, this also violated the proportional odds assumption. As recourse, we modeled these as logistic regressions for two of the favorability categories.
It is important to note that these numbers reflect self-reported turnout, which may represent an overestimation due to social desirability bias. It is possible that some people who report that they will vote are not likely to do so.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank María Elena Cepeda, Lina Rincón, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Johana Londoño, the anonymous reviewers, and the Latino Studies editorial team for their helpful suggestions and feedback. We also thank Matt Barreto and Latino Decisions for making this project possible.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Summary of individual datasets
Dataset | Description | Sample size | Field date |
|---|---|---|---|
America’s Voice/Latino Decisions 2016 3-State Battleground Survey | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered voters in battleground states using a multi-method mode of online surveys, cell phone and landline phone interviews | n = 1499 | April 2016 |
America’s Voice/Latino Decisions 2016 National and Battleground State Poll | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered voters at the national level and battleground states using a multi-method mode of online surveys, cell phone and landline phone interviews | n = 3729 | August 2016 |
Latino Victory Project Battleground Survey | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered voters in battleground states using a multi-method mode of online surveys, cell phone and landline phone interviews | n = 809 | August 2016 |
NALEO Election Tracking Poll | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered voters at the national level using an online mode | n = 2271 | November 2016 |
Latino Decisions Election Eve Poll | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered and likely voters at the national level using a multi-method mode of online surveys, cell phone and landline phone interviews | n = 5599 | November 2016 |
Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS)—Latina/o/x Sample | Bilingual survey of Latina/o/x registered and non-registered voters using an online mode | n = 3003 | December 2016 |
Appendix 2: Sample sizes for each Latina/o/x origin group
Country of origin | Sample size | Percent of pooled dataset |
|---|---|---|
Argentina | n = 169 | 0.9 |
Bolivia | n = 117 | 0.6 |
Chile | n = 92 | 0.5 |
Colombia | n = 531 | 3.1 |
Costa Rica | n = 111 | 0.7 |
Cuba | n = 1070 | 6.3 |
Dominican Republic | n = 613 | 3.6 |
Ecuador | n = 187 | 1.1 |
El Salvador | n = 401 | 2.4 |
Guatemala | n = 201 | 1.2 |
Honduras | n = 143 | 0.8 |
Mexico | n = 7388 | 43.7 |
Nicaragua | n = 163 | 0.9 |
Other country | n = 483 | 2.8 |
Panama | n = 112 | 0.6 |
Paraguay | n = 12 | 0.07 |
Peru | n = 260 | 1.5 |
Puerto Rico | n = 2292 | 13.6 |
Refused | n = 481 | 2.8 |
Spain | n = 1181 | 7.0 |
USA | n = 567 | 3.4 |
Uruguay | n = 22 | 0.08 |
Venezuela | n = 314 | 1.8 |
Appendix 3: Summary statistics
US Colombians | Latinas/os/xs | |
|---|---|---|
Age | ||
18–34 years old | 30.9% | 30.7% |
35–49 years old | 30.0% | 24.9% |
50–64 years old | 21.8% | 24.2% |
65 years old and above | 17.4% | 20.2% |
Income | ||
Less than $20,000 | 11.3% | 15.4% |
$20,000 to $40,000 | 15.4% | 20.0% |
$40,000 to $60,000 | 19.0% | 16.9% |
$60,000 to $80,000 | 13.2% | 12.6% |
$80,000 to $100,000 | 11.3% | 12.1% |
$100,000 to $150,000 | 8.3% | 8.6% |
More than $150,000 | 10.4% | 8.9% |
Refused | 11.1% | 5.3% |
Education | ||
Grades 1 to 8 | 1.3% | 5.9% |
Some high school | 3.4% | 6.1% |
High school degree | 12.1% | 19.6% |
Some college | 24.3% | 29.6% |
College degree | 37.3% | 25.4% |
Postgraduate degree | 20.7% | 12.0% |
Refused | 0.9% | 1.4% |
Gender | ||
Female | 54.0% | 56.8% |
Male | 46.0% | 43.2% |
Nativity | ||
Foreign-born | 68.4% | 32.3% |
US-born | 31.6% | 67.7% |
Partisanship | ||
Democrat | 68.9% | 66.4% |
Independent | 7.9% | 8.0% |
Republican | 21.1% | 21.4% |
Other party | 0.6% | 1.2% |
Refused | 1.5% | 3.0% |
Acculturation | ||
Spanish-language ability | 45.1% | 31.7% |
English-language ability | 54.9% | 68.3% |
Favorability toward Obama | ||
Very unfavorable | 14.5% | 17.9% |
Somewhat unfavorable | 8.0% | 9.6% |
Somewhat favorable | 28.1% | 27.0% |
Very favorable | 46.0% | 42.4% |
Refused | 3.1% | 3.1% |
Favorability toward Clinton | ||
Very unfavorable | 36.6% | 37.7% |
Somewhat unfavorable | 10.2% | 11.9% |
Somewhat favorable | 31.5% | 23.9% |
Very favorable | 19.0% | 22.8% |
Refused | 2.6% | 3.7% |
Favorability toward Trump | ||
Very unfavorable | 55.1% | 51.3% |
Somewhat unfavorable | 13.1% | 12.7% |
Somewhat favorable | 15.6% | 13.7% |
Very favorable | 8.2% | 10.0% |
Refused | 8.0% | 12.2% |
Understand politics | ||
Strongly disagree | 15.7% | 12.4% |
Somewhat disagree | 19.4% | 18.4% |
Neither agree nor disagree | 20.9% | 23.6% |
Somewhat agree | 32.1% | 31.2% |
Strongly agree | 11.9% | 14.5% |
Influence Politics | ||
Strongly disagree | 5.2% | 5.4% |
Somewhat disagree | 16.4% | 12.9% |
Neither agree nor disagree | 32.1% | 28.6% |
Somewhat agree | 26.9% | 32.6% |
Strongly agree | 19.3% | 20.5% |
Self-reported turnout | ||
Yes | 78.7% | 80.2% |
No | 21.3% | 19.8% |
Immigration attitudes | ||
Favorable | 71.1% | 66.9% |
Neither | 15.1% | 18.4% |
Unfavorable | 11.7% | 12.6% |
Refused | 2.1% | 2.1% |
Perceived discrimination against | ||
Latinos | ||
Not a problem at all | 7.0% | 9.5% |
A minor problem | 47% | 47% |
A major problem | 46% | 43.5% |
N = 531 | N = 16,910 |
Appendix 4: Characteristics of US Colombian population from US Census 2017 American Community Survey
US Colombians in 2017 American Community Survey | |
|---|---|
Age | |
18–24 years old | 12.6% |
25–34 years old | 19.9% |
35–44 years old | 19.2% |
45–54 years old | 19.3% |
55–64 years old | 15.8% |
65 + years old | 13.1% |
Household income | |
Median household income | $58,847 |
Education | |
Less than HS diploma | 12.2% |
HS diploma | 26.3% |
Some college | 28.1% |
College degree | 21.3% |
Postgraduate degree | 12.1% |
Gender | |
Female | 54.3% |
Male | 45.7% |
Nativity | |
Foreign-born | 62.0% |
US-born | 38.0% |
Acculturation | |
Speaks English less than “very well” | 37.7% |
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Ocampo, A.N., Ocampo, A.X. Disaggregating the Latina/o/x “umbrella”: The political attitudes of US Colombians. Lat Stud 18, 390–419 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00268-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00268-2