Real Talk: Understanding Texas Latino Voters through Meaningful Conversation
Challenge
Latinos in Texas represent a fast-growing demographic and community of voters, soon to become the largest ethnic group in the state. In the 2020 presidential election, they also became the second-largest share of eligible voters nationally, after Whites. Yet compared with other groups, Latino voter turnout continues to lag.
Culture Concepts was commissioned by Texas Organizing Project Education Fund to find out: Why?
Traditional theories and popular misconceptions abound, but few people were actually talking to Latinos. The most common storyline was the “sleeping giant” narrative: that although Latinos have enormous potential political power, they lack interest in wielding it.
Culture Concept’s ethnographic research uncovered new narratives by allowing Latinos to explain things on their own terms. The research provides the first holistic look not just at why some Texas Latinos vote and others don’t—but how they make meaning of government and politics.
Approach
The Culture Concepts team, composed of social scientists Cecilia Ballí, Michael Powell and Monica Lugo, conducted lengthy one-on-one interviews with more than one hundred eligible voters in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. The cornerstone of our approach was authentic listening—our term for in-depth engagement that centers participants’ ways of understanding and interpreting the world, instead of imposing our language and categories of thinking.
We then analyzed thousands of pages of interview transcripts; conducted extensive literature reviews around the subjects of Latino voting, partisanship, and political media narratives; and reviewed U.S. Census and polling data.
Key Insights
The report highlighted ten major insights in addition to other important things we learned. Some of those insights debunked common myths and reveal, inform, and suggest how political strategies and voter outreach need to change, including:
Latinos who vote feel empowered and invested in the political system and have a firm sense of belonging on personal and social levels.
Conversely, Latino nonvoters are not sure their vote matters. They don’t come from voting backgrounds and don’t feel that people in government or political candidates and parties truly care about their experiences or perspectives. They struggle to relate government policy directly to their lives.
More than a rational choice, voting is a social habit—a practice that gets developed over time and through the modeling of others.
Partisan identification is often delicate or weak among Latinos, even among those who regularly vote for or affiliate with one party. The report explores various reasons why many Latinos don’t strongly identify with Democrats or Republicans, or with the labels “progressive,” “conservative” or “moderate.”
Impacts
The client benefited in two main ways. First, by verifying and validating many of their intuitions around Latino disengagement, the study bolstered core tenets of their existing strategy, including reaching out and listening to less frequent voters typically ignored by candidates and campaigns.
Second, the project contributed to the client’s reputation as thought leaders with commonsense and people-centered solutions. Instead of high-minded policy advocates, TOPEF and its sister group, Texas Organizing Project, could further position themselves as grounded changemakers who have a pulse on the people they work with. They were able to use the report to demand reciprocal relationships and better engagement from elected officials.
The full report was publicly released, which also led to broader societal impacts, as well.
Culture Concepts found that rather than a “sleeping giant” to be awakened, Latinos are independent thinkers who seek to be heard and meaningfully incorporated by the political system in order to be empowered. They want leaders who genuinely understand and are willing to address their day-to-day realities.
The study resulted in public storytelling opportunities that can shape political narratives for years to come. Across the country, journalists and political operatives applauded the report and a Texas Monthly feature article by our founder, Cecilia Ballí. They specifically underscored the need for more nuanced research and narratives about Latino voters—the kind of thinking and work that Culture Concepts provides:
The study also received deep interest from political candidates and parties seeking to learn more about how to better engage with Latinos in Texas. As a nonpartisan study, any candidate could potentially benefit from the insights.
