The Interest Gap

Efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to court Hispanic voters this election season may have a limited effect. A study recently released by Harvard University suggests that Hispanics are still paying less attention to the presidential race than other groups. And surprisingly, the so-called interest gap actually grew during the height of the primary season.

Thomas Patterson, a co-director of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says the gap in participation rates between Hispanics and other Americans has been declining over the years, but it still exits.

According to national polls conducted by Harvard's Shorenstein Center, 63 percent of Hispanics said they paid almost no attention to the campaign during a typical week; compared to 57 percent for other groups. During the peak of the primary season - from mid-January to mid-March - the overall level of voter involvement increased by just 18 percent among Hispanics, while it doubled among non-Hispanics.

Patterson says he was surprised by the numbers from the early primary season. "It speaks in part to the difficulty of mobilizing groups that have not traditionally been involved," he said.

Patterson believes the political parties' efforts to appeal to the country's fastest-growing voting bloc is unlikely to result in increased voter participation this election season. "It [the campaign] really hasn’t overcome all those other things that contribute to lower turnout levels," he says.

Those contributing factors include income, education level and age. Given that Latino voters on average are younger and lag behind non-Hispanics in income and education, another researcher expressed surprise the gap was so small, especially considering the study had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a political scientist at Cal State University at Long Beach, recently completed a book on Latino voters in the Los Angeles area.

"You’re not comparing apples and apples," she says, in reference to studies plotting the attitudes of Hispanics versus non-Hispanics. "For me, the issue is really what is 'attention.'" To be sure, measuring the qualitative impact of campaigns is a soft science at best, and surveys involving Hispanic voters typically rely on very small samples.

Bedolla, a Democrat, studied the campaign styles and ads of presidential contenders Al Gore and George W. Bush in the recent California primary. While she thinks Bush's Spanish-language ads were far superior to Gore's, she feels neither candidate offered anything more than a few phraseof Spanish and campaign-stop mariachi bands.

"I don’t think there was anything concrete coming from Bush and Gore," Bedolla says, "that would necessarily resonate with voters interested in bread and butter issues."

While the same argument could be made about ads and speeches aimed at non-Hispanics, Bedolla says the effort it takes to pay attention and filter out the rhetoric is greater for Hispanics. She says well-educated and affluent people are more likely to discuss politics at work or with family and friends. They may have more time to seek out information on candidates and greater ability to analyze it. Hispanics, on average, haven't been exposed to that level of political socialization.

"The threshold is higher," says Bedolla. To appeal to these voters, a candidate must be "very specific about what you are doing and how it will affect their lives."

That doesn't appear to be happening, according to another finding in the Vanishing Voter survey. Nearly half the Hispanic respondents felt the outcome of the presidential election would make little or no difference in their lives, a position shared by just 41 percent of non-Hispanics.

"You have this feeling of separation … that politics is for white people," says Bedolla, who interviewed 100 Latinos for her book.

Yet Hispanics also tend to be less cynical about the political process, according to the Harvard study. Patterson attributes that to a sense of "wonder and enthusiasm" for the American political system among recent immigrants.

Bedolla suggests it may be more complicated that that. Her research indicates that some Latinos value the system so much that they consider themselves unworthy to vote, and would rather leave the decision-making to those who know better. "In a strange way, they believe political participation is so important, it makes them less likely to participate."