I've been saying it since 2001, but it's finally entering the conventional wisdom:
Hispanic voters' role in '04 seen overstated [By Joseph Curl, Washington Times, September 21, 2004]
While President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have set up
aggressive campaigns to draw Hispanic voters, the
nation's largest minority bloc is unlikely to play a
decisive role in the 2004 presidential election, based
on their past voting records and their populations in
battleground states.
Although election analysts predict more than 7 million of the nation's 40 million Hispanics will vote on Election Day, the bloc represents 7 percent or higher in just five battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida. "
This race will be determined primarily by white voters," said Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution think tank, who has analyzed Hispanic voting data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.
As evidence he offers these statistics: One-third of Hispanics are below voting age, and another quarter are not citizens. Thus, for every 100 Hispanics, only 40 are eligible to vote, 23 are likely to register, and just 18 are likely to cast ballots. For blacks the comparable number is 37, and for whites, nearly 50.
Mr. Frey has determined that white voters make up 86 percent of all voters in the most competitive states.
"The Hispanic vote is going to be a lot less important than people think. This election is going to be won in the Midwest, largely white, battleground states," he said.
In the biggest battleground states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, West Virginia — the percentage of Hispanic voters ranges from just 0.4 percent in West Virginia to a high of 1.5 percent in Pennsylvania.
But Adam Segal of the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University expects the voting bloc to play a significant role this election. "I think we'll see an historic turnout among this community," he said. "When both the candidates are saying it, it's got to be true because they don't just make that up." Both campaigns are indeed making major efforts to increase their take of the Hispanic vote.
Crossposted from www.iSteve.com
I've been doing a lot of research on this subject lately because, frankly, it's shameful and alarming that America's elites are carrying out a vast social experiment by emasculating enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, yet almost nobody is discussing the facts about what kind of new version of America they are creating. Everyone across the political spectrum admits that the white-black test score gap is a major social problem, but nobody is thinking about the white-Hispanic test score gap. Fortunately, the facts are available, but they take a lot of digging to uncover.
Here's the best estimate I've yet seen: A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the "general factor" in cognitive ability) between "Anglo" whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there's not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.
One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that's a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions and in the most difficult jobs.
In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations. So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap. (Warning: this 65% number does not come from a perfect apples to apples comparison because more studies are used in calculating the white-black difference than the white-Hispanic difference.)
Source: Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S. & Tyler, P. (2001) Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.
