Immigration Politics and Partisan Realignment

Abstract

This article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California’s Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.

Keywords

political parties parties and interest groups parties and elections time series quantitative methods methodology direct democracy political behavior Hispanic/Latino politics identity/group politics public opinion

In 1994, a clear divide emerged within the Republican Party about the best electoral strategy regarding America’s growing Hispanic population. On one hand, California Governor Pete Wilson made support of ballot Proposition 187—a measure to stop undocumented immigrants from receiving state benefits—a centerpiece of his campaign. Fueled by racially charged television ads, his campaign is widely thought to have damaged Republicans’ long-term prospects among Hispanic voters in California. On the other hand, George W. Bush simultaneously sought his first term as governor of Texas swearing-off the politics of racial threat. Watching Bush instead address large Hispanic gatherings, where he spoke a little Spanish and argued that his education proposal could help Hispanics, many believed he made inroads for Texas Republicans. Both Wilson and Bush won against strong opponents, albeit on the coattails of the Gingrich Revolution. Accomplishing their short-term goals, to what degree did these candidates’ strategies affect the long-term partisan landscape in each state?

In California, ballot support for Prop. 187 shows evidence that racial threat served as a factor in voters’ behavior, with the white-Hispanic bifurcation resembling the white-black bifurcation of the pre-Civil Rights era South (Tolbert and Hero 1996). The fact that Hispanic Americans were largely seen as the target of Prop. 187 raised the prospect that this event could lead citizens from diverse national backgrounds to think of themselves as part of a broader group of Hispanics (Fraga et al. 2010, 172–74). Furthermore, the fact that Republican Governor Pete Wilson made Prop. 187 inherent to his reelection bid serves as a central event in the mobilization of a large group with many individuals who did not have strong partisan attachments or were not yet registered to vote. Because Prop. 187 was perceived as anti-Hispanic, newly mobilizing Hispanics were unlikely to be supportive of the Grand Old Party (GOP).

Since this event, the Republican Party has become substantially less competitive in the state of California. Some have pointed to the 1994 election and argued that the loss of Hispanic voters has detracted from the GOP’s long-term electoral prospects in the state, particularly as this group has grown and mobilized (Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura 2006). Others have argued that this issue is less a function of losing Hispanic support and more that the national Republican Party’s increasing emphasis on social conservatism is unpopular with voters in California (Fiorina and Abrams 2008). In this article, we weigh these competing claims by assessing the relative change over time in partisanship of white and Hispanic voters. We do this both by contrasting intermediate-term changes in California versus Texas, as well as by contrasting long-term changes in California versus the United States as a whole. This work thereby builds on past research on macropartisanship (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 1998; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 1998; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989) as well as analyses of social groups in the aggregate (Box-Steffensmeier, De Boef, and Lin 2004; Enns and Kellstedt 2008; Kelly and Enns 2010; Korey and Lascher 2006). By adding to prior models of macropartisanship, we can determine what impact the 1994 election had on partisan loyalties above and beyond the factors known to be important to partisanship at the aggregate level.

By considering the importance of these gubernatorial elections on party identification, this article expands the macropartisanship literature to consider how subnational factors may shape local-level affiliations. Much prior research on mass partisan changes focuses on national-level influence on the entire American electorate—whether the cause is critical elections (Sundquist 1983), issue evolution (Adams 1997; Carmines and Stimson 1989; Wolbrecht 2000), or responses to current political and economic conditions (Brandt and Freeman 2009; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989). If governors’ stances on immigration shape the macropartisanship of ethnic groups within their state, then it is important that such leaders recognize the potential long-term consequences of their actions.

The evidence we show that policy positions in the 1994 election shaped state-level party coalitions in the long run has important implications for state politics in general. State elected officials need to consider that if the electorate’s policy preferences show the potential for substantial change over time, then laws they enact and positions they take can affect their party’s ability to win elections over time. As Monogan (2013) illustrates, parties that highly value winning elections in the future should consider not only which issue positions will win at present, but also what will win in the future. Whether the electorate is changing because of a demographic shift such as a growing Hispanic population, an information shift such as increasing information about the dangers of global warming, or a generational shift such as younger voters being more favorable to gay rights, past positions can affect future elections (Monogan 2013, 291). Our findings in this article support the view that position taking can have long-term consequences for electability.

Besides the general point that policy positions can have a long-term effect at the state level, the fact that an immigrant-related policy such as Prop. 187 specifically had an impact bears significance itself, given the prominence of immigration on many states’ agendas. As state legislators write bills related to immigrants, they should bear in mind how the stances they tie themselves to can impact electoral prospects. From 2005 to 2014, the 50 states enacted 2,556 laws related to immigrants.¹ Many of these laws, such as Arizona’s 2010 law S.B. 1070 with its “show me your papers” provision, have drawn substantial press attention and have the potential to have a similar impact on electoral coalitions. Therefore, understanding just how important the 1994 election was for partisanship in California and Texas provides some notion of the kinds of effects future immigrant laws can have on state electorates.

To assess the significance of the 1994 California and Texas gubernatorial campaigns, this article proceeds first by reviewing the background of these elections. Second, we describe the data and method we use to assess the greater impact of this election. Third, we conduct difference-in-differences analyses that contrast changes in partisanship between California and Texas, contingent on race. Fourth, we analyze macropartisanship in California by race and contrast this with patterns in the United States as a whole. Last, we consider the implications of these findings.

Background

In one sense, it seems natural that immigration became a major issue in California in 1994 because San Diego was a highly active point of entry for undocumented immigrants at the time. Yet, historically speaking, it is somewhat surprising that California was the state where Republicans used racial threat in 1994 while Texas was the state where it was disavowed. Overt discrimination against Mexican Americans had largely disappeared in both states by the late 1960s (Barone 2001, 177). If anything, outright discrimination prior to the civil rights movement had been a bigger issue in Texas (Peirce and Hagstrom 1984, 651). Furthermore, in Texas throughout the 1960s, Hispanics associated primarily with the Democratic Party as nearly all elected officials were Democratic in a Solid South state (Barone 2001, 183). Even into the 1970s and 1980s, Hispanic elected officials from Texas were principally Democrats (Peirce and Hagstrom 1984, 52–53). Hence, despite the middle and upper class nature of Hispanic organizations in the state, Texas Hispanics had strong ties to the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, in California before the 1990s, Hispanics had traditionally been seen as a swing group targeted by both parties (Barone 2001, 181). All of this suggests that for a California Republican candidate to invoke the politics of racial threat and a Texas Republican candidate to reach out to Hispanic voters was a clear contrast from the past in each state. The 1994 election, therefore, had real potential to shake up partisan coalitions.

The 1994 Elections

To understand how Bush and Wilson’s campaign strategies influenced long-term partisanship, it is worthwhile to consider first how the campaigns played out in the context of 1994. First, in Texas, Democrat Ann Richards narrowly won the 1990 gubernatorial race over gaffe-prone Republican Clayton Williams. Her campaign, in which she branded herself a “sensible progressive,” focused on economic recovery and a moderately aggressive civil rights agenda. Like many states at the time, Texas had suffered a dramatic economic downturn throughout the 1980s. During Richards’s tenure, however, the state maintained a steady rate of growth, even while the national economy continued downhill (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 1993). Keeping voters’ attention on the economy, Governor Richards handled the pressing issue of illegal immigration with a soft touch. Her administration framed the economic stress caused by undocumented workers to be a result of the federal government’s claiming their generated revenue—the income taxes and social security payments—while leaving Texas to provide for their social services (Verhovek 1994). Overall, Richards was largely recognized for turning the state economy around and did little that would damage her electoral coalition. Therefore, Richards appeared to be in a relatively strong political position going into the 1994 election.

Meanwhile, in California, Republican Pete Wilson had been elected in 1990 after a tight race with Dianne Feinstein. Taking office in 1991, he inherited a huge budget deficit.² Furthermore, the national economy took a major downturn in the early 1990s, dealing Wilson a tough political hand. By the end of his first year in office, Wilson had already vetoed a bill funding English-language classes for immigrants and began to blame both documented and undocumented foreign immigrants for imposing disproportionate costs on the California state budget (Associated Press 1991; Reinhold 1991). It is intriguing that Wilson made these choices because earlier in his career, as a U.S. senator, he voted for the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986—a law written by Alan Simpson and Romano Mazzoli that included provisions such as amnesty for undocumented immigrants residing in the United States prior to 1982. Despite this background, after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Wilson trumpeted the fiscal stress caused by immigrants even more, blaming the federal government for mandating the distribution of benefits without providing funding. In 1993, he and the governors of Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois sued the federal government to reimburse the states for the costs created by undocumented immigrants (Weintraub 1993).

Pete Wilson’s Reelection Bid

Perhaps because of the sour economy, Wilson started his reelection bid trailing challenger Kathleen Brown by more than 20 percentage points in horse race polls (Wroe 2008, 82). Hence, his chances for reelection looked slim at first. Meanwhile, Republican state senator Dick Mountjoy, along with a committee of activists, proposed a ballot initiative titled “Save Our State” that would outlaw the provision of state services to undocumented immigrants (Wroe 2008, 56–61). However, late in the filing process, it looked as if the initiative, which the secretary of state labeled Prop. 187, would not make the ballot due to a lack of signatures.³

The California Republican Party decided to throw its support behind the measure, raising money to pay professional signature gatherers to push the proposition over the critical threshold (Nicholson 2005, 96–97). The thinking behind the party’s endorsement was that Prop. 187 would create a major demographic shift that would reduce immigration into the state. This demographic change would allow the GOP to strengthen its electoral coalition within a more predominately white population (Rodríguez 1996). Campaign materials from Prop. 187 supporters exhibited this hope that the law would affect demographics. For example, Dick Mountjoy, Ronald Prince, and Barbara Kiley said, “Welfare, medical and educational benefits are the magnets that draw these ILLEGAL ALIENS across our borders” (Bender 2012, 115). Therefore, the dominant idea was that eliminating such benefits would curb immigration. By aligning itself with the initiative, the Republican Party set the stage for its candidates, including Wilson, to make Prop. 187 a centerpiece of the campaign.

Indeed, Wilson ran campaign advertisements that showed fuzzy footage of people crossing the border and a narrator saying: “They keep coming: two million illegal immigrants in California.”⁴ The ads closed with a frame urging voters to support both Wilson and Prop. 187. The racial priming of the ad was reminiscent of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Willie Horton ad, in that both presumably won the votes of whites by invoking racial fear, much like the campaign practices Key (1949) described in the pre-Civil Rights Act South. Meanwhile, Kathleen Brown publicly opposed the initiative, offering a clear contrast to Wilson on the immigration issue.

Wilson’s strategy seemed to work as both he and Prop. 187 won, by margins of 14.6 and 17.9 percentage points, respectively.⁵ Alvarez and Butterfield (2000) argue that Prop. 187 was popular due to cyclical nativism driven by economic downturn.⁶ Furthermore, the Field Poll indicated that 57% of voters thought Prop. 187 would save the state millions of dollars (Newton 2008, 57). All of this allowed Wilson to overcome Brown’s huge lead early in the campaign to win reelection. The exit poll in Table 1 indicates that Wilson won the white vote by a 30 percentage point margin, which carried him to victory. Hence, if Wilson embraced Prop. 187 with a goal of garnering white support, his winning coalition seemed to reflect that strategy.

Table 1.

Reported Vote Choice in 1994 California Gubernatorial, by Race.

	Race
Vote Choice	White	Black	Hispanic	Other	Total
Brown	35%	79%	73%	49%	43%
	(774)	(185)	(188)	(83)	(1,230)
Wilson	65%	21%	27%	51%	57%
	(1,454)	(49)	(71)	(86)	(1,660)

Total	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%
	(2,228)	(234)	(259)	(169)	(2,890)

Note. $χ_{3 d f}^{2} = 308.0501$ $(p < 0.001) .$ Cell entries are column percentages. Survey weighted frequencies in parentheses. Raw sample size prior to weighting: N = 3,147.

Prop. 187 and Racial Threat

As a long-term plan, Wilson and the California Republican Party promoted the “Save Our State” initiative in an attempt to reshape the partisan landscape. Yet, to do this, they had to be convinced that the initiative and Republican candidates who planned to implement it would actually win in 1994. Thus, the Republican Party needed white voters to support both the ballot proposition and GOP candidates. In believing that white voters would support the proposition, as they ultimately did, Republicans likely drew on the idea of racial threat. Racial threat theory proposes that the racialization of politics occurs when a demographic majority (white voters, in this case) use their voting power to control minorities and—in the face of a growing minority population—maintain status quo racial dynamics favorable to the majority. In the case of Prop. 187, the Wilson campaign used racial threat, which was strengthened by conditions of economic instability, to mobilize white voter support of discriminatory policies against a minority scapegoat.

Racial threat has traditionally been applied to the analysis of white voting behavior in the American South (Giles and Evans 1986; Giles and Hertz 1994; Key 1949). In an attempt to form a theory of minority group relations, Blalock (1967) identifies three types of racial threat—economic, political, and symbolic. Each uniquely encourages majority voters to support discriminatory legislation as a means to sustain or expand white spheres of influence. In the case of the 1994 election, we believe that economic racial threat is the most important type to consider. Economic threat specifically refers to whites’ concern that a minority group, such as Hispanic immigrants, poses a threat to job opportunities and earnings.

Several studies have considered the role of racial threat on votes for Prop. 187. Considering the racial context itself, Tolbert and Hero (1996) use county voting data to show at a macro level that the highest levels of support for Prop. 187 were in counties that were homogeneously white and those that were bifurcated—having a large Hispanic population but the rest of the population being primarily white. By contrast, Hood and Morris (2000) analyze individual-level data and find that the percentage of Hispanics in an individual’s county of residence did not impact individual whites’ support for Prop. 187. However, as the percentage of Asian Americans in a county rose, support for the initiative decreased, offering evidence of the contact hypothesis (Allport 1954). Building upon these studies, Campbell, Wong and Citrin (2006) study individual-level data and conclude that party affiliation, ideology, and racial context each had significant independent effects on whites’ voting behavior for the “Save Our State” ballot proposition. This study, then, provides individual-level evidence that racial context influenced vote choice. Without considering the economy itself, the retrospective evidence is varied on the degree to which racial threat affected white voters and whether a sense of threat was critical to the high level of white support for Prop. 187. Before the election, though, Republican leaders had several reasons to think that racial threat would influence the white vote.

Central among the reasons Republicans might have thought this would be a successful strategy was the fact that, in 1991, California saw a large-scale recession, the effects of which were manifest in the run-up to the election. This opened up the possibility of trying to win votes using economic racial threat, which the GOP explicitly tried to do. Given the fragile state of the California economy and needing to keep the blame from landing on the incumbent administration, the Republican Party stressed the increasing economic burden imposed by undocumented workers (Bender 2012). At the individual level, reactions to the local unemployment rate did not impact vote choice on Prop. 187; however, less-educated individuals were more likely to vote in favor of the initiative (Campbell, Wong, and Citrin 2006; Hood and Morris 2000).⁷ The education result is important to understanding the potential for economic threat because many undocumented immigrants “have much lower education and skill levels than the native white population, and they often take jobs that native-born Americans do not even want” (Campbell, Wong, and Citrin 2006, 132). Therefore, the white voters who were most likely to lose their job, if they had not already, would have seen undocumented immigrants as a greater threat to their livelihood. This fits well with Tolbert and Hero’s (1996) finding that counties with a higher unemployment rate voted at higher levels for Prop. 187: voters with fewer years of education were more likely to be jobless, and these voters were more likely to support the initiative.

All of this suggests that white voters, concerned with the economic stability of their state and looking for a scapegoat, were successfully mobilized by the efforts taken by Wilson and the GOP. Accordingly, we conclude that the Republican Party correctly anticipated that the perceived economic threat posed by undocumented immigrants motivated white voters to support Prop. 187. However, when the dust settled after the 1994 election, our analysis reveals that the scapegoating had a lasting effect on Hispanic party loyalty.

George W. Bush’s Bid for Governor

Although Wilson won in 1994, many have argued that his campaign damaged long-term Republican prospects in California by alienating the party from the growing Hispanic demographic (Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura 2006; Diamond 1996; Nicholson 2005; Whalen 2002). Even at the time, a number of prominent Republicans opposed Wilson’s strategy: Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp argued that immigrants were good for the economy and would make great citizens due to their entrepreneurial spirit and religiosity. Furthermore, Ralph Reed believed Hispanics held conservative preferences on many social issues and, in 1993, announced that the Christian Coalition would recruit Hispanic members (Diamond 1996). Hence, there seemed to be a sense among many Republicans that a more forward-looking strategy might be to embrace, rather than alienate, Hispanic voters.

Another objection to Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant campaign strategy was raised after the election of Texas Governor-elect George W. Bush. Bush stated that Prop. 187 would be wrong for Texas and argued that, although border controls should be enforced, it was always worthwhile to provide services to children such as education regardless of their origins (Hamburger and Wallsten 2006, 65–67). This argument was consistent with the campaign he had run in the prior year to earn his first elective office. Somewhat ironically, his Democratic opponent, Governor Ann Richards, had been one of Pete Wilson’s co-petitioners in 1993 for federal reimbursement for the costs of immigration. This suit for federal reimbursement was different from Wilson’s campaign message in 1994 because the suit was largely aimed at shoring up the state budget by petitioners, and neither candidate in Texas embraced anything as punitive as Prop. 187. The Richards and Wilson co-petitioning, though, does serve to illustrate just how different the partisan message was in each state, with Texas Republican George W. Bush and California Democrat Kathleen Brown being the two most immigrant-friendly candidates between the two states.

Much like Wilson, Bush faced an uphill challenge in his 1994 campaign. In summer 1994, incumbent Ann Richards led Bush in the two-party horse race 52.4% to 47.6%.⁸ Unlike Wilson’s strategy of campaigning on immigration, however, Bush chose education as his focus and promoted a policy similar to both Bill Clinton’s policy as governor of Arkansas and the No Child Left Behind Act that Bush would sign as president. With education, Bush could advance a plan that appealed to conservatives, but on an issue traditionally associated with the Democratic Party. Furthermore, education allowed him to argue he had something to offer when speaking to minority voters without raising charged issues such as affirmative action. Indeed, he made several campaign stops in principally Hispanic cities on the border with Mexico where he argued that his plan would be beneficial to heavily Hispanic schools (Hamburger and Wallsten 2006, 58–61).

Table 2 reports exit poll results for the Texas gubernatorial by race. Intriguingly, despite all of Bush’s efforts to win over minority voters, exit polls suggest that his electoral support did not differ substantially from Wilson’s. Contrasting Tables 1 and 2, we see that Wilson did better with every demographic group except for Hispanic voters, where the poll comparison suggests that Bush did merely 1 percentage point better than Wilson in Hispanic support.⁹ Although both men won, Wilson’s 14.6 point margin was much safer than Bush’s 7.6 point margin.¹⁰ Bush still won his first term primarily with white support, but had a smaller share of it than his counterpart in California. We should note, though, that we cannot determine whether Wilson’s larger margin came as a result of his campaign strategy, incumbency advantage, the benefit of outside groups’ campaign for Prop. 187, local economic factors, a better mobilization operation, or something else. For one or more of these reasons, though, Wilson coasted to an easier victory.

Table 2.

Reported Vote Choice in 1994 Texas Gubernatorial, by Race.

	Race
Vote Choice	White	Black	Hispanic	Other	Total
Richards	37%	85%	72%	66%	46%
	(444)	(126)	(145)	(10)	(725)
Bush	63%	15%	28%	34%	54%
	(763)	(23)	(57)	(5)	(848)

Total	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%
	(1,207)	(149)	(202)	(15)	(1,573)

Note. $χ_{3 d f}^{2} = 194.4701$ $(p < 0.001) .$ Cell entries are column percentages. Survey weighted frequencies in parentheses. Raw sample size prior to weighting: N = 1,631.

Data and Method

Beyond the immediate results of the 1994 election, how did the contrasting strategies between Wilson and Bush affect Republicans’ electoral coalition in the intermediate and long run? In this section, we describe the data and method we use to evaluate the impact of these gubernatorial campaigns. In particular, we assess how macropartisanship, or the balance between Democratic and Republican identifiers in the electorate, changed as a response to these campaigns. We use the traditional measure of macropartisanship, which is,

M_{t} = \frac{D_{t}}{D_{t} + R_{t}},

where M_t is the measure of macropartisanship at time t, D_t is the number of survey respondents identifying as Democrats, and R_t is the number of survey respondents identifying as Republicans. We refer to this as “Democratic macropartisanship” simply because higher scores indicate a more Democratic electorate. It is worth considering, though, that lower scores do mean the electorate is more Republican overall because only identifiers with one of the two major parties are included in the measure. Macropartisanship can become more Democratic if Independents become Democrats, if Republicans become Democrats, or even if Republicans become Independents. Under the last circumstance, the denominator is shrinking while the numerator is staying the same, so movement of this variety raises the score. Conversely, macropartisanship can become more Republican if Independents become Republicans, if Democrats become Republicans, or if Democrats become Independents. Consequently, the measure reflects the overall electoral balance between the two parties. For this reason, macropartisanship serves as a useful barometer of the party system and has direct electoral consequences (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 1998; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 1998; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989). In our analysis, we examine overall macropartisanship for California, Texas, and the United States. We also separately consider macropartisanship for Hispanic and white survey respondents in California and Texas, respectively.¹¹

We measure macropartisanship using three surveys. For Texas from 1990 to 1998, we use data from the Texas Poll; for California from 1969 to 2010, we use the Field Poll; and for the United States from 1969 to 2010, we use aggregated summaries of Gallup polls.¹² These surveys sample from the adult population aged 18 and older. The time frame is shorter for Texas because the poll was discontinued shortly after our time frame. For the Texas Poll and Field Poll, we are able to use the raw survey data to construct measures for Hispanic and white adults, in addition to the overall population.

To contrast California from Texas and determine the intermediate effect of the contrasting 1994 campaign approaches, we estimate difference-in-differences regression models (Angrist and Pischke 2009, 233). We estimate separate models for the overall population, white adults, and Hispanic adults. This method allows us to assess how the Prop. 187 treatment affected state-level macropartisanship by examining how California macropartisanship changed after the treatment had a chance to impact the public, and how this contrasted with any change in party identification by Texans (the control group).¹³ As Texans never voted on Prop. 187, the law was never implemented, and the governor at the time outright rejected this idea, any change in Hispanic partisanship should be thought of as a baseline rate of change before and after the 1994 election. Because the time frame of data collection is shorter for the Texas Poll, we must constrain this analysis to 1990–98 for both states. This time frame contains the four years before and after the election of interest. Accordingly, our analysis includes three gubernatorial election cycles, with those immediately preceding and following the 1994 elections as bookends, in both California and Texas. The Field Poll and Texas Poll conducted at least one survey per quarter, so our data are quarterly estimates of macropartisanship for each voting group.

To determine the long-term effect of Prop. 187 on macropartisanship in California, we estimate time series models for four groups: all adult Californians, white Californians, Hispanic Californians, and all adult Americans. The last series, of the United States as a whole, offers a contrast where the Prop. 187 treatment was much less salient. Our time series models of macropartisanship include the factors deemed relevant by prior research (in particular: Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 1998; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989), including lagged macropartisanship, consumer sentiment, political approval of the president, the president’s party, and indicator variables for each presidential administration.¹⁴ The lagged value of macropartisanship serves to allow dynamics in the model, wherein each predictor indirectly shapes future values of the outcome variable (Koyck 1954).¹⁵ Consumer sentiment and political approval of the president are coded positively during Democratic administrations and negatively during Republican administrations to capture the expected effect of each variable on a Democratic-oriented measure of partisanship. Political approval specifically consists of the residuals of a separate model of presidential approval as a function of consumer sentiment, thereby capturing the effect of a president’s political perception separate from the economy. In addition to including all of the predictors from past macropartisanship models, we also add a post-1994 indicator variable to capture the effect of Prop. 187 on long-term partisanship. In doing this, we use the logic of intervention analysis (Box and Tiao 1975).¹⁶

The Intermediate Impact of the Election on Macropartisanship in California versus Texas

Although Wilson was more immediately successful than Bush in 1994, evidence suggests that Bush’s strategy yielded intermediate-term gains in later campaigns. Although Bush only won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 1994, he raised his share to 46% in his successful 1998 reelection bid. Meanwhile, California Republican Dan Lungren only garnered 22% of the Hispanic vote in his 1998 loss to Gray Davis, a decline even from Wilson’s meager 27% in 1994 (Khaligh 2002). Furthermore, Bush went on to do well among Hispanic voters in his two presidential elections, increasing the Republican share of Hispanic votes for president for the first time since 1984 to 35% in 2000 and 44% in 2004 (Sanchez 2007, 166).

Beyond the enduring consequences for particular personalities, did the behaviors of these two Republicans have unique effects on the overall party coalitions in their respective states? In other words, to what degree did these campaigns have a lasting impact on the public’s willingness to identify with one party or another? We estimate the effect of this position-taking contrast using difference-in-differences regression to determine how macropartisanship changed in California relative to Texas after the 1994 election. We estimate this type of model for all adults, Hispanics, and whites, respectively.

The results from our difference-in-differences models are graphically presented in Figure 1.¹⁷ Each panel of the figure shows four bars: representing California before Prop. 187 (1990–1994), California after the initiative (1995–1998), Texas before the initiative (1990–1994), and Texas afterward (1995–1998). The vertical axis represents the percentage identifying as Democratic in the macropartisanship measure. The top of each bar also displays a line representing the 90% confidence interval for each estimate.

Figure 1.

Average macropartisanship before and after the 1994 election in California and Texas, for (a) Hispanic voters, (b) white voters, and (c) all voters.

Figure 1a shows the findings for Hispanic respondents. As can be seen, in California, Hispanic macropartisanship became significantly more Democratic after the 1994 election. Meanwhile in Texas, Hispanic macropartisanship moves in a slightly Republican direction, but there is no discernible change. Therefore, Prop. 187 does appear to have a significant impact on Hispanic party identification in California, with an estimated 10.9 percentage point difference-in-differences effect.¹⁸ Meanwhile, Figure 1b shows that in Texas, our control group, white macropartisanship, becomes significantly more Republican, while there is no discernible change among white Californians. The estimated difference-in-differences effect for white Californians is a substantively smaller 5.7 percentage point shift.¹⁹ Putting all of this together, Figure 1c shows expected macropartisanship among all adults in each state and time frame. Considering the baseline set by Texas voters, our difference-in-differences analysis indicates a significant effect of Prop. 187 on California party loyalty. The estimated treatment effect of Prop. 187 for California’s whole electorate is a 7 percentage point shift in favor of the Democrats.²⁰ All said, then, our results suggest that Wilson’s embrace of Prop. 187 in 1994 hurt Republican fortunes in California, and the bigger share of the effect came from changes in party affiliation by Hispanic voters. Bush, in contrast, was able to safeguard his party from a such an event by avoiding a campaign platform that targeted a growing segment of the state electorate.

The Long-Term Balance of Partisanship in California

As a final look at the impact of the 1994 elections, we turn to an analysis of the long-term balance of partisanship in California and the United States, expanding the time frame we study to 1969–2010.²¹ We continue to model macropartisanship, or the percentage of the public that identifies as Democratic among those who identify with one of the two major parties.

Figure 2 shows the time series of macropartisanship in California and the United States by annual quarter. The horizontal axis indicates time in years, and the vertical axis indicates the percentage of adults in the group identifying as Democrats out of those adults who identify either as Democrats or Republicans. The figure contains four lines: a solid black line indicating the partisan balance among all Americans, a dot-dash green line indicating macropartisanship for all Californians, a dashed blue line indicating macropartisanship for Hispanic Californians, and a dotted red line indicating macropartisanship for white Californians.

Figure 2.

Macropartisanship in California and the United States, 1969–2010.

We analyze these time series in Table 3. The model for each series replicates the original macropartisanship model (MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989).²² Each model’s lagged dependent variable implies that predictors have dynamic effects that spill over from one quarter to the next. With the exception of the post-1994 intervention, the results of the four models in Table 3 are fairly similar to each other; they also mirror prior findings on factors that shape macropartisanship (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 1998; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989).

Table 3.

Macropartisanship in the United States and in California, 1969–2010.

Parameter	CA Hispanic	CA White	CA Total	United States
Post-1994 intervention	4.8187*	1.2335	2.1908*	−0.6170
Post-1994 intervention	(1.9802)	(0.9891)	(1.0213)	(0.6388)
Lagged macropartisanship	0.3244*	0.4738*	0.4960*	0.6198*
Lagged macropartisanship	(0.0747)	(0.0694)	(0.0678)	(0.0538)
Consumer sentiment	0.1415*	0.0256	0.0320	0.0727*
Consumer sentiment	(0.0435)	(0.0212)	(0.0217)	(0.0148)
Presidential approval (political)	0.1054*	0.0430*	0.0490*	0.0686*
Presidential approval (political)	(0.0410)	(0.0210)	(0.0213)	(0.0141)
Presidential party	−17.9123*	−4.6512*	−4.2258*	−7.2683*
Presidential party	(3.5783)	(1.6884)	(1.7083)	(1.2008)
Constant	51.6207*	27.2989*	28.9877*	22.4889*
Constant	(5.9331)	(3.6211)	(3.9418)	(3.2518)
R ²	0.7343	0.8464	0.8072	0.9381

Note. T = 167. Quarterly time series data. Cell entries are parameter estimates. Standard errors are in parentheses. Indicator variables for presidential administrations were included, but not reported. Breusch-Godfrey tests revealed no evidence of serial correlation. Estimates were computed with R 3.2.1 (R Development Core Team 2010). CA = California.

Indicates significance at p < 0.05 (one-tailed t test).

The first numerical column of Table 3 presents the model for Hispanic macropartisanship in California. As this model shows, above and beyond all of the other factors known to shape macropartisanship, Hispanic partisanship in California became significantly more Democratic after Prop. 187. At the onset of the intervention, this was a 4.8 percentage point shift in favor of the Democrats. By contrast, in the second numerical column, we model white macropartisanship in California and see that there is no discernible effect of the 1994 election among these respondents.²³ In the third numerical column, we model California’s overall macropartisanship and observe that after the 1994 election, the overall electorate became significantly more Democratic than we would expect given the other predictors, with an estimated 2.2 percentage point increase. Hence, the significant movement among Hispanic voters contributed to a noticeable change in California’s electorate as a whole. In the last column, for the sake of comparison, we see that in the United States as a whole, there is not any discernible effect of the 1994 election on macropartisanship when controlling for the other variables. Our findings suggest that changes in Hispanic macropartisanship led the charge in instigating a significant change in Californian macropartisanship.

Just how substantial was this effect in the long term? Our treatment variable is a step intervention in a dynamic model, which means the effect grows as time elapses. Figure 3 illustrates how the predicted change in California partisanship unfolds over time following the intervention. The horizontal axis represents the number of quarters that the intervention has been in place, and the vertical axis represents the shift relative to preintervention levels of partisanship, holding all other predictors constant. The solid black line represents change in total California macropartisanship, the blue dashed line represents change in Hispanic macropartisanship in California, and the red dotted line represents change in white macropartisanship in California.

Figure 3.

Computed intervention effect for Proposition 187 on macropartisanship for Hispanic voters, white voters, and all voters.

As Figure 3 shows, the effect of Prop. 187 on California macropartisanship grew and cumulated. The long-term effect of the Prop. 187 intervention for Hispanics was a 7.1 percentage point shift in favor of Democratic identification.²⁴ Among whites, this long-term effect is estimated at 2.3 percentage points, although recall that the effect is not statistically discernible.²⁵ Finally, this treatment effect produces an expected rise of 4.3 percentage points in Democratic identification among all of California’s adults.²⁶ A 4.3 percentage point shift in partisanship can have a major impact on election results throughout the state. As movement in white partisanship was substantively small and statistically insignificant, we have to conclude that the significant 7.1 percentage point movement among California’s Hispanics was critical in this long-term shift.

Implications

While it is impossible to say for certain why the electorate’s party identification might shift over time, in this article, we have found that changes in California’s partisan balance are consistent with a response to the 1994 election and a campaign centered around Prop. 187, which intended to reduce state benefits to undocumented immigrants. Contrasting California to Texas, which had no such ballot initiative, we see that in the four years following this election, California became more Democratic in a way Texas did not. This effect was biggest among Hispanics. In addition, if Prop. 187 was indeed the cause of changes in California’s macropartisanship, we see that the 1994 election induced a long-term 4.3 percentage point shift in California residents’ Democratic identification. Such an effect has the potential to swing election outcomes. This estimated effect emerged in a broad model of macropartisanship that accounted for presidential administrations, economics, and presidential approval. The overall effect in California was led by a substantial 7.1 percentage point shift among Hispanic Californians toward the Democratic Party.

Besides becoming more Democratic, during the 1990s, California’s Hispanic electorate also grew considerably. Intriguingly, Barreto, Ramírez, and Woods (2005) find that Latinos who naturalized under the amnesty provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 were not critical in this electoral expansion. Rather, there was a surge of Latino registrants from 1994 to 1996, which ended up having a significant effect on later Latino turnout. These authors tentatively conclude that: “Proposition 187, the 1994 anti-immigrant state initiative, drew national attention and potentially served to mobilize the Latino electorate by prodding both indifferent and first-time voters to the polls. Accordingly, 1994 represents a watershed year for Latino politics” (Barreto, Ramírez, and Woods 2005, 796). Our finding, that even in the context of a broader macropartisanship model, Hispanic Californians became more Democratic, further supports the view that 1994 was a watershed year.

All of these findings fit the story that changes in partisan coalitions can be a localized event. Again, there are multitudinous factors that could have led to the divergence between California and Texas in the 1990s, but the data fit with the theory that state policy makers such as governors do matter for partisan identification. Where Bush was able to expand the Republican coalition in Texas over the years following the 1994 election, Wilson’s selection of Prop. 187 for the cornerstone of his campaign had lasting, negative effects on Republican fates in California. As elected officials in more states consider whether to implement hostile laws toward immigrants, or laws that might alienate any growing group in the electorate, they should bear in mind that their actions might have long-term consequences for their respective parties.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For helpful direction, we would like to thank George Rabinowitz, Jim Stimson, Virginia Gray, Alexandra Filindra, John McIver, Marco Steenbergen, Georg Vanberg, Dominik Hangartner, Caroline Tolbert, Scott MacKenzie, and several anonymous reviewers. For providing data, we would like to thank James Dyer, Allison Murphy, O’Neil Provost, and Tara Blanc.

Authors’ Note

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, and the Twelfth Annual Conference on State Politics and Policy, February 2012, Houston. Complete replication data and code are available at .

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

Online Appendix for this paper can be found at

Notes

Author Biographies

James E. Monogan III is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on political methodology, state politics and policy, and American political behavior.

Austin C. Doctor is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia. He studies comparative politics and methodology. His research focuses on contentious politics and the dynamics of violence in intrastate conflict.

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