Latinos Don't Vote on Faith or Religion but on Economic Issues

Moral issues rank very low in Latino Voter's minds when making a voting decision while issues like the economy, jobs, taxes and minimum wage are far more important, a new poll released today shows.

That finding totally contradicts the famous Ronald Reagan belief, said in the eighties, that "Hispanics are Republicans. They just don't know it yet."

Since Reagan famously said that to political advisor Lionel Sosa, most republicans who say they want Latinos in the Republican Party insist that they are "naturals" to join the party because of their conservative philosophy family and religion and their entrepreneurial spirit. Today's Republicans are still repeating this as if it were a sacrament but it ´s not turning out that way in the voting booth.

This poll of Latino voters by ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions shows why: the majority (53%) of these citizens said their own religion does not have much influence on which candidate they choose, while 40% said it does. Also they maintain that the candidate's religion is just as irrelevant for 55% of them, compared to 43% who do take it into account.

Although the numbers don´t appear as far apart, they become clearer when broken down: Only 23% said their religion has a "big impact," while 19% said the candidate's religion has a big impact. The only exception is among Latinos who are part of the GOP, since 47% said their religion does have a big impact on their election choices.

"It's always been said that Latinos have a conflict between their religion and their political tendencies. That they're usually more progressive on economic policy but conservative on social issues," said Matt Barreto, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and advisor to Latino Decisions.

However, Barreto said the poll reflects no such conflict: "Religion and social and moral values are not among their priorities when they make their political and election calculations."
The poll confirmed that Latino voters place little or no importance on traditional moral issues when voting: 75% think the economy, jobs and taxes are much more important in politics. Only 14% said moral or social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage or family values are more important.

Ironically, this is true for many categories of Latino voters, including Democrats, Republicans and independents; U.S. born and naturalized citizens; various socioeconomic levels; those who attend church weekly and those who are "born again." Economic issues rule.
On the other hand, there are moral issues on which Latinos agree, and which can incidentally have an impact on their political stance--and immigration is one of them.

"In this poll, there's a clear moral attitude of support regarding churches and religious leaders helping undocumented immigrants even if it's in conflict with the law," said Ricardo Ramírez, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. "For them, helping the undocumented is a moral issue and could even be a religious one."

A majority (66%) of Latino voters think churches should support the undocumented even if it challenges laws, and only 21% think they should not help them. Naturalized Latino citizens tend to have stronger positions on this: 75% said the church should help. Among U.S. born Latinos, this support is lower, 58%.

But even 66% of Republican Latinos and 66% of independents have this opinion.
In general, these voters tend to want their churches and election politics to remain very separate: overwhelming majorities of these voters think no religious leader, minister or rabbi should tell them which candidate to vote for.

The president's religion and Mormons

When asked about the religions of President Obama and one of his main Republican rivals, Mitt Romney, many of these voters had no idea which religion either one of them belongs to: 48% said they did not know the president's religion and 58% said the same about Romney.
"At this point, Latinos don't seem to be very interested in the religion of these candidates," said Barreto.

Interestingly, 12% of Latinos said Obama is a Muslim, and only 25% correctly said Romney is a Mormon or belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Something else the poll revealed is that Latino voters have a very vague idea of what Mormonism is. This issue will probably be relevant during the general election if Romney is the GOP's candidate, although this is yet to be determined.
Of respondents, 58% are not familiar with Mormonism, 13% are very familiar and 27% are somewhat familiar.

About 40% said, incorrectly, that Mormonism is not a Christian religion and only 31% said that it is--while 27% said they do not know. Although religion does not seem to have a positive effect on Latinos' vote, it is not clear whether it might have a negative effect on Latino Republican or independent voters.

"Apparently, Mormonism is not defined in the minds of these voters. This could be good or bad for the Republican candidate if it's Romney, because this issue will surely come up in the race," said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell University. "If there's more definition of what the Mormon religion is, it could be more beneficial or detrimental for Romney; it depends."

 

Follow Pilar Marrero on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PilarMarrero

Comments

[ETSpoon]

05:55 PM on 12/09/2011

The "Latino" vote may not be sown up for the Democrats as they have since the 1970s pretty much jettisoned the wise economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, which made this country a post WWII economic powerhouse, for the "free market" lunacy of Milton J. Friedman. With both parties in basic agreement on Friedman-Alan Greenspan "free market" laissez faire economics, at least for Wall Street and the Fortune 500, all that was left was trivia and minutia.

[Count of Anjou]

11:53 AM on 12/29/2011

The Boom Years of the 50s were the result of America having the only intact economy in the world following WWII. Couple that with the frugality of Americans who had lived through the Great Depression of 1929 and that is what made America great. It had nothing to do with the economic policies of Keynes and Galbraith, as you suggest.

[Tresmilanos]

05:08 PM on 12/09/2011

"Latinos" don't even eat same-like foods--let alone share political voting patterns. With this overblown immigration debate however, Latinos have FINALLY been presented with a unifying socio-political issue.

Over the past ten years, Latinos everywhere have been able to observe how deep the hatred for Mexican people runs within the Republican Party. That party’s anti-Mexican campaign of racism has given them pause and has presented the question of, "if they feel that way about them, then how do they really feel about my people?" Certainly the images and answers generated by that question (for even the "special" ones), are not good. Thankfully, it has moved many Latinos to a mind-set of self-preservation from a preoccupation with social status. They have come to understand that today--to the Republican Party at least, it does not matter where you stand on the social ladder; in the United States--we are ALL just “a bunch of dirty Mexicans.”

Personally, I have voted much like my parents and grandparents have. They have always voted in terms of what is “logically” most beneficial to the most people. I guess you could consider that pattern more “values than faith”, but then again, aren’t values and faith both interrelated & interdependent?

[Emmett Booth]

04:33 PM on 12/09/2011

Mormonism ain't Christianity. Not that it should change a single vote, but casting Mormonism as a slightly outré sect is simply not true.

[BlairCase]

03:13 PM on 12/09/2011

Hispanics like Anglos tend to vote with their pocketbooks. They grow more conservative as they grow more allfuents. Having lived most of my adult life in El Paso, a city of about 650,000 that is about 80% Hispanic, I've notice that it works about like a city that is 80% Anglo. You get the same division between rich and poor. There are rich kids' schools and poor kids' schools. You have poor nieghborhoods that vote Democrat and affluent neighborhoods that vote Republican. The only difference is that Hispanics are the dominant ethnic group in all neigborhoods.

[Nuyorican21]

12:10 PM on 12/09/2011

It still depends on the issues. Bush got more Latino/Hispanic votes than many Republican presidential candidates because of his immigration policy as well as his support of school vouchers nationally. Its pretty obvious the economy is paramount, that won't change for any group.

[mira chancleta]

08:56 AM on 12/09/2011

Dear Pilar, "journalist",

And how many Welsh-descended Patagonians from Argentina, Chinese Cubans, Corsican-descended Puerto Ricans, German-descended Mennonite farmers from Mexico, Yamo-Mami Indians from the Amazon did you interview for your "latino" article?

[grittyreboot]

02:53 PM on 12/09/2011

It's amazing to me that we even talk about latinos as one group when its evident that there is a lot of diversity both ethnically and in terms of political philosophy within the latino demographic...

Out of curiosity, what is the demographic representation of those groups you mention? As in, what % of the latino community do they represent?

[Tresmilanos]

03:12 PM on 12/09/2011

F&F--same thought here.