Pack Your Politics! Assessing the Vote Choice of Latino Interstate Migrants

Abstract

While popular narratives regarding the destiny of demographics assume Latino interstate migrants will alter destination state politics as Latinos disperse across the states, no studies directly assess the empirical validity of the underlying assumption of migrant's political preferences. Moreover, established theories of domestic migrant preferences suggest a variety of potential individual-level behaviors that often diverge from the underlying assumption of a uniform introduction of more liberal voters. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, this study presents an analysis on Latino interstate migrant voting behavior, while also overcoming a variety of data limitations in existing studies. Countering some previous findings that homophily, adaptation, or even a static liberal orientation describes migrant voting behavior, the results suggest that Latino interstate migrant preferences vary by the political context of their previous state of residence. The results imply that the destiny of demographics will be conditioned, to some extent, by the migratory patterns of Latinos and the dyad of departure and destination states. When Latinos leave liberal (conservative) states, they bring more liberal (conservative) policies. In short, Latinos seem to pack their politics when moving across state lines.

Rooted America: Immobility and Segregation of the Intercounty Migration Network

“…The continuing decline of internal migration for the past decades suggests a scenario of equilibrium, or “an inflection point” (Molloy et al 2011:173). Moreover, analyses of voting behaviors reveal that internal migrants tend to hold political orientations consistent with those of their origins (Preuhs 2020). Nevertheless, we consider this as a competing hypothesis to the segmented immobility hypotheses, and will directly test it in our analysis.…”