Maybe It Is Just Partisanship After All… Latinxs, Trump, and the 2020 Election

• In Event: Latinxs in the 2020 Presidential Election

Abstract

Leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and over his years in office, Donald Trump articulated political views that portrayed Latinx communities as un-American, and restricted immigration from Latin America to the U.S. And yet, all through the Trump administration and into the 2020 U.S. presidential election, support for Trump among a not insignificant segment of the Latinx American population has remained consistent and may actually have increased. This support seems puzzling given that much of the existing race and ethnic politics literature suggests that perceptions of discrimination and threat among members of racialized minority groups, as well as concerns over linked fate with co-ethnics, significantly shapes political preferences. To test whether the discrimination/threat hypothesis held for Latinx support of Trump in the lead-up to the 2020 election, we collected an original nationally representative sample of Latinx Americans. Using embedded survey experiments, we tested whether respondents would shift their baseline evaluations of Trump after they were presented information on several Trump policies that had adverse impacts on Latinx communities. Initial analysis of our data indicates no significant effect of the treatments on the sample's approval of Trump or vote choice, examining both in-unit and between unit change. Drawing on additional data from our survey as well as the 2019 CCES, we argue that contra the threat literature, Latinx partisanship is not only stable, but once established may in fact trump considerations of ethnic identity. Ultimately, we posit that partisan identities among Latinx Americans work much the same way as they do for most Americans, suggesting that research on Latinx Americans may need to reevaluate the relationships between race/ethnicity and partisanship.

Authors

• Hajer Al-Faham, University of Pennsylvania

• Roberto Carlos, University of Georgia

• Michael Jones-Correa, University of Pennsylvania