A new paper co-authored by Laura Wray-Lake, associate professor of social welfare, measures the impact of former President Donald Trump’s early months in office on the sociopolitical development of American adolescents. Published today in the journal Child Development, the paper found that adolescents translate what they observe in the political world around them through the lens of their existing beliefs. The study shows that growing divisions in society are also evident among the nation’s youth. The authors, including Wray-Lake, researcher Danielle Dunn and doctoral student Jason Plummer, examined whether approval, disapproval or having no opinion of Trump in 2017 predicted shifts in sociopolitical development in 2018. Using a sample of 1,433 students in 9th through 12th grades who were racially, ethnically, geographically and politically diverse, the researchers measured experiences of marginalization, critical analysis of race and inequality, deliberation skills, and intended and actual political actions. “Youth who disapproved of Trump, especially Latinx youth, felt targeted and marginalized, likely as a product of Trump’s hostile rhetoric and policies toward multiple groups including Latinx immigrants,” the authors wrote. “Meanwhile, young supporters of Trump showed less awareness of inequality and placed less value on racial equality and diversity, suggesting that they may be adopting values and beliefs of like-minded political leaders.” The study also found that both supporters and detractors of Trump increased their capacity to engage politically compared to youth with no opinion. The authors noted that the study is relevant beyond the Trump years, as it offers a reminder that many adolescents are actively paying attention to politics.
Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas, research director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, spoke to the Atlantic about Latino voter trends in the United States. In the 2020 election, incumbent President Donald Trump won a higher share of Latino votes than he did four years earlier. Domínguez-Villegas said he thinks Trump’s 2020 performance with Latinos was mostly a reversion to the mean after a low ebb in 2016. “It was going back to the historic numbers for the Republican Party,” he said. However, experts disagree about what to expect in the next election. “Latino voters still prefer the Democratic candidates by pretty large margins,” Domínguez-Villegas said. “In some places, [there were] smaller margins than 2016, but nothing out of the ordinary.” The 2020 election also challenged the common misconception that Latino voters are a monolith. “We slice white voters to tiny little slivers, and we don’t do the same with Latino voters,” he said.
Public Policy Professor Mark Peterson spoke to the American Independent about the decision of some Republicans to leave their party after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. While many GOP officials stand by Trump, an unusually high number of current and former lawmakers, as well as voters, are quitting the party, deepening its ideological divide. Peterson said that while the exodus is a break from the norm, the long-term impact is unclear. Continued attention on Trump’s performance in office might reduce his hold on voters, he said. The article also noted that party dynamics may change if GOP lawmakers struggle to get out the vote without Trump on the ticket.
Research Professor Paul Ong spoke to NBC News about President Biden’s immigration policies and rhetoric, which are being closely watched by much of the nation’s foreign-born population. Some immigrants who are grappling with scarcity and insecurity in the United States were particularly susceptible to Trump administration characterizations of “good immigrants” and “bad immigrants,” the article noted. It added that limited access to unbiased information in a native language contributes to the level of vulnerability to such rhetoric. Ong offered the example of Vietnamese Americans, who have been closely allied with the Republican Party. Many come from refugee families shaped by unique experiences with the Vietnam War and strong opposition to communism. This background makes the group more likely to buy into an American nationalistic narrative, Ong said.
A new report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative shows that Latino voters were decisive in sending President-elect Joe Biden to the White House. Researchers analyzed votes cast in 13 states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin — that collectively are home to about 80% of the Latino electorate. Researchers estimated that nationwide Latino voter turnout increased 30.9% compared with the 2016 presidential election. Among voters of all races, turnout was 15.9% greater. The impact of the growing Latino electorate was evident in battleground states. In Arizona, where Latinos represent 25.2% of all registered voters, the electorate’s size and turnout helped secure Biden’s victory. Even in Wisconsin and Georgia, where Latinos make up less than 5% of registered voters, their strong support of the Democratic candidate helped tip the scales to victory by margins of less than a single percentage point. The report also provides context for a prominent post-election talking point. Many observers said that results in Miami-Dade County, Florida — where Trump got support from a majority of Latino voters — was evidence of a wider Latino swing toward the president. Trump did win the state, but the UCLA report found that in all Florida counties outside of Miami-Dade, Latino voters favored Biden by a margin of 2 to 1. By looking at votes cast and demographic data at the precinct level, the report offers a more accurate analysis of the impact of Latino voters than other studies that have relied on exit polls, which do not capture enough Latino voters.
Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KCAL9 News after a mob loyal to President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. “What happened today did not happen by accident,” said Yaroslavsky, noting that Trump had for weeks called on his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Yaroslavsky said invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power could have a calming effect on the nation. “It’s been four years of this tension, of this instability, of this constant drone of craziness,” he said. “In the next 14 days, if you have an unstable president, there’s a lot of damage he can do.” Yaroslavsky, who has served as an overseas election observer for three decades, lamented the damage done to the United States’ reputation as a beacon of democracy. “Imagine people all over the world watching the spectacle that we were all watching.”
The pivotal role that Latino voters played in this year’s battle for the White House provides a roadmap for engaging with the diverse and growing constituency in decades to come.
To chart the way, experts from UCLA and elsewhere are digging into data from the 2020 vote to find answers to questions still lingering after Election Day.
Which issues resonated with Latino voters from state to state, in urban and rural communities, and from different ethnicities and age groups? How did President-elect Joe Biden build a winning coalition — and why did President Donald Trump make unexpected gains among the Latino electorate?
“Latinos want to feed their families, they want security, they want a president who’s going to deal with this pandemic, and we saw that in our polling across the board,” Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told the virtual audience.
But the panelists emphasized that the biggest takeaway from 2020 is that Latinos do not vote with a single mind.
‘The youth in our community is transforming our electorate, and so we need to reach out to them, get them engaged.’ — UCLA Professor Matt Barreto
“There are things that bind us together, but our politics are unique,” said Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor of political science and Chicano/a studies who advised the Biden campaign. “At the end of the day, Latinos want to be engaged, as Latinos but also as Americans.”
Finding ways for candidates to connect with this complex electorate is a top priority given its rapid growth — more than 16 million Latino votes were cast this year, compared to about 7.5 million in 2004, Barreto said. The trend will continue, he noted, saying that in Arizona alone, 175,000 U.S.-born Latino high school students just missed the chance to cast a ballot this year but will be eligible to vote in 2024 and beyond.
“The youth in our community is transforming our electorate, and so we need to reach out to them, get them engaged, let them feel heard and massively target voter registration campaigns,” said Barreto, who also serves as faculty co-director of LPPI, which is based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
One notable trend in 2020: Trump’s campaign message that the U.S. economy would be stronger under his watch hit home with both the white, non-college-educated males who formed his base as well as with U.S.-born Latino males under 40 — but “Latinas were not having any of this nonsense,” said Mike Madrid, former political director for the California GOP and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which was launched by disaffected Republicans working to unseat the president.
“Trump had stronger numbers than anybody anticipated, and we’ve got to recognize that if we’re going to be honest about what’s happening in the community,” said Madrid, who remains a member of the Republican Party.
Broadcast journalist María Elena Salinas, the moderator, said that several other GOP analysts were invited to participate on the panel but declined.
Madrid said the conservative economic, foreign policy and moral platforms that originally drew him to the Republican Party have been replaced by “white identity grievance politics.”
“I believe that the majority party in the next 20 years will be the one that captures the economic aspirations of a multicultural middle class,” he said. “The Republican Party has a significant problem with that because they’re not interested in a multicultural anything. The Democratic Party, I think, really needs to refine some of their economic messages.”
That messaging was met with skepticism on rural stretches of the campaign trail, said panelist Rudy Soto, a Democrat who lost his recent bid to win a congressional seat in the red state of Idaho.
He recounted one conversation with a Latino father and son who asked, “ ‘Why are you pushing to give everything away for free?’… That doesn’t represent what we are actually about,” Soto said.
“In rural America and much of suburban America, where Hispanic communities are at the forefront of growth,” Soto said. “We’re seeing a lot of struggles when it comes to the Democratic Party’s message connecting with people,” Soto said.
Perez predicted that the Biden administration would be quick to enact policies that benefit the Latino community, building support for the Democrats’ agenda.
As the record turnout in this year’s race showed, “Latinos are difference makers across the country,” helping to tip the scales in tight races from Arizona to Wisconsin to Georgia, he said.
During this election cycle, Democrats used sophisticated modeling tools to tailor messages to multiple Latino audiences, a strategy that has long been used to parse the white electorate.
“For the better part of the 21st century, campaigns have had efforts to micro-target and understand different segments of the white vote: suburban women, non-college-educated men, young, sort of hipster Portland types, whatever it is,” Barreto said.
The Biden campaign used the same technique — massive sampling and community-driven outreach — to zero in on issues important to diverse Latino segments, he said.
U.S.-born children of immigrants who are voting for the first time likely have different priorities than families rooted in their communities for several generations, he said. And voters with ties to Cuba, Venezuela, Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico and elsewhere bring their own lenses to the American experience.
Democrats are now studying the lessons of 2020 to position themselves for future engagement with the Latino electorate, the panelists said. This includes building up the infrastructure to more aggressively combat misinformation, lobbying for fair maps in the next round of redistricting, and grooming Latino candidates for office up and down the ballot.
“Latinos, like other voters of color, cannot be taken for granted by either party, candidates or campaigns,” said LPPI Executive Director Sonja Diaz in remarks ending the webinar. “The campaigns that inspire Latino turnout will be rewarded with winning margins.”
The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative and Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program launched a partnership to highlight the importance of the Latino vote in 2018, following the U.S. midterm elections. Read more.
Public Policy Professor Mark Peterson spoke to the National Interest about the Trump administration’s refusal to begin coordinating with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team on a national coronavirus response. Public health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a coordinated White House transition is absolutely critical at a time when COVID-19 cases are surging across the country. Mishandling the transition could have “enormous consequences,” Peterson said. “How are we going to coordinate the rapid distribution of vaccines across the country? They need to be produced and distributed, and that all relies on massive coordination,” he said. Peterson also noted that the lack of personal protective equipment has continued to hurt many states and hospitals. “We need complete transparency in coordination” in these efforts to help protect front-line workers and the general public, he said.
Pollsters and pundits predicted a blue wave for Joe Biden and Democrats, and President Donald Trump called for an overwhelming red surge at the polls to secure a second term.
Both sides got it right and wrong.
“It’s just that Joe Biden was able to put together a coalition that, at the end of the day, will likely have 5 million more people behind it and, importantly, had strength enough to carry him through victory in what’s likely to be five states that Trump won in 2016,” said Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
Tanden is a 1992 UCLA alumna who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations, lending credibility to her discussion of the state of the electoral process and prospects of a polarized nation under the administration of Biden and his vice president-elect, Kamala Harris. She was the featured speaker for a post-election analysis Nov. 10 moderated by UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura. The online session was the second Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture of the 2020-21 academic year.
Tanden was asked to analyze the campaign, comment on voter turnout and assess an ongoing tumultuous transition amid vote recounts demanded by an incumbent president refusing to acknowledge the outcome of the 2020 vote. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has reached its highest levels across the country.
“I can’t think of a better person to talk to about this than Neera Tanden,” said Segura, who described the first week after the election as “an anxiety-filled time.” Citing her work with previous presidential campaigns and noting her law degree from Yale, Segura added that Tanden “has perhaps the best grasp of what we’re likely to see in a Biden administration in the coming years.”
Noting that the White House win was the “most pivotal outcome, for sure,” Segura asked Tanden to address the fact that Democrats did more poorly in House and Senate races than they had hoped.
“I think we do have to grapple with the fact that it seems that Biden’s brand is stronger than the brand of the Democratic Party,” Tanden said. “There’s a lot of work for the party to evaluate how Biden has a brand that the party needs to move to, rather than the other way around.”
Tanden prefaced her analysis by starting from a global perspective, noting a worldwide rise of right-wing authoritarian populism over the past decade and the “politics of division” some politicians are stoking. She called out countries that include India, Turkey and Hungary, as well as current “politics roiling in Britain.”
“What we’ve seen around the world is that once an authoritarian populist takes power, through democratic means, it’s very, very difficult to dislodge that person,” Tanden said.
She suggested that Trump shares a trait with many authoritarian leaders — an ability to dominate a news cycle and negatively brand their opponents, calling it one of “Trump’s greatest superpowers.” The GOP’s effort to associate Democrats with socialism, she noted, was important in some races but generally turned out to be a less successful strategy against Biden.
Still, she acknowledged that Trump was able to mobilize his base of support across the country and bring out conservative voters at unprecedented levels, far exceeding his 2016 tally despite falling short of Biden’s total.
Segura asked Tanden about Trump’s legal strategy in challenging the election and the possible detrimental effect on democracy given that many Republican voters believe the election was stolen.
“I think we are witnessing a profound damage to democracy in the sense that Republican leaders are willing to basically do anything to appease Trump’s fantasy that he can win,” Tanden said. “You see that in the two Georgia run-off candidates who attacked the Republican secretary of state. Basically, it’s been reported that Trump demanded that they do so or he would attack them.”
The outgoing president has a “stronger hold on the base of the Republican Party and Republican voters than any other Republican in my lifetime, so he has an ability to basically scare any single one of these Republicans,” she said.
Even so, Tanden said she did not think the electoral process is in jeopardy “unless something goes really haywire,” given that Trump’s legal challenges are being rejected by judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican administrations. U.S. courts do not have a history of overturning votes after the fact, she said.
The coming years won’t be easy for either party, Tanden said, and both sides face unique challenges.
Republicans will find it hard to do anything independently “because they will just be in fear of Trump running again or campaigning against them. … The one thing he’s demonstrated over the last four years is he is perfectly happy to attack Republicans if they don’t do his bidding, and with deep, deep consequences.”
Democrats seem likely to face an obstructive Republican Senate majority and thus will have to seek compromise to govern.
“It’s an open question; there’s four Republican senators, maybe five, at this point who congratulated Biden, so maybe they form a basis of trying to negotiate some compromises,” Tanden said.
She has observed structural challenges within the Democratic Party that she believes create a healthy debate about tactics.
“With gerrymandering, Democrats have to run in conservative-leaning districts,” Tanden told the online audience of about 200 people. She noted that such practical considerations “allow more ideological fluidity in the party, as we sometimes have seen.”
Segura also asked whether what was “good for the goose is good for the gander? Do we run amok as a party — are Democrats thinking that to themselves?”
“I think this is a balance … a range of arenas where the Democrats need to be assertive. They need to undo Donald Trump’s really lawless immigration policies. We need to reenter the Paris [climate accords],” Tanden countered.
Going forward, the most pressing and important thing for the new president is to handle the coronavirus crisis effectively. She noted that Biden “can do a lot on the virus with executive action.”
If Republicans show a willingness to bend, Tanden said she believes much can be accomplished. “But if Republicans choose to ignore everything, then we are going to be in a position where, hopefully, we address the virus,” she said, “and argue at the midterms.”
Tanden recalled her thinking after the 2018 midterm elections. “I told my staff that 2020 was going to be a huge turnout election in both directions, and that the job was going to require mobilizing more voters … and the truth is that happened and it’s a historic victory.”
But Biden’s job is just beginning.
“When you have power, you can build on power,” Tanden said. “Joe Biden is going to have to spend more time thinking about how he builds a majority in the country. But I think he navigated this extremely well, and he and his team have good instincts about how to move forward.”
UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura spoke to KQED’s California Report about Latino support for President Trump, which increased both nationally and in California compared to 2016, according to the American Election Eve Poll. While the overwhelming majority of Latinos backed the Democratic ticket, support for Trump increased from 18% to 27% nationally and from 16% to 22% in California, according to the poll. Segura, a lead pollster for the survey, said one reason for the shift was that Democrat Joe Biden was not as well known among Latino households as the Clinton family was. More significantly, he said, Democrats didn’t do enough to engage these voters in California and other non-battleground states. “There’s an important lesson here. I think the one place where President Trump did invest in Latinos is in South Florida, and he was rewarded for that,” Segura said. “So investment matters, being on the ground matters.”
